Why Should Students Read Literature?

Why Should Students Read Literature?

By Jill Jenkins

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. “ Albert Einstein

            In education today, focus is teaching students to acquire a list of skills so they can successfully complete an end of the year test.  Is that really all it takes be an educated person?  In today’s Language Arts classes instead of reading entire pieces of literature, the students read excerpts from novels, excerpts from speeches, excerpts from articles and answer specific questions that require the child to review the piece and select specific information.  It is called closed reading.  I call it closing minds.  The truth is you can teach that list of reading and writing skills and still use entire pieces of literature.  Not only will student have a sense of accomplishment, but teachers will be giving your students the skills they need and so much more.

            Remember back to your youth, the lessons that you learned from great pieces of literature were more encompassing and life important than an end of the year test.  I still remember reading James Hurst’s, “The Scarlet Ibis,” a beautiful short story about a brother’s guilt over his younger brother’s, Doodle’s, death.  Although the story is packed with vivid descriptions and imagery, its message is one that a child can carry with him for life. First, the story helps the reader develop empathy for the struggles of the disabled brother.  Second, the major theme is whether pride is a positive force or a negative force:

”I did not know then that pride is a wonderful, terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines, life and death. “

This lends itself to discussions about whether pride is a good quality to have or a bad one.  The teacher can have the student select specific examples of how the narrator’s pride in Doodle helped Doodle and how it eventually led to his death.  This is a subject that they can relate to since many parents push their children out of pride.  The students should be able to personalize the story and develop a greater understanding of their own life.  Third, the conclusion of the story of the narrator collapsing across Doodle to protect his “fallen scarlet ibis from the heresy of the rain,” always makes the class cry.  I remember crying when I read it as a junior high student and every year I have taught it (almost 40 years) I have the same emotional response.  Literature allows us to feel.  Feeling and showing that emotion helps student become more emotionally mature.  There is research that people who are emotionally mature are more likely to succeed in life. Literature emotionally engages students like no “closed reading” assignment can.  With a little effort there are so many of the reading, writing and speaking skills that can be taught with this story.

            Reading entire pieces of literature can help students deal with problems in their personal life. A quality education should prepare people for more than a career.  To be perfectly honest, most of the careers that exist today didn’t exist when I was in middle school.  This means we are preparing students in our class today for a world that we cannot even imagine.  We do know that they students will live in a world with other people and we know that there are some fundamental lessons on how to deal with betrayal that they might learn from reading The Once and Future King by T. H. White.  The book explores what it means to act civilized even when one is betrayed by the people loved most. I know this book was my anchor during my divorce. I drew strength from the words of Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America.”  Literature can help us overcome our darkest days.

            Students learn ethics from literature. For example, To Kill A Mocking Bird  by Harper Lee teaches students that one must always do the right thing even if it costs your family dearly.  Atticus Finch, a southern lawyer, who represents a poor black man accused of raping a poor white woman suffers ridicule and harassment, but with dignity he carries on honorably.  He is not only a great role model for his children, Jem and Scout, but for the reader as well.  The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a more contemporary novel that discusses discrimination in our society and the main character overcome the problems with honor and dignity.  Teaching students how our society has changed because of the noble, honorable actions of its citizens is an important lesson. I love to share with my students that Charles Dickens changed the laws on child labor with his book, Oliver Twist.  Writing is powerful tool and so is literature.

            Giving students a sense of history is another important role of teaching literature.  Books like Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier can teach students how the Civil War affected real people.  History classes can seem like a dusty text-book full of unfamiliar places and dates to a middle school student.  Novels can help students understand that the events were real and they had both positive and negative effects on the people who lived through them.  All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is another book to teach about World War I or The Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane is another depiction of the Civil War.  Poems like Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” creates a vivid image of a soldier’s death from mustard gas during World War I.  Students might be horrified, but war is never pretty and it can help them understand the sacrifice soldiers have made throughout our history. 

            Literature can give students insight into other cultures and other human suffering.  For example if you want students to understand some of the current struggles in Afganistan, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner  can help students understand its political, culture and historical and social problems.  The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver can help student understand how the geography, politics and culture affects lives in the Congo.  Literature can open new worlds and people to students that textbook excerpts cannot.

