Just, wow.

[maeve66]

I knew that this district was different from my experience in West Oakland, but... man. I knew that the librarian was really good, and that the library was well-equipped and that a lot of students seemed to use it at lunch and afterschool.

But it hadn't really sunk in that the majority of these students like to read. Today I scheduled library tours for my morning and my afternoon class, and just came back from the first one. The students were eager and excited to find books. They asked for suggestions and for help using the computer catalog. They knew their own interests and tastes. They listened while the librarian and I talked about recent young adult fiction (YAF) that we'd enjoyed and some of them immediately searched those titles out.

More amazing still, when we returned to the classroom and I declared thirty minutes of SSR -- Sustained Silent Reading -- they were demonstrably overjoyed and then silent, while reading, with maybe ONE kid who fidgeted a lot.

This is an entirely novel experience for me in my ninth year of teaching.

It makes me very, very happy. These aren't necessarily kids with really high reading skills, either. Many of them read far below their grade level. But they're motivated to read. They're motivated to access entertainment and information through the written word. Wow.

Comments

[mcpino.livejournal.com]

YAY for knowledge-thirsty kids!

[agent-moody.livejournal.com]

Seconded! (speaking as a youth myself)

I remember in fifth grade we had Undisturbed Sustained Silent Reading: USSR. I always chuckled at that.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Man, I might have to steal that. I do support the degenerated workers' state theory, after all. Undisturbed Sustained Silent Reading. That's awesome. Have you started? What school are you at? And are you liking it? Did you see anyone from Solidarity at your Detroit conference?

[agent-moody.livejournal.com]

Even then I thought it was amusing, even though that was a few years before I considered myself a socialist (maybe my movement to socialism was inevitable?)

I'm currently in my fifth week of school, at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. It's been pretty good so far, though being an engineering major assures I'm always busy, even if refuse to recognise it. There were a few Solidarity people who showed up for the Detroit conference; we had one person show up to the YPSL convention beforehand. Apparently he was a YPSL when he was younger, and wanted to see what we were up to. I also talked to someone about my membership in Solidarity (I'm an offical sympathiser now), and we had at least one Solidarity member on our plenary panel.

[speedofthought.livejournal.com]

Excellent! Sounds like the teachers are doing their jobs over there :). Hey, like my icon?

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I love your icon. I may look for another (different) picture of her and use it, too. I've always had a strong hankering for Jane Addams.

This next bit is both responding to your comment and to mahogany's. I don't think it comes down to how good the teachers are, or not entirely. I do think that a great deal of it comes from how much literacy there is in the home before kids ever get to school, but not only that, either -- because a lot of these English Language Learner students don't necessarily have the highest level of home literacy going on. Some of them do. Some of them have fascinatingly mixed cultural knowledge bases. I am thinking of one kid in particular, about whom I may blog at some point.

But... I think it's something about the general environment and a sort of majoritarian tipping point. If the school and the teachers privilege and model literacy, and if students see enough valuing of literacy in their neighborhood or social experience, then the atmosphere as a whole tends to pull students towards enjoying reading. I don't know -- I'm only going from observation of the two places I have worked.

The opposite held true at my other school -- kids who came from better functioning schools and better functioning communities and transferred to our school (which had HELLA dedicated and hardworking teachers)... instead of maintaining their own attitudes towards learning and reading, after about three or four months, for reasons of social survival, as far as I can tell, they would almost always have stopped reading or glorying in being curious and book oriented. I think if you took kids FROM that school and sent them elsewhere, to schools where they were in a minority (not a painful one, I'd hope -- a small group, let's say), they would adapt in the other direction, too.

All of which evades the central question, the answer to which is "I don't know."

[mahogany.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this could be an example of kids that are excessively peer oriented, vs kids that have secure adult attachments. Is it possible that the children in the Oakland school were more peer oriented, in that they took take all of their cues from their peers, they look to their peers as their primary source of information and approval, and the opinions of their peers matter more than those of the adults in their lives? It sounds as though the children in your new school still look to the adults in their lives as their primary compass. Could this be one of the reasons that the children are more willing to embrace the social and home environments that encourage literacy?

[mahogany.livejournal.com]

Wow, indeed. That's outstanding, not to mention, I imagine you're looking forward to the rest of the school year.

Any theories on the primary factors that have contributed to the difference in attitudes toward reading between the two school populations?