Tag Archives: Schools

Exams, Reading, Teaching

Killing The Classics

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I have had cause to think some more about what people are reading and confront again that knotty issue of whether some books, plays and poetry are more ‘worthy’ of being read than others. There has been a recent survey suggesting that children have read more books with higher reading ages during lockdown than in previous years. Unsurprising, I would say, since children have had more time at home, and potentially less time at various clubs, playing with friends, and travelling to and from school. But this raises the question of the importance of reading books with higher reading ages.

I wish we lived in a world where you could read what you enjoyed, and didn’t worry if the book was difficult or easy, worthy or unworthy. I believe that then, children and adults alike would read more, enjoy it more, and so get better at it, opening up worlds of books previously unreachable. Unfortunately we live in a world where, if children cannot reach a reading age of at least 16 (by the time they are around 15) then GCSE becomes a struggle. So, teachers around the country are trying to force children into progressing from Tom Gates, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The World of Norm to Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare within a few short years. Even if I agreed that this was a suitable aim for our education system, I would not accept that we are going about it in the right way.

Increasingly, children are being taught classic literature at younger and younger ages. I do not see the point of this. It only alienates the majority of children while squashing beautiful and complex works into consumable nuggets for children who cannot cope with the original. Why are we doing this? I taught Year 7 The Tempest a couple of years ago. How ridiculous! There was barely a nod to the original text, so we taught a very strange story, missing out any interpretations the use of power, different forms of love, corruption, aging and death, to students who were too young to understand a play for adults. I am not saying the students didn’t learn anything. I just wonder if a play they could really relate to, act, and understand would have been a better use of time. If Shakespeare wasn’t on the GCSE curriculum, this would never have been even thought of. Animal Farm is probably slightly more understandable as a Year 7 text, as it can be understood on a purely basic level. But it grates that the children who could not possibly understand the political ideology and historical situation it was written to satirise are missing the key reasons why Orwell wrote it in the first place. It does not follow that if students study ‘classic’ texts in early Key Stage 3, they will be able to understand them better in late Key Stage 4. Even then, Shakespeare is pushing the limits of most teenagers’ abilities. All we do, is create a generation of children who feel that books, plays and literature in general are opaque, not for them, and divorced from anything they have experienced themselves. That sense of alienation rolls into disaffection, and disengagement.

Is it impossible to inspire students with a love of books and of reading? I don’t think so! I think we can, if we allow the child to choose the things they like and give them time and encouragement to read, and to help them feel they are not being judged. I have, in my time as a librarian, come across children who felt judged for reading something that was, frankly, too easy for them. And children who felt judged for trying to read something too difficult for them. This judgement is unhelpful and unnecessary. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t guide people to find books that will suit their interests and ability level, but we all need some sense of security, and pushing people to their outer limits all the time is counter productive. Furthermore, insisting a book is too hard – rather than letting the child find that out for themselves – is a way of saying, these things are not for you! You are too young, too stupid, too working class, too whatever… The child will fill in the blanks.

This is all so obvious, I wonder that it needs saying. Schools are so focused on exam results rather than actual achievement, enjoyment and preparation for life, that creating literate individuals who will carry on learning and reading for their whole lives is less of a priority than getting those teenagers a 4 in their English Language and Literature. I don’t blame individual teachers who all long for their students to love and appreciate the books, plays and poetry they are taught. I don’t even blame schools for focusing their attention on exams rather than long-term educational goals, but the system is so skewed that, however good your intentions, students continue to struggle with classic texts and unfortunately learn that they are not for them in the process. My aim would be to open up all literature to everyone. I just fear we are not going about it in the right way.

Revision, Teaching

How do we motivate our students to revise?

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I hear some demotivating advice given for revision techniques, and I feel I should redress the balance. I know that I am not an expert; I am simply someone who works with teenagers who are taking exams. It may be, therefore, that I have totally the wrong idea and others are more qualified to pass on advice. However, from what I see, students need something tailored to them and their needs, and need to be given time and space to work on improving their own work practices.

I have heard recently that a local school recommended (for the holiday) a diet of 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours to do what you want in every day. That last 8 hours, by the way, includes eating, drinking, washing, dressing and other vital daily chores. I would laugh if it weren’t so desperately counter-productive. This suggestion is not given in isolation.  Barnaby Lenon, a former headteacher of Harrow, suggested students study for 7 hours a day over the Easter Holidays, according to a Guardian article published last year.

At first I thought only about how demotivating this advice would be to the ordinary student. Most students need encouragement and help in organising and motivating themselves.  The suggestion that they do 8 hours a day is ludicrous.  They will either try and fail, leaving them feeling awful and even less motivated than before, or they will laugh and think their teachers are fools, and be as little motivated and organised as before.