            Teaching literature can give students not only a connection to that past, but show students that we are not all that different.  Which teenager students has not fallen desperately in love, which teenage student has not disregarded their parents’ wants and advice to behave dangerously, which teenager doesn’t’ have a friend who is always joking and one who is always fighting?  They all need to read William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  How can we call students culturally literate without a little Shakespeare in their lives? Since the new Common Core requires that ninth and tenth grade students understand the literary device “allusion”, teaching a broad-base of different literary genres and examples seems important. Without a being culturally literate that literary device is rather useless.  Students would have no base of literary knowledge.

            Literature weaves a rich tapestry in our lives. It sparks our imagination by showing us people and places both familiar to us and unfamiliar. It teaches us that all of human kind is connected in our hopes, our joys, our sorrows, our needs and our troubles. It teaches us where we have been and where we might be going.  It teaches us what it means to be human and values that we should uphold.  Literature allows us to feel, and to have empathy for others and maybe even for ourselves. Literature gives us the lessons to hold us together during difficult trials in our lives and tools to handle those problems.  An education should be more than a list of reading skills; an education should teach us how to behave as human being in a complex society.

Is Your Son’s Progress Becoming a Bar Code for Strangers?

Is Your Son’s Progress Becoming a Bar Code for Strangers?

By Jill Jenkins

            When our country was founded, schools were held in one-room school houses with one school spinster who taught all grades and all subjects.  In the 1800, the Industrial Revolution created secondary schools on the factory design.  Each subject was taught by a different instructor and the students passed from subject to subject like cars on a conveyer belt.  Now it is the age of computer and schools are becoming a data-driven industry, but who is reading that data?

            According to “A Day In The Life Of A Data Mined Kid” by Adriene Hill, a student swipes his student ID card to get onto the bus and the school can track him to his destination sending his parent a text-message when he arrives at school and when he returns home.  A student goes on-line to complete her homework and the school can access that I.P. address of the computer to determine if the computer is within its boundaries.  If it is not, the school can learn that child’s parents are divorced and label the child as “an at-risk” student.  The federal government has given states funds to establish databases collecting information on attendance, tardiness, grades, and behavior.  Who is using this data and how safe is it from prying eyes?  According to this same article, “A study released last year by Fordham Law professor Joel Reidenberg found that very few school districts explicitly restrict the sale or marketing of student information in contracts with service providers.” 

            There is even more bad news. Some schools use the software Oracle and  its software service product is easily hacked.  This means the personal information about parents and students are easily accessed by any hacker.  Stories fill the news of students who have hacked into the university’s systems and changed their grades.  If ordinary college students can do it imagine what could happen if all of this information schools have mined about your student got into the wrong hands. Worse yet, many schools are contracting with third-parties to create teaching software and store that student’s scores on their data system.  Who is responsible for the students’ privacy then?  According the Jake Tapper of CNN, two security experts, Bryan Seely and Ben Caudill , have discovered that strangers could get your personal information and your child’s personal information from computer using Oracle software.  According to this article over 100 K-12 schools and 50 Universities use this software.  Furthermore, the two were able to access social security numbers, names, grades, addresses which means the hackers could use the information to steal someone’s identity or take our loans in that person’s name. 

            I am not saying that technology is all bad, but I am saying schools need to be careful.  First, if your child has to swipe his I.D. to get on a school bus and you receive a text saying he has arrived safely.  That has to make you feel better than the parents whose kindergarten students didn’t arrive home from their first day of school until seven P.M.; likewise, the parents of two seven year olds in Texas who were put on the wrong bus and up miles away; or in addition, the father in Arkansas whose 8 year old son was put on the wrong bus and the driver left him with strangers to deliver him home.  Parents are assured when they receive a text indicating their son or daughter has made it safely to school or home, but that information could be hacked by a sexual predator monitoring your child as well.  He may be able to hack the system and know when you child gets on a bus and when he gets off.  Data on a student’s attendance and grades should be used by the school to improve the quality of education given and identify students with problems so they can be helped. Computerized grading programs do improve communication between parents and teachers.  Used properly data-driven teaching can improve education.  As a department chair, I used to pull data for my Language Arts teachers on how all of our students performed on a writing assignment in My Access.  The program allows teachers to decipher which writing skills most students did well and which writing skills most students were struggling with.  We used that data to determine on which skills we needed to improve our teaching methods.

