If a kid writes to you and explains that they were “hartbroken” you’d probably think that they don’t have fantastic literacy skills.

And if they used a lower case “i” in every sentence they typed, you’d probably become even more suspect.

And if they spelled the word “can’t” without the apostrophe (i.e. cant), spelled snapped without the double “p” (i.e. snapped), and spelled characters with an i (i.e. charicters) – and they did everything I mentioned in the above commentary in the framework of about a paragraph, you might even suspect that they’ve never read an entire book in their entire life.

But then again, communicating in the modern world, with our modern tools, can often lead to a great many false presumptions, now can’t it? I was reminded of this earlier today when I read a piece of my fan mail.

Man i love this book i wish that alan would do a book on Mich as the main charecter and keep the story going because when i finished the book i like snaped back in to reality and i was like whoa these people didnt exist…the book dose not just reach out to you but you feel as if you known the charicters for a life time (excpecily if you read Hoopster and then Hip hop high school and then this) and when i put the book down and read over the back page and it said it was the last in the seires i was like..hartbroken i was like this cant be the end it just cant but if alan dosent make a new book featuring micha or a new person in the family im still kool with the ending in homeboyz it left me guessing the whole time awsome book a MUST READ!!!!!!!!!!!  I CANT STREES ENOUGH MUST READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This kid has read three of my books and wants me to write more in the series. That makes me feel good. However, I get communications like this ALL the time – the passion for the material combined with what I’ll simply refer to as “a lack of attention to written detail”. Truthfully, I am not sure if this young fan can do better. I mean I think he could. After all, if you’ve read three full YA novels and enjoyed having done so, well… that says something, doesn’t it?

But doesn’t this message to me also say something about how kids today don’t even feel the need to work in the Queen’s English? What matters to this young fan is that he expresses his passion. He wants his voice to be heard. That seems clear. And if I write him back and castigate him for the lack of “proper attention to written detail” in his message, he’s gonna think I’m the biggest bozo there is.

But if I let it slide, well… there’s an English teacher living inside of me that wants to huff about things like basic spelling, grammar and punctuation. But is this the place for me to do so?

Does zipping off a message over the web to an author whose work you like require one to “write with attention to detail”?

I’m at a loss as to the answer to this. Yes, I’m flattered. (I really do love that so many kids greatly like my books.) But on the other hand, should I be doing more to encourage fans to “step up their game”? My book Homeboyz has really opened up so many worlds to me.

With reading on my iPad, I am really digging it for non-fiction texts because often when I read NF, thoughts bubble up of people with whom I would like to share a thought, idea and so on.

The iPad makes it a one device “bounce over, shoot a quick email, copy and paste passages if I’d like, and then right back to my book” experience.

I love that.( Cause, like I said, when I read NF, I seem to think of other people to whom I’d like to share/connect these ideas to which I am being exposed.)

That’s an unexpected treat for me.

With fiction reading I rarely do that. I am far too immersed in the characters, story, narrative and so on.

NF though is about ideas – and since it taps a different part of my brain, I guess it also taps a different way that I process the information… and want – or do not want – to share it.

More and more ereading and print book reading are becoming apples and oranges.

eReading provides things like video embedded text, hyperlinking, ADD style reading (whereby, I read, check my email, read some more, check a sports score, read some more, buzz in on the news, read some more and so on.)

Print book reading is singular and if I want to multi-task, I need to put my book down.

Fiction doesn’t seem to trigger in me the desire to put my book down to do other things nearly as much as NF does.

Hmm… it’s interesting now that I think about it.

Either way, to remove judgement about either of these two means of reading seems like the best approach to me. One is not necessarily better than the other. (For a skilled reader, that is. For a kid with low literacy skills, learning to concentrate and focus and hold one’s attention for long stretches of time appears very critical to me… I am not willing to throw that skill under the bus for young adults at all! But does it have to be a printed book? Well, it certainly removes the temptation to use the “device” to bounce on over to something else if the device – by that I mean, the book – doesn’t offer any “bounce on over to” function. )

The world is changing right under our eyeballs. Of that there is no doubt.

