Purchase of the day.

From the February 14, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Bats - Creatures of the Night" (All Aboard Reading: Level 2: Grades 1-3) [Paperback] Joyce Milton (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.60)


(image from Wikimedia Commons)

... and 55 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — that all together put a lovely smile on the blogger's beautiful face.  Many thanks!

"Be a Sadist."

Rule #6 on Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing a short story:

No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

This is a problem I have with fiction. Characters are created for you to care about and the author invents torments for them — for us to enjoy. Have you ever written a fictional story and experienced sick excitement as you contemplated what you were about to do that poor unsuspecting sympathetic character you created? Or do you only read fiction. If you're able to get into fiction, is it because you fully trust the author to deliver the titillation of bad things happening to this sweet leading character?

This is a line of thought that brings me back around to an opinion I've arrived at from other directions as well: Give children nonfiction to read.

Teaching kids to read using nonfiction works better.

Aha! Back in '07, I got all sorts of criticism for advocating teaching reading with nonfiction books — science, history, etc. — and now here's the evidence that it is the best method.

Why would the No Child Left Behind emphasis on math and reading leave less time to learn history?

I'm reading this Wall Street Journal article about new history history test scores:

The overall lackluster performance is certain to revive the debate about whether history and other subjects, such as science and art, are being pushed out of the curriculum because of the focus on math and reading demanded under the No Child Left Behind federal education law. The federal law mandates that students be tested in math and reading.

Why is this even a conflict? To learn reading,  you need reading material! Make the reading material nonfiction works about history. Problem solved.

I have discussed this issue before, and I know people have a problem with it, but schoolchildren don't need to read fiction to learn how to read. Let them choose their own fiction books for reading outside of school.

"I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways."

"It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes."

ADDED: And this is why those lefty teachers are so keen on getting kids to read fiction stories and not nonfiction as they learn to read. (Remember the great children-reading-nonfiction blog vortex of 2007?)

About that warning label on the reprint of the Constitution (and other documents from the Founding Era).

"This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work."

Why a warning label?
	Had you heard of Wilder Publications before? It's PR, plain and simple.
	It will help young people get into something they might otherwise reflexively reject.
	It's a cute way to get parents thinking about discussing the Founding documents with their kids.
	The Founding documents deserve (and invite!) critique, especially on the subject of equality.
	These documents live and evolve and it's good to cue readers to interpret them appropriately.
	Here's the edition for liberals to buy. They can see that it irks conservatives.
pollcode.com free polls

The perils of hands-on classroom activities.

WCBS-tv reports:

[A] Rockland County teacher [is] under fire for binding the hands of black students and having them sit under a desk during a lesson on slavery....

In a social studies class at Haverstraw Middle School, teacher Eileen Bernstein chose Gaby [Shand] and another girl for a demonstration of conditions on ships that carried slaves out of Africa....

Wilbur Aldridge, the regional NAACP director, went with the Shands Thursday to meet Bernstein.

"She said she apologized for causing any problems for the child, but she was not apologizing for using that simulation during the class," Aldridge said.

But Principal Avis Shelby apologized, calling the slave ship demonstration a "bad decision."

Emily Bazelon and I were just talking about the perils of hands-on classroom activities on Bloggingheads, and I suggested a return to good old-fashioned book-learning:

Does the 6-year-old boy want to be seen reading "Freakonomics" (the book) on Freakonomics (the blog)?

It is a cute picture, especially if you love kids reading, but:

My husband is K.C. and the kids are Jacob (10) and Jared (6). We live in Connecticut, and K.C. commutes into New York City to work as a portfolio manager. I am a stay-at-home mom with a medical degree.

A few months ago, I thought Jacob would like reading Freakonomics, which he thoroughly enjoyed. After he finished that, I thought he might also like Malcolm Gladwell, so he is now in the midst of Blink.

Our copy of Freakonomics was lying around the house, so Jared started to get interested as well...

I have to share a funny story with you. When I told/asked Jacob about being included in your blog, at first he seemed pleased, but then a slight cloud passed over his face, and he said, “Well, I don’t want to be recognized …” Whereupon my husband reassured him that he would not be followed by paparazzi.

First commenter, one "sunshine" says:

Weird, a child asked not to have his photo put up on a highly-read Web page and both the parent and the editor refused to honor his request. Nonconsensual blogging. This concern may seem like a trivial joke, but look for this issue to increase in coming years.