Now I am beginning to acknowledge that for the focused and driven student such advice can be just as detrimental. The student who wants to be the best, to get the top marks, will take such advice to heart.  They may even go beyond it, thinking that if all students are meant to do 8 hours a day, then they must do more if they want to be the best. The result of this thinking is over-stress and over-work.  Young people already put their peace of mind and their body’s health in jeopardy at exam times. Every school counsellor will tell you that. Not only that, but it doesn’t work.  Anyone with any sense can tell you that after having done 2 or 3 hours of hard thinking, everything else will be a blur. If you get to the eighth hour, your best work is already a few hours behind you. The danger is you stare unseeing at the paper in front of you and remember nothing of it the next day when you drag yourself reluctantly to try and repeat the process. What we need to do is to teach our young people to work ‘smart’.

Do you disagree?  Do you think that we should be aiming to the top of what is possible (in the hope that something at least will be achieved)? As I say, I am no expert. I do know a lot of teenagers, though. I work with a good number of students who find doing any work outside of lessons is a struggle. Instead of putting a number of hours as a target, we perhaps should focus on teaching our young people how best to organise and motivate themselves. We should be getting them to ask themselves what works best for them. 

Perhaps the pomodoro technique is the best; 20 minutes of work and 10 minutes of rest, repeated as often as possible.  Perhaps setting a particular time in the day when they always work can help.  Perhaps carving out a particular place where they feel comfortable working can help – be that in a public library, school library, work-space or their own bedroom. It may be that working with others can help them get motivated.  It may be that music helps them shut out the world and concentrate on the task in hand.  It may be that they are task driven – they work until they are finished that element of work and then stop.  It may be that time slots work better for them. The truth is, there are as many ways of working as there are people.  Young people are inexperienced and don’t necessarily know what will work best for them, and so, I think, it is our job to speak to them about the different ways they can try and encourage them to find a rhythm that suits them.

Too often I hear comments like, ‘you can’t work while listening to music’, or ‘how can anyone concentrate in a busy room?’ and I realise that the teacher or parent is trying to impose their own study habits and preferences on their student or child. Who is to say what works for them?  Only they can tell.  We need to give them the information and space to help them work it out for themselves, while being careful not to sanction 6 hours of sitting listening to music in their rooms with little concentrated work done. The truth is, when they are 15 or 16 they are liable to make mistakes and need a bit of guidance.  Even at A level and beyond they need a bit of help and encouragement.  But if students are ever to learn to be independent learners, they need to work out how they should study.  We can help them, but we can’t force them into a particular way, even if that way worked for us.

Essentially, as a mother and as a teacher, I have not got a definitive answer to the problem of revision. Hard work wins the day. It will always beat all but the most talented of minds, and will guarantee your child reaches their potential. The problem is always how to equip young people with the internal motivation to work and the sense to work out what is the best study method for them, without putting them off work completely. It seems to me that advocating 8 hours study a day is not the way to do it. What do you think?  Am I aiming too  low or are they asking too much?

Reading, Teaching

Why do schools put books into levels?

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The answer is that it is convenient. In the absence of a member of staff who knows the books available in the school, and knows their content, reading level and interest level, schools have to find an easy, quick way of matching a book to a child. It is nothing new.  I remember books like that when I was at school.  The excitement of finishing the red books and being allowed to try the silver books – what a sense of achievement!  My children too, at primary, went through the same process. I appreciate that there is a certain amount of sense to the progression through varying levels of difficulty.  But I have a fundamental problem with the idea.

It is not just that, even before some children are out of key stage one they know their reading ability and label themselves as ‘non-readers’, though that is extremely detrimental to any hope of making those children into readers for pleasure. It’s not just that children are picked on for being either too clever or too stupid, though, again, that is another reason why school is a torment for so many children. I have a problem with the idea of finding a level for books at all.

There is a practical problem, even before we address what my fundamental objection is.  How do you find the correct level for a book?  If you have to read every book first, why are you not just recommending them to children as and when they want them without the need to explicitly categorise the book and the child? If you are relying on the companies and their computer driven data, then you will inevitably find that there are some startling anomalies.  Enough to make you doubt how accurate the rest of the data is.  Books in the same series are given hugely different levels – which is a nonsense, particularly if your aim is to create readers rather than just set homework. Books which are clearly classics and difficult in themes and ideas can be given a low level.  Books which are for younger children can be given a high one. I always think about William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.  They are not complex, they are simple to read and understand, but a huge amount of context and a high level of understanding are appropriate when reading them.