I see it with my own eyes from the front of my classroom each and every day. Overall, the boys are getting their butts kicked by the girls – particularly when it comes to reading and literacy skills.

Of course, these are generalizations – I have boys that are wicked smart and truly great students… and girls that are just not stepping up whatsoever – but taken on the whole, there are more girls achieving at higher rates with greater regularity and consistency in school these days than there are young men.

And the data supports this assertion. Here’s a link to an article about the most recent report on how Boys Trailing Girls in Reading Across the States.

And so, should we hit the panic button?

Yes and no.

Yes because no matter what your gender, I couldn’t be more staunch in my belief about how kids need to own excellent literacy skills. Those who can read and write well are at a huge advantage over those who cannot in this world and I don’t care what tech invention Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, and so on comes up with… the need to be able to read and write well is not a skill that is disappearing anytime soon.

(Goodness, I hope that doesn’t one day make a list of the world’s dumbest predictions one day like, “Who wants to see talking movies?”)

So yes, boys need to elevate their reading performance. And their writing performance. Why? Because it ultimately relates directly to their thinking performance and the fact is, for those who do not own solid literacy skills, a glass ceiling exists.

A glass ceiling being lowered by things like Friedman’s The World is Flat recognition.

But no, we don’t need to panic. And why? Cause panic isn’t going to do anything. Doing something is going to do something.

• Accessible relevant reading material that wins the hearts and minds of boys must be better embraced as a classroom tool.
• Reading for pleasure has to be recognized as something that does not just occur, but rather, is cultivated in young people. (Expecting it to just bloom is silly – we need to garden.)
• Bludgeoning our lowest level boy readers with scripted curriculums, disengaging, watered-down, 5 pound textbooks and drill-n-kill materials has got to be kicked to the curb.
• Sending the message that good bubbling on bubble tests is the penultimate goal to which readers should aspire needs to be exorcised. Reading is not about being tested on reading.

All in all, we need to listen to our literacy light leaders. I mean it’s not like we do not know how to better win over more boy readers. We do know bhow. And there are a ton of people who do, indeed, provide workable answers to this problem. Thing is, we are not listening to them. Our best thinkers in the field of literacy are holding a map, a flashlight, a canteen of water and a supply pack of tools saying, “Follow me!” …and still, these “experts” are not being entrusted to guide us through the rough terrain us we currently face.

Boy readers are reachable.
Young men do like to read once the right material crosses their path.
We can do better.

But let’s not forget one thing, we oughtta be proud of our girls. A few decades ago they couldn’t even vote and now they are taking the boys out to the woodshed and kickin’ their butts.

Remember, in our effort to raise up our boys, let’s make sure we do not slow down our girls. They are to be saluted!

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is about to absolutely rock the Hollywood box office this weekend. And it has been a rip-roaring success in the world of book publishing. As a teacher, when I see this I know that I can leverage the power of an author who has found a way to reach real kids into classroom success for me and my kids.

Here’s how I do it.

First of all, I know that the state has hired me to teach the content standards. (They clearly say so.) And when they assess my student performance, the material they test is not text specific but rather, standards-based. This means that they are not going to be testing my kids on Kafka, Twain, and Joyce but rather on denotation vs. connotation, theme, tone and so on.

And hey, Diary of a Wimpy Kid uses all of the literary elements of denotation vs. connotation, theme, tone and so on. So why not use Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a text to teach the standards in my classroom?

I do.

Now before I get crucified as being someone that does not revere the GREAT BOOKS of human civilization – a canon blaster, if you will — please take a few things into consideration.

California is a state with 6.4 million students. And 1.6 million of them are English Language Learners. This means that I need to differentiate, accommodate and be responsive to the real literary needs of the students that are sitting in my class — all while still teaching the appropriate grade level content standards.

I am not sure if there is a more accessible book for English Language Learners out there right now than Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

-It’s funny. (And kids will wrestle with text when the reward is material that will make them laugh).
-There’s a lot of white space on the page. (Check the research on the value of that to a student with low literacy skills – especially when English is not their first language).
-It’s relevant and kids relate. (The bumbling, fumbling shenanigans of Greg allow students to see their own lives reflected directly in the text.)

