Just Comprehension

 Comment from one of my esteemed colleagues: Your study guides aren't anything special. They're "basically just comprehension."

Just comprehension? JUST comprehension? How many times do you suppose high school seniors have told me over the years, "Hey, Wohlsi! I read that thing there, and I don't even know what I read"? They had escaped learning critical comprehension skills for the previous eleven or twelve years because they'd been through one language arts class after another in which the instructor taught facts and handed out drills and exercises and writing assignments and scads of vocabulary lists, and resorted to teaching anything but "comprehension"!

Vocabulary is NOT comprehension. Comprehension is far more complicated than that. If I could JUST TEACH comprehension, I'd have the battle won!

I JUST finished teaching (subbing, part-time) a bit of Julius to some sophs. I asked them to read three pages of the play; then I read parts aloud. Then we discussed it. Then we acted it out. Then I asked, "How many of you realized all this was going on in the play as you read it?" and not a single kid raised her hand.

I'd say they're going to need some instruction in COMPREHENSION, wouldn't you?

So after I showed them how much they missed, I instructed them to continue trying to read on their own, and to carry on an internal dialogue of questions and answers in order to monitor their own understanding. I didn't have time to incorporate my study guides with that group.

Now, I know the teacher for whom I did the subbing. And she's a great teacher, and I know she will get around to teaching comprehension to her kids.

However, I am also positively certain that many young teachers (and some old ones too) don't even try to teach comprehension anymore. I know it because, when I was a young teacher, I bailed out of it because I had a tough time comprehending the material myself!

And bailing out was easy to do.

Oh, sure, I wanted my kids to actually read and understand for themselves. I yearned for the kinds of close reading study guides that would help them do so (the kind that I now author). But they were nowhere to be found. So I just passed out vocabulary and spelling lists!

That, my dears, along with prefabricated writing prompts I copied (or cut up and reassembled) out of teaching manuals, was the total extent of my miserable instruction in comprehension.

I KNOW you can understand the literature yourselves! I can too. If we take the time to read, we can do it, and you must know that I know you know how to do that, and I of course know you must know that I know you know that I know, and so on, blah, blah ... The point is, I understand you.

You must understand me.

Most of your kids don't know how to steer through a complex piece of literature, and they're in your class to learn that skill. It is incumbent upon you to lead them through the wilderness and show them meaning, but more importantly, you must show them how to find their own way and do more of it themselves the next time they encounter that kind of wonderful stuff. And if you don't believe that, you don't belong in the language arts classroom.

When you're a young teacher starting out though, you need a close-reading guide to help you get through, because you don't have time to analyze in one gulp and prepare to teach thoroughly and well all of the reading your program requires of kids over the entire school year.

I still haven't found anything anywhere that will help you do that. Maybe you have. Tell me about it! I want to have a look!

At any rate, because I haven't found it, I've started creating the material myself, and I happen to think it's mighty special, in spite of my esteemed colleague's opinion that it's "only comprehension."

If I offer you a tool that helps kids understand in great detail a passage of Shakespeare (your choice of passage, not mine - virtually the whole play is done for you) would you use it, and then show them why that material helps them understand, in order to help them develop their own close reading skills? Why would you not? When they take an ACT, or SAT, or ASVAB, or any other standardized test, they'll be judged on their ability to COMPREHEND THE SUBTLETIES OF CLOSE READING!

Just comprehension, huh? And what more important skill do we teach in the English/Language Arts classroom?

I'm in the middle of authoring a close reading of Julius now. I'll get it ready, and you can start teaching your kids "just comprehension," if you have any use for a thing like that. I have a finished Macbeth unit available if you want to teach comprehension for that play, along with many other close study guides. And might I add, a good number of teachers have purchased them already, I suppose, mostly to teach "JUST comprehension"!

Well, God bless 'em. Teach comprehension in your classroom, not because it's easy to teach, because, Honey, it aint! But it's one of the most important skills you'll ever teach.

NCLB - Put It Out of Its Misery

Recently, the decision has been made to "pull the plug" on No Child Left Behind. At least, I hope that is the decision that has been made; NCLB has been on life support far too long. In honor of that development, I thought I'd share a letter I sent to a member of congress whom I heard condemning American education on television. This is a rough draft of that letter. I eventually edited out some of the more severe language and sent a milder, more polite version. But here's the one I truly wanted to send:

Shame on you!