Is sunshine's criticism apt? Or can we see from the context that the child imagined that once his photograph appeared on a popular blog, strangers would accost him in the street?

And more generally, I do wonder about putting pictures of children up on line. People love to see pictures of kids. It's a nice, happy part of life to see children. Yet some people seem to think that children should not be seen -- that it's dangerous for their children to be visible at all.

On the subject of children reading: I can see why "Freakonomics" and "Blink" make excellent reading for the young. We're so intent on foisting fiction on children, but there is a lot of nonfiction out their to stir their thinking.

Radio alert.

I'll be on "Lake Effect," on WUWM, the Milwaukee public radio, some time between 10 and 11 Central Time today. Streamable here. The archive will be up here later. I've already recorded the interview, which is a fast moving ramble about blogging that mostly concentrates on my recent, controversial suggestion that it might be a good idea to use nonfiction books when teaching young children how to read.

UPDATE: You can listen to it here now. It's only about 5 minutes long.

Fiction and nonfiction daddery.

Cameron Stracher has a new book called "Dinner With Dad." Here's some discussion of it:

[H]e chronicles his path from a corporate workaholic to a dad who’s at home, cooking dinner for his wife and kids five nights a week.

Even though his schedule changed, Mr. Stracher writes that he still found his Type A personality hard to reign [sic] in. He scaled back at work, but Mr. Stracher’s energies went elsewhere — into making ambitious dinners, airing strong opinions about where the carrot peeler and spatulas should be kept, harping on his son’s messy homework and lecturing his daughter about not putting the caps on her markers. He writes that over the years, “my natural tendency to control things has become more pronounced . . . the only saving grace, from [my wife’s] perspective, has been my absence.”

I got a copy in the mail, and I'm actually going to read it. It's of special interest to me, because -- as you may know -- I was married to a writer back when my sons were young, and he not only stayed home with them, but he wrote a novel about the experience. Since it was a novel... and I know you're thinking so this is the reason for Althouse's anti-fiction program... since it was a novel, there had to be all sorts of personal conflicts, and I don't mean arguments about making dinner. I mean what's the first thing you think of happening, if you're thinking like a novelist, if the man stays home with a small child, let's say, in Park Slope, in Brooklyn. He takes the child to the playground, and all the other parents are women, and then.... Come on, it's Novel World! What happens? You know what happens. (And, no, that's not the reason we're divorced.)

I was trying to use Technorati to get a page of all the discussion of my recent posts about having young kids learn reading from nonfiction books and look what I got, which made me laugh. Let me approach this more scientifically: here.

And here's Cameron's blog, Dinner With Dad. I note that the blog like the book is nonfiction. Nonfiction, I tell you. WOOOOOO!

Sorry, just trying to scare the English majors again.

Audible Althouse #84.

It's a podcast. Evil birds, where not to meet men, using nonfiction books to teach kids to read, Mad Magazine, finding the mummified body of the previous owner in the house you just bought... and screwing around with the theme song.

You don't need an iPod. You can stream it right through your computer here.

But all the rebels subscribe on iTunes:

About that suggestion of mine that reading classes should use nonfiction books.

This post has really stirred people up.

Look, my main point is efficiency. Kids need to learn to read, and they should also be learning science and history too, so why not combine the two tasks? Reading would still be taught and, in the early years, would be the central focus of the lesson, but the texts would have an added benefit of getting started learning other academic subjects.

I'm not saying fiction isn't worth reading. I'm saying that it can be held for after hours pleasure reading. Frankly, I think this would increase the love of fiction. Here's this shelf of books that you can read when you finish your other work. You can take them home if you like. I think this would give them an aura of excitement. There are lots of people who have fiction forced on them and avoid it once they're out of school. My father would get passionate about his hatred of "The Return of the Native," which he was forced to read. Me, I read "The Return of the Native" and all of Thomas Hardy's novels on my own and loved them. Look at how kids read the Harry Potter books on their own. Put them outside of the classroom and let kids see them as a leisure treat.

In saying that, I don't mean to say they are just for fun and that there's nothing deep. I'm saying that reading fiction books is or should be intrinsically rewarding and that intrinsic reward is best felt when you are exercising free choice. And I also think that the depths in fiction are best absorbed in a free environment without an authority figure trying to lead you or tell you how to think. Much good fiction is about challenging authority, and I worry that authority figures will choose fiction that they approve of because it teaches the values they like. That's not my idea of how good fiction works.