However, the practicalities aside, I hate the idea of giving books levels because it goes against everything I want children to understand about what books are.  They should be gateways to other worlds, keys to knowledge, tutors to teach empathy, journeys to be taken inside your head. They should be what you long to get home to, what you are excited to talk about, what you love to share with your friends and family.  They should not be a way to tell you how clever you are or are not.  They should not be homework.  They should not be hard work.

I have said before on this blog that we all read books of different levels at different times. Who reads to the top of their ability every day? It would be exhausting and disheartening. Pushing children to choose books from a certain level makes them have to push themselves every time they open their book.

I have also talked about the importance of choice when encouraging readers.  Reading levels in school narrows the already restricted choice for the student. Of course we want them to choose something they can read and that they won’t get bored with or struggle with.  But taking away their chance to try something ambitious or relax into something comforting and familiar will not encourage the children to become readers. I read Bleak House when I was 16.  I doubt I understood much of it at that point. No doubt many of the references and ideas passed me by.  But my love of Dickens stems from that point.  No one said, don’t try that, it’s too hard.  I didn’t realise it was, so I got what I could from it.  If it truly had been so far above me, I would have left it and tried something else.  Would that have been so bad?  At the other end of the spectrum, I have just been reading Fantastically Great Women who changed the World by Kate Pankhurst.  Admittedly I was doing so to prepare for a lesson, but, I have to say, I really enjoyed it.  I learned so many things about famous women who should be celebrated. What I am trying to say is that no book is too easy or too hard, unless you yourself decide that it is.

For those children who have lots of choice of books outside school, the book levels in school may not do too much damage.  They may visit the library, be allowed to buy books at a book shop, get presents at Christmas and birthdays of books they might like, and may have books in the house to go to in order to satisfy their reading needs.  For those children who do not have books outside school – and these children are already at a disadvantage educationally – the levels may be restrictive and judgemental enough to put them off reading.

I may be asking for too much of the education system in these dark days, but I would like to see a book expert who recommends books to children based on what they like, what they want to try, what has been recommended to them and, yes, on their reading level.  I would like to see a range of books in every school with no prescriptive demarcation of levels or age. The book expert, well maybe we could call them a librarian (based, you know, on the latin for book) and the place where the books are kept could be called a library.  What do you think?  Do you think it might catch on?

Reading, Teaching

How Cool is Reading?

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Reading For Pleasure

The holy grail for school librarians and English teachers is to inspire this – Reading For Pleasure. But is it ever possible to change a child’s attitude and habits and turn them into a reader?

What is at the root of the issue? It seems to be reading ability.  According to a recent study, speaking of children up to 10, () ‘slower readers and poorer comprehenders read less than more fluent readers and more able comprehenders’. (Quoted in a TES article from November 2019) This seems perfectly logical. If you can’t read very fluently, it is not much fun to attempt it. It’s hard work, even. Which child (or adult for that matter) wants to spend their spare time doing something they find extremely difficult? Of course, the gap between what the poorer reader is able to read easily and the appropriateness of the books to their interest and sophistication, grows rapidly. What happens before long is that the books they would be interested in reading are no longer within their grasp.  What they can read seems juvenile and simplistic to them. This makes it even less likely that they will maintain the effort of reading in their spare time.

We have not even yet mentioned the shame and humiliation so many teenagers feel or fear when it comes to reading. No wonder they don’t want to try it or spend any time thinking about it. When someone knows that a book they have is beyond them, often they still carry it around like a talisman, helping them fit in and seem part of the group. I have seen this so often in my work as a librarian. I would love the student to take a book they will truly enjoy and be able to appreciate. Even if they can find one, they are reluctant to be seen reading it, because they know they will be judged by their classmates.

So much excellent work has been done by publishers like Barrington Stoke.  They publish so many fantastic books which appeal to older readers but have simple sentence structures and a specific vocabulary – not to mention many other features such as readable typefaces and cream coloured pages for those with dyslexia. Even these, though, are not the books which a ‘cool’ kid at school wants to be seen with.  Those will be the ones on the shelves of Asda and Tesco which have been publicised to death, and are therefore popular enough to be acceptable in school.

To be honest, though, at school, reading is not seen to be cool at all. As teachers and librarians we continually try to fight that stereotype. But what can we do?  We were never the cool kids at school when we were young, and we certainly have no vestige of coolness now!  Anything we recommend or encourage will inevitably be lame, whether we like it or not. The attempts to make it desirable to be a reader, such as getting points as part of the Accelerated Reader programme, are as likely to backfire as to be successful.  I hope the element of competition does encourage some students to read more, but I fear it does the opposite for so many others. To be the year group’s ‘Word Millionaire’ will only seem desirable either to young children or to people who love reading in the first place. It is certainly not like winning the cup for the school football team, is it?

