How to Have a Successful Read Aloud
| This is a brief excerpt from the Introduction to Now available as both a paperback and due east-book. INTRODUCTION |  |
Due north the thirty years since the showtime edition of this volume, much has changed in the globe, equally well as in American education. And and so, besides, the book has evolved.
Dorsum in 1982, there was no Cyberspace or email, no prison cell phones, DVD players, iTunes, iPods, iPads, Amazon, e-books, Wi-Fi, or Facebook. The closest affair to an "instant message" was a facial expression that exasperated mothers gave their children. "Texting" was something you did on a typewriter. The first CD role player was just going on sale, Starbucks was merely a coffee-edible bean shop in Seattle, and if you said "laptop" to people they'd have thought y'all were talking about some kind of TV-dinner tray.
And what did we get for the billions spent
on testing?
For all of those differences, there are some things that remain the same. In 1982, the U.S. economy was in its worst recession since the Great Depression and the nation's business concern leaders were looking for someone or something to blame for it. Sound familiar? Since South.A.T. scores had been in a xx-year refuse (considering lots of boilerplate and below-average students, and non but the rich kids, were taking the tests for the first time in history), the corporate executives fingered education as one of the culprits for the recession and demanded reforms and accountability at all levels—a more business-like approach.one ("If our schools were more like Japanese schools, our economic system would be more theirs!"2) This would open the doors to nigh iii decades of testing mania and school reforms.
At practically the same time, the cost of college began a 400 percent increase, outpacing the increases in medical intendance and median family unit income by 2008.3 By 2011, student loans would be larger than either the nation'south credit card debt or the motorcar loan manufacture.4
Which brings usa to the present fourth dimension. With all the new applied science now in place and billions of dollars in testing accomplished, we've made a ane bespeak improvement in reading scores since 1971 (see chart). Mmmm.
If you're even half sane, you have to be asking yourself, "What in the world is wrong here?" I promise this book tin respond at least some of that query, likewise as what we can exercise nigh information technology, because surely there'south a improve way than what we've been doing.
I should interject my thoughts here on the national testing mania and and so-called school reforms. Since unabridged volumes have been washed on the field of study, I'll restrict my conclusions to merely this single paragraph. The concluding three decades have been largely a huge money-grab past testing companies and their government pawns. If you demand proof, wait no farther than the half-page summary of events done by New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip in 2011.5 All he did was take the statements of country educational activity supervisors over the last decade, year by year, along with the results of state tests. Over and over, authorities (regardless of party affiliation) proved itself wrong, inaccurate, mendacious, duplicitous, contradictory, and unworthy of trust. And this from i of the more progressive locales—not Louisiana or District of Columbia—New York. God aid the children with those public servants in charge.
Everyone wanted to know: What tutoring programme got him a perfect score?
Given that amount of ineptitude, is anything going correct? Yes! Consider once again that reading nautical chart and wait for the sunshine. With the hundreds of distractions imposed on children in the last 30 years—200 cable channels; most children with TV'south in their bedrooms (usually the lowest scoring students); single-parents raising one in four children, and a babe built-in every threescore seconds to a teen female parent6—it's a wonder the scores actually rose by one signal and didn't drop by ten or 15. If that is the case, then something must exist working and this book will examine what really works. In fact, let'southward await at one of those "somethings" now.
E start with the family of Susan and Tad Williams and sons, Christopher and David. Of the four hundred g students taking the A.C.T. exam with Christopher back in 2002, only fifty-seven had perfect scores—he was the fifty-8th. When discussion got out that this kid from Russell, Kentucky (population iii,645), had scored a perfect 36, the family was besieged with questions, the most common beingness "What prep course did he take? Kaplan? Princeton Review?" Information technology turned out to be a course his parents enrolled him as an infant, a free program, unlike some of the private plans that now cost up to $250 an hour.
In responding to inquiries about Christopher's prep courses, the Williamses simply told people—including the New York Timesvii— that he hadn't taken any, that he did no prep work. That, of form, wasn't completely true. His mother and male parent had been giving him and his younger brother gratuitous prep classes all through their childhoods, from infancy into boyhood: they read to them for thirty minutes a night, year after year, even after they learned how to read for themselves.
"The best S.A.T. prep course is to read to your children when they're trivial."