Another thing I'm not saying is that we shouldn't have literature classes. I've been talking about reading classes, those learn-to-read sessions very young students have. Those students aren't delving into the subtleties of themes and language and so forth. I have no problem with literature classes that teach students how to analyze texts in some fairly deep way, as long as they don't destroy the pleasure and love of art. So perhaps literature classes should be elective.

I'm also not opposed to teaching history and science through the kinds of novels and storybooks that present the information accurately. And I think a history class could very well have students read novels that had an effect on history or how people think about history, like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "1984." I've taught a couple "Women in Law and Literature" seminars myself. (We'd read a court case and a novel that dealt with the same subject as the case.)

Finally, I'm not saying that young kids should be given badly written, boring text books as their early readers any more than my critics think they should be given badly written, boring storybooks. That assumption, at the core of many of the criticisms I've read, is so perverse that it makes your whole argument seem to be in bad faith. Or perhaps you have only read nonfiction when it was imposed on you by a teacher and you have never discovered its intrinsic rewards by reading it on your own free choice. I'll bet if you had a shelf of books for kids to choose for their free time and it had some nonfiction books like this one, lots of kids would pick them over fiction. And I think a lot of boys would be grateful and some girls mind be inspired to go into careers that are more common for boys.

Writing this post, I discovered that I'd written on this topic before, inspired by a WaPo article called "Educators Differ on Why Boys Lag in Reading":

"A lot of teachers think of reading as reading stories," said Lee Galda, professor of children's literature at the University of Minnesota. "And in fact, a lot of boys, and not just boys, like nonfiction. But we keep concentrating on novels or short stories and sometimes don't think of reading nonfiction as reading. But in fact it is, and it is extremely important."

Teachers and parents have said boys generally prefer stories with adventure, suspense and fantasy and tend toward reading nonfiction stories and non-narrative informational books, as well as magazines and newspapers.

I wrote:

Maybe it would be easier to say that everyone wants to read what interests them and quite properly rebels at being told what to read. (Maybe boys just rebel more conspicuously than girls.)

It's one thing for the biology teacher to insist that you read a biology book, but if teachers are just trying to get kids to read, why shouldn't they provide a broad selection and give kids a chance to discover what they find interesting? It looks as though the biggest problem is that teachers are pushing too much literary fiction on kids. English teachers tend to be people who enjoy that sort of thing, but most people don't read it on their own. Why should we have an appetite for stories? And why should our appetite for stories be about elegantly described characters and their relationships (as opposed to adventure and fantasy)?

I used to take my sons to the bookstore and let them find whatever they were interested in. We used to hang out at Borders nearly every day, and I usually ended up buying a book or two. What did they want? Humor, especially in comic form (like "Life in Hell"). Collections of amazing science facts and other things that did not have to be read in linear fashion. (This was a big favorite.) Books about movies and music and other subjects they were interested in.

And here's another old post of mine, describing a group of 3 boys I saw at Borders, getting more excited about a book than I've ever seen kids get. But good luck getting your local teachers to include this one on their pleasure-reading shelf:



ADDED: Some email:

As a very young boy (7-11) I never bothered reading one book of fiction (Lord of the Rings changed that for me at the age of 16). All I read as a child were books on dinosaurs and books on the middle ages.

When I entered 7th grade and we began studying the 13th century, I knew more about early feudal crop rotation and the politics of southern France than my 8th grade teacher....honestly. I also knew the difference between the paleozoic and cretaceous periods. I also read books about lasers...college level books that I had no business reading (and despite not understanding any of it I enjoyed the reading.)

I had the pleasure of teaching English in South Korea for 3 odd years. I ditched the "learn English" type books in favor of beginning science and history books early on. I tell you, the boys AND girls had a fantastic time learning English while reading about how the early Greeks figured out the Earth was round, or how photosynthesis works.

I also made the poor kids memorize poetry, but that's neither here nor
there.

UPDATE: Among my many critics, I want to give the prize to this guy for writing "Althouse correctly notes that reading comprehension skills among high-school students are on the decline" -- not because he gave me credit for something but because I never said anything about reading comprehension skills among high school students! I hope he does an update, something like: Althouse correctly notes that reading comprehension skills among bloggers are on the decline.

Don't know much about history...

... but know more than before.

