Sex in the Classroom Part II: The Common Core, Adolescence, and Skills

Is it any wonder we see a trend of kids' reading and comprehension skills staying pretty high in elementary grades and dropping off right around the time of puberty? It's because of all the sex! Their minds are being hijacked by it!

Prowling the rows between desks in our middle school classrooms, we wade past flirtatious girls studied in the art of pop culture fashion, dressed in clothing that just barely conceals their fast-growing "charms," as the Romantic poets used to call them, and responding to these provocations, the less mature boys, who "show off" and strut around at every opportunity like a bunch of little roosters.

Our kids' minds are elsewhere! On sex! Is it not obvious? Who or what can disrupt their attention long enough to make them read? No one? Nothing?

Easy to give up, isn't it?

Seldom do we actually impose upon them challenging reading assignments (poor dears, struggling with all those hormones). We spare them out of pity. It's too often true. In fact, I have heard from students themselves, that the only time they ever read is when they "follow along with [audio] recordings," of the plays or stories or poems assigned.

So I ask them, what goes on during the rest of class time? And this is what they tell me: "Oh, we get vocabulary lists and stuff like that, and speeches, and art projects, and next week we're dressing up like the Canterbury travelers. And we get extra credit for it, too!"

They get immersed in experiential and declarative knowledge with so-called "enrichment activities," but they don't learn how to read because THEY DON'T READ!

We teach kids not to read. Vocabulary lists give them opportunities not to read. So do exercises in editing practice and grammar. Their class time gets filled with anything but reading. Reading gets relegated to situations other than class time, like when they have to take the ACT, for heaven's sake!

We rationalize about it. We insist that we can't have them struggling in our classrooms with language they don't understand. Are they better off waiting to encounter the language later, during a high stakes test? Are we doing them a favor making sure they don't experience the pain now? Is it easier on them and us to play a recording of someone else reading aloud, making sure they have their books open while the machine is running? Then we can tell their parents and our colleagues how scrupulous we have been about having them all "read along!" There! What a lovely scenario we can produce! But of course, it's also a good idea to wade through the sex occasionally and make them put away their cell phones behind those open books, isn't it?

To some extent at least, I can understand your situation, and I commiserate. It's not even practical to make kids read every play or poem or story or novel assigned. What with all their other class work, the math, the science, and the social studies, it's overwhelming! We haven't even begun to consider football practice and part time jobs.

Surprise! I agree with you!

Yes, I know you use quality study guides that probe the meaning of a story and require higher level thinking skills, but how many literary experts have already plowed that ground? Hundreds? Thousands? And how many hits do you get after typing those questions into a Google search engine?

Are students becoming skilled readers, able to draw inferences of their own from a text, or are we just handing them declarative knowledge about Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huck Finn? What on earth are they going to do when they get a passage from Othello on the ACT? They certainly won't have recordings to listen to or videos to watch; they won't get any credit for showing up for their ACT dressed like Desdemona or Iago! They'll need to read and interpret for themselves when they get there. Are we giving them sufficient practice to face that reality?

No! We are not! In class, we teach our kids how NOT to read and MAYBE still get by in life! Shame on us! And the sorts of instructional tools we commonly use in conjunction with literary studies are very blunt instruments. Our kids are used to being beaten with them, and they've found ways to avoid them or numb themselves to the pain. Time for something new, don't you think? It's time that we TEACH, and FORCE THEM TO EXERCISE, true reading skills.