So, if we come back to reading ability, how do we tackle the issue of improving a student’s chances of being competent enough to be inspired to read?  Truthfully, it comes down to reading practice.  If a baby is read to, spoken to, and interacted with, their language skills will develop well.  If their parents and friends continue to read to them, model reading, encourage reading, they will have a better chance of growing up to be a reader.  If their parents have large vocabularies, if they continue to talk to their children, the children will have a large and growing vocabulary themselves.  This makes accessing books all the more possible. Once the child starts school, reading in lessons, living in a reading culture all day five days a week will help encourage them to pick up a book and make the effort to understand it.

It’s easier said than done.

In the years that I worked as a school librarian, I saw children turn to reading who had never read. I saw the pride of a child of 11 who had successfully finished reading their first ‘proper’ book.  I saw the interest sparked in children who found their place in the pages of a book.  People who had been on the outside suddenly felt they belonged.  People who did not see themselves reflected in those around them, found others like themselves in the books they read.  However, I did not see many children who valued ‘coolness’, popularity or social status turn to reading. By the time they had come to me, it was already engrained that reading was not for people like them. Not if they wanted to carry on being cool.

This is not the key to the issue.  The key is with parent-child relationships, adult literacy, resourcing and working on school reading cultures, school libraries and librarians and so on. But it is a serious impediment to reading for pleasure. Those who love to read can always keep quiet about it – so it doesn’t ruin their reputation at school.  But those who have already slipped through the net will never be caught again because of the fact that teenagers do not aspire to be readers.

As a swot, the least cool of all, I have no answer to this problem. It may be that I have to pass this one on to someone better qualified. The problem is, which of us librarians is cool enough for the task?

Reading, Teaching

Making Reading a Priority – in school

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When we are thinking about how to get children to read, I think we need to look at (at least) three different elements – the parents and how they can help, the teachers and what their role is, and then, how the young people themselves can change their own habits.

In my last blog post, I gave a little advice (albeit mainly common sense) on how to encourage your child to read.  This post will look more at what can be done in school. I worked as a school librarian for over ten years, with the aim of promoting reading and fostering a reading culture.  Since then, I have done my PGCE and have taught English. So, I have experience from both sides of the fence; I understand the pressures teachers and schools face, and the frustrations of librarians trying to make a difference.

If there are any teachers reading this, ask yourself, have you ever felt guilty for reading instead teaching your class to write (another) PEE/PEA/PETER/SQI paragraph?  Did that fifteen minutes reading at the end of a long day or on a Friday afternoon seem too much of a relief? Did you ever feel you really should be doing something else? Because it is supposed to be pleasurable (and it is), it does not seem like work. If it is not work, then can it really be doing us good? Well, yes, it can!

I don’t want to assume that teachers don’t read to their classes, in secondary as well as primary.  I know they do.  I also know the pressures on them to get through the curriculum. What is there to show for an afternoon reading?  How can you prove that it has improved student progress? You can’t. (Though of course, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t.) The pressures of a full GCSE timetable, such high expectations for students of all abilities, not to mention the accountability measures which burden teachers’ working lives, mean that reading gets squeezed out, however valuable we know it to be.

The truth is, the students who come from homes where their parents read, where they were read to, and where there are lots of books to choose from, will always have an advantage. The school’s job is to aim to level the playing field.

These are just a few things teachers can try:

Find time to read in class Read in registration; read at the end of the day; read poetry and novels; act out plays; read newspaper articles; read film reviews; get the students to read them and you read them too.

Model reading Let the students catch you reading, at the beginning of a lesson, at break time or lunch time. They will be interested in what you are doing and will see that it is something you truly enjoy.

Share your enthusiasm Tell students about books you have read, recommend books to them, stick up your current read on your door. Enthusiasm is infectious.

Talk about reading Peer recommendations are so effective in encouraging reading. Knowing what to read next is half the battle. This could be a five minute discussion at the beginning of a lesson, a post-it note display or a post-box with recommendations to share at intervals.

Create a Class Library This is not to replace or detract from the school’s main library, but there should always be interesting, varied and age appropriate books available in the classroom. To regularly update it, and not to get too concerned when the books are not returned, these things cost money which may well come out of the teacher’s own pocket. PTAs and charity shops can be a help with that problem.

These are things individual teachers can do, but the only way to truly change things for the better is to create a reading culture throughout the whole school. That is too large a subject to deal with at the end of a post. Something so close to my heart will have to have a section to itself. But if you are choosing a place to work (as a teacher or teaching assistant) or a school for your child to go to, ask yourself “Do they have a reading culture?”  The main way you will be able to tell if they have, is by asking if they have a library with a dedicated (and, ideally, qualified) librarian.

Next time I want to write about how teenage students can read more to boost their literacy, to tackle the all-important GCSEs and, of course, because it is – and remains – wonderful fun!