            However, it that data is misused, students could be unfairly labeled.  Sometimes students are struggling with matters outside the school and it might affect their score on a given assignment or test.  Since computers have no knowledge of what a child might be dealing with on a given day, it is unfair to allow a machine to label a child and it could be used in that manner.  Students are more than just a bar-code or a student identification number; they are real people with real problems.  Computers can incorrectly label a child and that label can be used against the child for years in future.  My daughter was a child of divorced parents.  She graduated with honors from both high school and college, got her Master’s Degree and is working as an assistant editor to a major publishing company.  I certainly think it would have been a travesty if she had been labeled as “at-risk.”
               We still need to ask, who has access to that data and how are they using it? Data-driven education is in its infancy.  As a result, schools need to work cautiously to ensure that the data collected is safe from hackers. Schools need to research each outside agency that the district contracts with to ensure that the data isn’t being sold and that the data is safe from hackers.  Our students’ privacy is more important than to be first on the block to try an innovative new program.  Your son is more than a bar-code.  Make sure your school is treating him as such.

Class size: Can it Impact Learning?

Class size:  Can it Impact Learning?

By Jill Jenkins

            According to a recent article in the Salt Lake City Tribune, Judi Clark, the executive director of Parents for Choice in Education stated, “Class size is really irrelevant in this day and age in education. It’s not about how many children you have in the classroom. It’s about how you’re leveraging technology to deliver one-on-one instruction."  Charter schools in this state can limit the number of students they have in each class, but public schools cannot.  Although the state’s pupil to teacher ratio is 22.8, that is not the same thing a class size.  Pupil-teacher ratio takes the total number of credentialed people: counselors, special education teachers and librarians divided by the total number of enrolled students. Actual class size means that actual number of students in a class. In Utah some classes in academic areas have as high as 52 students.  Physical Education classes can have over 80 students.  As a former teacher I can verify these numbers.  The largest number I ever had enrolled in one Language Arts Class was 62 tenth grade students and after three days of having every desk filled and students sitting along counters or standing, the counseling staff removed 1/3 of my students and reassigned them to the teacher next door.  Ten years later I was called to jury duty and one of those students who was sent next door was there.  She was still angry that, “I had given her away.” However, most of my classes ranged from 35 to 40 students in Language Arts classes and I taught seven periods a day.  How do large classes really affect the learning of students?

                According to the article, “Class size and Student Achievement” by Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Dominic J. Brewer, Adam Gamoran, and J Douglas Willms from Cornell Higher Education Research Institute at Cornell University, there are a number of disadvantages of large class size:  first,  it can reduce the amount of time students can actively engage with each other; second,  it can increase the disruptive behavior in the classroom; third, it can reduce the amount of time the teacher can spend working  with each individual student; fourth, it can reduce the material the teacher can cover; fifth, it can eliminate many methods of assessing students i.e. open-ended assessments and writing assignments; and sixth, it can reduce the learning by reducing the kind of teaching methods that the teacher can employ in her classroom. What evidence is there that this actually reduces the learning in an over-crowded classroom?  According to the Tennessee STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Research) completed between 1985-1989, random students from kindergarten to third grade were placed in classes, some with small classes and some with large classes.  The students in smaller classes, 13 to 17 students, performed .015  to .020  or about 5% higher on standardized tests in both math and reading.  Furthermore, According to the article, “Class size and Student Achievement” by Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Dominic J. Brewer, Adam Gamoran, and J Douglas Willms from Cornell Higher Education Research Institute at Cornell University  further states, the Coleman report suggests that students from lower-social economic groups, at-risk students and English Language Learners (E.L.L.) benefit the most from smaller class sizes.  Others argue that this only seems true because first, students from higher-economic group often come better prepared for school; second, their more affluent parents select schools with better teaching staffs where students earn higher test scores; and third, they attend schools with more resources.  Since salaries of teachers have grown slower than those in jobs requiring similar education levels, it becomes more difficult for district to attract the best and the brightest to become teachers, especially to teach in the most disadvantaged areas that have fewer resources for the teacher to use to instruct students and more problems. Other research shows that the teachers with high verbal ability also improve students’ achievement.  If all of this is true then all students would benefit from smaller class sizes. Four other studies: one in California, one in Wisconsin, one in Great Britain and one in Canada showed increased test scores with smaller classes, but their growth were inconsequential in middle school and high school; however, this could mean that the teachers did not change their teaching methodology.  Lecturing is a highly ineffective method of teaching.  A more student centered approach is possible in smaller classes usually has more positive results.