I heard what you said about American education on television. Shame on you!

You politicians have saddled us with an inferior educational system and attached to it some insanity you call "No Child Left Behind." I've been a high school English teacher for over thirty years. I've never seen anything so ridiculous. Ironically, leaving kids behind is precisely what it does best!

So now that your policies have been in effect for some years, how do you respond to the rather predictable developments that have come about? You condemn schools, teachers, and students as failures. I realize you probably don't know better, but shame on you anyhow!

Our teachers and schools can stand up to any in the world. I frequently get foreign exchange students in my classes. They're all very bright, and most have perfectly good English language skills. But they normally find the curriculum so demanding that they can't keep up with it. They are literally astounded at how much homework we have them do.

You want us to make all kids conform to elite standards.

We can't do it; I'm sorry. It's impossible.

We cannot transform kids with behavioral problems into scholars. We cannot mainstream kids with profound disabilities together with advanced learners and expect all of those kids to excel.

But nobody else in the world can do that either! We're the only country silly enough to try. We sometimes seem to think that America is populated with kids who are "all above average." No nation is populated with such kids. That fact is understood by most.

The Chinese understand. They separate the elite learners from the others. The "others" become students of vocational and technological careers. They get good, solid training and come out of the system certified in valuable skills and trades. Admittedly, those students have a difficult time switching lanes to a professional career, and maybe they deserve the right to go back and do their education differently if they want, but aside from that, the system works because the education kids receive is matched with their aptitudes, interests, abilities, and talents. They learn skills that serve them for their entire lives.

Oh, and by the way, the elite learners blow the top out of the standardized test scores.

The Japanese understand. They too separate the elite learners from the others. Their "others" also become students of vocational and technological careers, and yes, they too have a difficult time switching lanes.

The Germans understand. Many Europeans understand.

Even the Canadians, who reside just to the north of the silliness going on here, seem to understand.

Most Europeans test all, or nearly all, of their kids, but their schools separate and educate. Their elite students are placed in accelerated programs, and they excel. Consequently, their overall test scores are higher.

Canadians lean toward separating and educating their elite. Their systems vary, but the progressive schools allow kids, with the help of school personnel and parents, to self-select in or out of college prep programs. Canada doesn't rank first or second in the world, but they're pretty close to the top.

However, we in the United States seem to believe we're living in Lake Wobegon! We abandoned freedom of choice long ago. Kids who would rather not prepare for college are forced to conform and prepare for college anyway.

It is exceedingly foolish to design a stiff, one-track educational system. All our modern research into brain theory and learning styles tells us so. But you impose it anyway. Then you proclaim it inferior to the rest of the world's.

Are you daft? Is there any wonder why we can't compete with superior educational systems?

In China, in Japan, in Europe, and in Canada, kids with interests, physical aptitudes, technical skills, and various other valuable, non-academic talents are given opportunities to obtain certified skills in many vocations.

In the United States, we send kids through school as though it's a sawmill. We lock them into preparing for college calculus, giving them "inferior" grades when they struggle. But we do little or nothing to help them on their way to vocations. Instead, we force feed them an educationally inappropriate program and inferior academic grades, and when we're finished with them, we tell them to go find their own appropriate education and pay extra for it to boot.

And one more thing: The fact that good paying jobs in vocations, trades, and labor are disappearing is not their problem. It's yours. You're always going to have people who need those jobs. This country needs the industries that provide them. Your economic policies absolutely must keep that fact in mind. We can't all do the jobs of computer techies, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers, and even if we could, some of us just don't want them.

We dump sad stories on our kids about the changing workplace; we hammer them with high-brow standards until it hurts. Then we test them and make them all look "inferior."

In classrooms with brilliant minds, we teachers spend most of our time parsing information for the benefit of the "average" kids in there with them. The brilliant minds grow just as bored as the kids who find the material exceedingly difficult. Too often, the result is that nearly half, and sometimes more than half our kids, join together and act out in rebellion. Can you blame them?

That's what you have given us. That is the environment in which you demand "adequate yearly progress" under NCLB.

Your system is poison, and we're swallowing it every day. Yes, something's seriously wrong with American education, but it isn't teachers, and it isn't students. It's the system, your primitive system, and the ludicrous, so-called "standards" you've hung around our necks.

Shame on you for making such insane demands and then firing these ridiculous accusations at us. Wake up to reality.