Hey, how did that happen if No Child Left Behind was supposedly diverting teaching resources away from history and into reading and math (the subjects on the tests required by the program)?

Well, maybe reading is... you know... fundamental.

I mean, check out this question from the history test:

[A] question on the fourth-grade version of the test, which quoted three sentences from the 1858 speech in which Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

The test asked students, “What did Abraham Lincoln mean in this speech?” and listed four possible answers.

a) The South should be allowed to separate from the United States.

b) The government should support slavery in the South.

c) Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.

d) Americans would not be willing to fight a war over slavery.

I'd say reading comprehension goes a long way on a history test that asks you to interpret a text, and, more than that, the ability to read and interpret texts gets you much farther along in the process of learning history than knowing some historical facts.

And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don't, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It's not tied to economic success in life and needn't be inculcated any more than an interest in watching movies or listening to popular music. Leave kids alone to find out out what recreational activities enrich and satisfy them. Some may want to dance or play music or paint. Just because teachers tend to be the kind of people who love novels does not mean that this choice ought to be imposed on young people via compulsory education. Teach them about history, science, law, logic -- something academic and substantive -- and leave the fictional material for after hours.

And quit bitching about No Child Left Behind.

ADDED: Message to the self-appointed reading experts who are outraged at what I've written: Ironically, you are not reading very well. I'm not saying reading shouldn't be taught. I'm saying that the reading materials used in teaching reading should be nonfiction, so that students are absorbing information and practicing critical thinking while they read. I consider this to be efficient and appropriate for the school setting. Students would have access to fiction to read on their own for fun (and maybe, because it would be a change of pace, they'd have more of a tendency to experience it as fun).

I'm drawing on my own background as a law professor. In law school, we spend much of the time teaching students to read cases. So to me, the combination of learning reading skills and learning substantive material is very familiar. I'm working with adult students, obviously, but they are still learning how to read. If I were to try to adapt this to young readers, I would find elementary, well-written books that present scientific and historical information.

If you don't like this idea, but can do nothing more than call it stupid, then I can't respect your opinion. My working theory is that you are either stupid, lacking in creativity (despite your affinity for fiction), or have some conflicting interest in the publishing or education industry.

By the way, I was taught to read through the ridiculous fictional series known as Dick and Jane.

AND: I have a big new post here addressing some of the criticisms of this post (which, I think, really misunderstand my point).

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 18.

It's Day 18 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.)

After the Katten Kabinet:

What boys like to read.

Here's an article in The Washington Post about teaching boys and girls to read. (Via Memeorandum.) I'm wading past the blather about what's innate. Girls are better at language? Just don't say girls are worse at math and science or you'll be wandering into Larry Summers territory, and people might get so mad, they'll want to strip you of your job. Anyway:

"A lot of teachers think of reading as reading stories," said Lee Galda, professor of children's literature at the University of Minnesota. "And in fact, a lot of boys, and not just boys, like nonfiction. But we keep concentrating on novels or short stories and sometimes don't think of reading nonfiction as reading. But in fact it is, and it is extremely important."

Teachers and parents have said boys generally prefer stories with adventure, suspense and fantasy and tend toward reading nonfiction stories and non-narrative informational books, as well as magazines and newspapers.

Maybe it would be easier to say that everyone wants to read what interests them and quite properly rebels at being told what to read. (Maybe boys just rebel more conspicuously than girls.)

It's one thing for the biology teacher to insist that you read a biology book, but if teachers are just trying to get kids to read, why shouldn't they provide a broad selection and give kids a chance to discover what they find interesting? It looks as though the biggest problem is that teachers are pushing too much literary fiction on kids. English teachers tend to be people who enjoy that sort of thing, but most people don't read it on their own. Why should we have an appetite for stories? And why should our appetite for stories be about elegantly described characters and their relationships (as opposed to adventure and fantasy)?

I used to take my sons to the bookstore and let them find whatever they were interested in. We used to hang out at Borders nearly every day, and I usually ended up buying a book or two. What did they want? Humor, especially in comic form (like "Life in Hell"). Collections of amazing science facts and other things that did not have to be read in linear fashion. (This was a big favorite.) Books about movies and music and other subjects they were interested in.

The Post article links to this website aimed getting "guys" to read. Is this website designed for some sort of male hard-wired brain phenomenon? Because I found it unbelievably irritating! Somehow I suspect males will find it damned irritating too.