I'm confused by people who don't understand that one is allowed to like the writing without liking the writer, the art without liking the artist, and the music without liking the musician.
@tetheredtoed1 As a teacher myself, I looked at the nonsense in my child’s math class, told him to do what they ask during the school day, but then I bought my own books and hired a private tutor to use direct instruction. Direct instruction is the way.
Opinion | My Students Can't Read
here is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
https://t.co/EbCH9cUgpL
“The world is full of talkers, but it is rare to find anyone who listens. And I assure you that you can pick up more information when you are listening than when you are talking.”
― E.B. White
The Serious People are putting on pained expressions and wondering why college students don't read anymore, but I doubt they've ever considered that maybe it's because high school English is now devoted to themes like "Inequality" (as at my son's school) instead of, you know, poems and novels.
These anguished essays leave me puzzled as to why professors are puzzled as to what to do.. If students can't do the work then give them a bad grade to reflect that. End of. https://t.co/Qlq67o0vJ1
If we want students who can think deeply, we need classrooms that still use whole books.
Not just excerpts. Not just exposure. Real reading, built over time. That’s what reading stamina requires: https://t.co/NoQzjVNpOZ