Hi,
Most of you will be taking this class as your last one in the ReadOregon endorsement program. I'm looking forward to all of your participation; we always learn so much from each other in this class.
I was surfing the website:http://englishcompanion.ning/group/teachingtexts/forum/topics/schoolwide-read when I came across a question that I wish every teacher would be asking or administrator: "We have money for a schoolwide book reading, would love to have some suggestions." Below is one of the replies:
"We have done The Glass Castle, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier. So far, the latter has been the kid favorite, although we did offer an alternative title, The Book Thief, for those for whom the gruesome violence would be an issue. (I had only 1 student out of 130 who chose the alternate title.) It is probably the one best suited to a cross-curricular purpose. We are considering People of the Book for next year."
There was a number of other suggestions replete with schoolwide activities to go with the book selected.
As you get ready to write your proposals and write-up your curricular findings, I would appreciate your thinking about the trade books you can include as well as the assessments and instructional activities you will implement. Some of you will have bins of books to use; backpacks of books for students to take home as well as classrooms or situations where these books are limited.
In this month's Council Chronicle, the President of the National Council of Teachers of English writes: "We know that schools in high-poverty areas have inferior school libraries and inferior classroom libraries." I would hope that this is not the case in our area, but we all know that media specialists are being cut and money for library collections as well.
Whatever we can do to make trade books a powerful entity in our classrooms helps all students realize the value of authentic reading.
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Educated People Really Are A Nation’s Most Valuable Resource
I just read a reassuring article by Thomas Friedman, an economist, in the March 11, Sunday NY Times(Yes, I’m behind—it takes me a few weeks to read the Times).
Titled “Pass the Books. Hold the Oil,” Friedman makes the case that nations invested in education are going to lead the way in this global 21st century.
Students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA(Program for International Student Assessment)scores, the measure used, and few natural resources while Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc. have the lowest scores and an abundance of resources, especially oil.
Why? Because the countries with the higher education scores believe that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and these, of course, depend on the quality of education the students receive. Furthermore, they believe that the skills that students have will decide the life chances these students have, so a culture and an educational system are based on these beliefs.
So even though we are a country with huge natural resources, we also need to be mindful that our greatest resource are the students we teach. Friedman quotes Schleicher who oversees the PISA tests “Knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this money.” From this we can infer that the work we do is important; the more skills and knowledge we make available to students as teachers certainly the more opportunities they have to succeed!
I was talking to a mother recently whose son is in an “I Have A Dream" classroom-with promises for a tuition-free college future, only she felt the students don’t even have the basic skills to succeed in elementary school let alone dream of a future with college in their sights! How sad this seemed to me. We all know how important preparing students for learning is and yet with such a prize in the future, this mother felt these students won’t ever grab this brass ring. I would hope this is a reminder to all of us as we begin a new term to make sure that students have the support they need to learn.
Enjoy your practicum!
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