Entry # 23:
If they're faking reading,
are we faking teaching?

"Fake Reading" -- that's the title of the first chapter in Cris Torvani's new book, I Read It, But I Don't Get It. Right off the bat, Cris describes her own anxiety as a long-time faker. She recounts the strategies that she and her "at-risk" students have used to "fake out Mrs. Fill-in-the-Blank" or "Mr. Complete 10 Book Reports by June." [Read an excerpt from Torvani's book.]

As I began reading this intriguing book, I was reminded of how I learned to ask questions that would get teachers away from the text (because I hadn't read it), and into a conversation that may have been interesting, or would give the impression that I was really prepared and going a step beyond.

Most successful students know these tricks. I recently read an adolescent novel called Frindle. It's about a bright fifth grader who was a pro in the use of these diversionary tactics. He'd learned to time his questions for around the time the teacher usually assigned homework. If he was lucky, the bell would ring and class would be dismissed with much less homework than the teacher had originally planned.

Most teachers have probably forgotten these tricks and the boredom that gave rise to their invention. If we remembered these realities, we'd be moved to teach differently. There wouldn't be so many of us stuck teaching in the " it was good enough for me" mode.

Cris Torvani is clear that it isn't good enough, and it wasn't good enough. She came to this realization early on and approached a teacher for help in her senior year of high school. She asked what she should do if she read without understanding. He gave the standard, "try harder, just concentrate" reply.

You don't learn to swim by "trying harder"

If you're drowning and thrashing around in the water, will trying harder help you learn to swim? When you're confused and can't complete a math problem, will trying to do 25 more help? I think the answers to those questions are clear. Swimming requires certain steps put together with actual practice. Solving problems requires an understanding of purpose and steps to reach a solution.

Why should reading and comprehension be any different? Why is understanding treated like a mysterious gene that some of us have and others don't? Why are our students sold on the idea that they must accept their fates as either "resistive readers" or "word callers"? Have they learned their labels well by listening to us?

Torvani's students' descriptions of teacher behaviors that they have learned to rely upon hit me hard. Don't answer questions -- wait for teachers to just feed kids the answers they want back. Pay attention to teacher recaps that offer all you ever really needed to know in the first place.

Some "resisters" make it all the way through high school by just listening to other students and the teacher. Others act out and disrupt a process that they cannot easily join. We spend lots of time focusing on the disrupters, much of it on efforts to get them removed from our classes. How often do we really focus on why these kids are outside the process?

Do we examine our material and methods for bias that acts as a barrier to their comprehension? Do we make statements about how "reading should be taught in elementary school," to underscore our unwillingness to help them break out of their confusion?

What I did wrong

I worked hard on the first aspect of the problem -- the materials. I filled my room with text from different perspectives and cultures. I even provided material at all different levels of difficulty, but I didn't provide strategic lessons in reading comprehension or decoding.

I read to my kids and I gave them lots of opportunities to read together and alone, but I didn't read with them. As a science teacher, I didn't see guided reading as part of my job and I now see that it was a big hole in my instructional program. I didn't tell them they should learn elsewhere, but my practice sure sent that message.

When Torvani's kids asked her what they were going to do if they weren't going to do book reports, she told them, "we're going to study what good readers do, we're going to learn how to use thinking strategies."

Teaching thinking strategies was a big piece of my curriculum. I didn't teach from a text book. I used an inquiry-based approach, but was often frustrated by my students' lack of questions. They always wanted to do the hands-on activities and experiments, but they rarely wanted to talk about the real meaning of what we were doing. I wrestled with their lack of reflection and built in mechanical ways to require feedback in their journals, on lab reports, in discussions and through a host of other "techniques."

I struggled to build in student choice by having them choose their projects and their partners, and by using an I-Search approach to their research papers...but I know that I often caved in and told them what the desired answers were supposed to be.

I shortchanged my kids by not helping them more with their own reading and understanding. I vacillated back and forth between my belief that "less is more" and my concern that we needed to cover more of the curriculum.

While I wasn't content to just have kids spit back facts, I wasn't really teaching them how to understand either. I think I taught them some lessons about how I understood -- about my own process. My sharing helped some kids and it was a half-step closer in their own process, but I see now that it wasn't enough.

I couldn't read the tests for them. I couldn't think aloud for them in other classrooms, and if they couldn't transfer the knowledge, the test scores told the tale. I used to think that they just lacked confidence, but while I still see this as part of the problem, I now know it goes deeper.

My son, the frustrated high school teacher

My son is a high school teacher now. He stopped by on Friday night and he was discouraged by the results of a test he gave last week. He couldn't understand why so many kids had failed. He described a familiar scene, one in which students didn't even answer the matching question section correctly. He reasoned that if they had just read the descriptors they could have gotten most of these items right.

For example, the National Labor Relations Board should have been matched with workers or labor, agriculture with farming, etc. I felt badly for him. He's working hard. He's trying to connect. He wants to make a difference. He's offering lots of opportunities for access, lots of avenues, but the student traffic is light to nonexistent. They're not buying in.

I'm going to call him now and see if he's coming to dinner. We're going to talk about what Herbert Kohl calls "student disengagement" and what John Ogbu calls "cultural opposition," but we're also going to talk about reading comprehension and our responsibility to help our big kids reject the notions that you're either a member of the reading club or you're not, and that membership can only be applied for in elementary school.

[Editor's note: Deb is co-moderator of the new MiddleWeb listserve.]


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