                Most of the effort to reduce class size has been in the grades kindergarten to third grade, but students even in middle schools and high schools could benefit from lower class size.  Research indicates that reducing the class size reduces the discipline problems.  Furthermore, reducing the class size increases the opportunities for more interactive learning situations which especially benefit the struggling students.  For secondary schools there are two goals: lowering the drop-out rate and increasing the standardized test scores.  Lowering the class size does both.  Ironically, in each of these studies, the goal was to reduce class size from 30 students per class to below 20 students per class, but in Utah the class sizes in the upper grades is between 40 and 52 in academic classes and well above 80 in classes like band, physical education or choir.  What does that mean in performance?  Look at the results of the recent SAGE test with most schools scoring in the “D” or “F” range.  These grades are understandable when one considers that often there are not enough working computers for such large classes which mean students have had little chance to complete enough practice writing activities or computer-based learning.

                In my own experience, I use less group activities, pair-and share and project based assignments when my classes rise to 40 and above simply because with forty students, desks, backpacks and growing teenagers, it becomes difficult for students to conduct themselves and hear what was going on without disrupting classrooms nearby.  Students who are kinetic learners need to be able to move, but in many situations movement becomes dangerous or impossible with that many students in a classroom.  For example, I love to allow students to play “Fly-Swatter” tag to review vocabulary or literary terminology.  The game consists of writing terms on the board and allowing sets of two or three students run to the board armed with a flyswatter and slap the appropriate word when given the definition then rewarding the winning student with a piece of candy.  With forty students in the room, there is not enough space to do this without a student tripping.  Furthermore, speeches and group presentations become almost impossibility because if every student gives a three to five minute speech, it will take nearly two weeks to complete the entire class.  Correcting research papers or any writing assignment and returning them in a timely fashion becomes more than difficult.  Smaller class sizes would give students opportunities to write more, speak more, interact more and create more project learning.  To answer Judi Clark’s argument that with enough technology the class size becomes immaterial, I say “hog wash”.  If a classroom has 52 large, teenagers with their bag packs smashed into 52 desks all using I-Pads, the room is too full for the teacher to effectively wander around and interact with the students while they work, so like all teenagers, they will begin to go to inappropriate websites and the time will become totally wasted.  Guess again Judi, tight budgets means the schools have purchased less expensive computer, so many of them do not function. Most middle schools also lack the band-width for all of them to be using computers at the same time.  So, your dream of computer run schools is just a myth.

                  With the new SAGE tests comprised of students synthesizing information from essays into an argumentative essay and an informative essay, students need a more engaged form of education than lecturing.  Having fewer students in each class would allow teacher to provide that kind of learning environment.   Students who are engaged in their own learning retain more of what is taught. It would allow teacher to provide more individualized instruction to those struggling students. It could increase both reading and math scores and reduce the drop-out rate.  If charters schools are allowed to have a enrollment limits, then the regular public schools should be able to do the same. Ideally no classroom should be above 20 students, but in this age of economic uncertainly lets at least say no class should exceed 30 students.  How do we do this?  We will need to build more schools and hire more teachers which will cost money.  Will the taxpayers willingly pay the higher costs?  According to the New York Times, it costs $167,731 per year to house one inmate.  Without a good education, people are unable to earn enough money to support themselves and their family. often end up in our penal system.  The public is already paying the price of poorly educated students.  Would they rather pay for schools or prisons?  It is not enough to give birth to a lot of children; we need to provide them with a quality education and making classes smaller is the beginning of doing that.