Theirs was a home chock with books but no Tv Guide, GameCube, or Hooked on Phonics. Even though Susan Williams was a fourth-generation teacher, she offered no home instruction in reading before the boys reached school age. She and Tad just read to them—sowed (and sewed) the sounds and syllables and endings and blendings of language into the love of books. Each male child easily learned to read, loved it, gobbled it upwards voraciously. Besides being a family bonding amanuensis, reading aloud was used not equally test prep as much equally an "ensurance" policy—it ensured the boys would be ready for whatever came their way in school. That, combined with church and Scouting, would ensure they were ready for any life threw at them.
By 2011, David was a University of Louisville graduate working as an engineer and Christopher was pursuing his PhD in biochemistry at Duke. Sometimes Christopher's early reading experiences surface even in the biochemistry department, like the day after a Duke basketball loss and he remarked to his lunch mates, "I judge 'there's no joy in Mudville' today." None of the other grad students grasped the reference to Ernest Thayer's classic sports verse form.eight
The Williams family experience didn't surprise me at all because I was already familiar with reading aloud every bit a prep course. Tom Parker recommends it all the time. He's the former admissions director for Williams College who is now at Amherst College, two of the most prestigious colleges in America. Parker tells broken-hearted parents who enquire almost improving their kid'due south Due south.A.T. scores, "The best S.A.T. preparation class in the world is to read to your children in bed when they're little. Eventually, if that'south a wonderful experience for them, they'll start to read themselves."9 Parker told me he's never met a student with high verbal S.A.T. scores who wasn't a passionate reader, and almost always they recall existence read to. An A.C.T. or Southward.A.T. prep course can't packet that passion, simply parents similar Susan and Tad Williams have washed it and then can you lot.
Are yous suggesting this reading stuff is the job of the parent?
I thought it was the schoolhouse's task.
This brings usa to the "sponge cistron," exemplified by a young lady named Bianca Cotton fiber (photo right), whom I met in 2002 on the morning my grandson Tyler began kindergarten. Families were invited in for the first hour to help break the ice, and I was snapping some pictures of Tyler and a new friend when I became enlightened of an extended conversation going on behind me in the little housekeeping section of the kindergarten.
Turning around, I found Bianca cooking up a make-believe meal on a make-believe stove while conveying on a brand-believe chat on a make-believe cordless phone. And, every bit you tin run across in the photo I snapped, she had all the trunk language down for talking on the telephone and cooking at the same time.
Every kid, kindergartner or otherwise, is a little "sponge," soaking up the behavior of the people effectually them. If Bianca had never seen an adult talking on the phone while cooking, she'd never call up to grab a phone while "cooking" her showtime kindergarten meal.
Since the cost of lengthening the school day is prohibitive, the best option is tapping the vii,800 hours
at dwelling.
If Bianca isn't proof plenty for yous, consider this: Since 1956, one select group above all others—newspapers networks, or news agencies—has the best record for predicting the outcomes in presidential elections. (If there were a blogger out in that location with those credentials, the networks would beating a path to his or her door.) Every four years for a half century, a quarter million children vote in the Weekly Reader presidential poll and in 13 of the xiv campaigns they've been absolutely correct.10 Similar little sponges, they sat in their parents' living rooms, kitchens, and cars, soaking up parental values, then squeezed them onto a Weekly Reader ballot.
It comes down to uncomplicated arithmetic: the kid spends 900 hours a year in schoolhouse and seven,800 hours outside school. Which teacher has the bigger influence? Where is more than fourth dimension bachelor for change? The sponge factor and those ii numbers — 900 and 7,800 — will appear over and over in this volume.
Jay Mathews, the Washington Post'southward long-time education writer, looked back on all the pupil accomplishment stories he'd done in 20-two years and observed: "I cannot think of a single instance in which the improvement in achievement was non tied, at least in role, to an increase in the corporeality of fourth dimension students had to learn."11 I've been saying the same thing for as many years. You either extend the school solar day (as have the successful KIPP Academy charters) three or y'all tap into the 7,800 hours at dwelling. Since the cost of lengthening the school 24-hour interval would be prohibitive in the neediest places, the almost realistic choice is tapping the 7,800 hours at home.
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Source: https://trelease-on-reading.com/rah-intro.html
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