And Diary of a Wimpy Kid (for those who want to take a moment to jump off their high horse of that books in school absolutely must be dense, erudite art) is a good read. Personally, I greatly enjoyed it because it’s an energetic, funny and page turner.

Plus, guess what? There’s a theme. (A few of them, in fact: 1) We learn from our mistakes. 2) Self-image is very important. 3) No one escapes problems in their life. 4) You’ve got to show initiative if you are going to get anywhere in this world.)

And there are examples of denotation vs. connotation.

And the text provides me examples of tone, perspective, hyperbole and on and on.

The same stuff that the standards ask me to teach.

Should Diary of a Wimpy Kid replace Mark Twain? Nope, not even close. But can it be used as a bridge to build capacity? Can it be used as a text to illuminate literary devices?

Can it be used as a vehicle to get 100% of your class to do ALL the assigned reading? (And how often do our classes do that? I mean “faking it” through books has become so ingrained in our culture that there’s a multi-million dollar industry to provide resources as to how to better fake it — Cliff’s Notes, Spark Notes, Pink Monkey and so on.)

Yes, I read Diary of a Wimpy Kid with my classes. And guess what? It was a home-run success and a great teaching tool.

And guess what else?

We had FUN!

Since when are fun and and learning mutually exclusive to one another?

But, don’t worry — keep using those 20th century tools to reach today’s 21rst century kids. After all I am sure Hollywood is going to race right out and make a movie of your classroom textbook any day this week.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid… it certainly can have it’s place in a classroom where students are achieving.

TIME magazine just published this story called Morning the Death of Handwriting. It made me realize that the more deeply I think about my job as a teacher, the more acutley aware I become that I really can’t say for sure that I am doing the right thing — or teaching the right things — in my classroom.

Sure, my state has standards — and our nation is currently developing national ones — but let’s be honest… they are a “best guess”.

No one really knows for sure what knowledge we need to impart to our kids in order to best prepare them for the demands of the future.

We can guess. We can speculate. We can use expert opinions to rationalize our reasons, but do we know? Do we really know?

We don’t. And I am not sure why we do not acknowledge this more openly. I think exposing our sense of “fallibility” would make us more compassionate towards one another as we discuss these matters and more willing to listen to people who have different opinions than the ones we ourselves currently have.

Because at the end of the day, these are all opinions — only opinions — that we are offering as to what will matter. Cause as I said, no one knows for sure.

For example, I teach Orwell. But I can’t say for sure that the impact of teaching Orwell creates a better future life for my students in a way that leaps over what I could have imparted should I have chosen to teach Jane Austen.

And while I make an effort to incorporate 21rst century digital literacy skills into my classroom, I can’t say that I’m not participating in the education of my kids in an area that’s a total waste because it will soon enough be obsolete due to somebody (probably a pimple-faced teen with a whole lotta Red Bull running through their veins) already figuring out a better means of accomplishing the same task in less time with more accuracy and insight.

I mean I teach MLA style. Is there not a point at which papers will simply be hyperlinked to their reference source so that I do not have to have my kids go through the process of typing last name, first name and so on?

Once, doctors believed in leeches and bleeding. Today we believe in slashing the arts in order to drill the “core”. Will history view us one day in the same manner?

No one knows. People may say they know, people may shout they know, people may drum up all sorts of intellectualized justifications for why they know.

But they don’t.

We’re all just doing the best we can and if we took a moment to take the bullhorns out of our mouths and tried to listen to other people’s points of view as heard through this perspective of understanding, “Hey, they really don’t know what they are talking about anyway” our educational dialogue in this country would be much more civil.

And less dogmatic. And less infuriating. Wouldn’t it? (I am only speculating — I don’t really know.)

But I do know that the folks who have PhD.’s — they don’t know. And that smart-mouthed kid in 3rd period. He just might know.

And which of those two thoughts is more disconcerting?

Education is a best guess business.

“Reading” is a more fractured experience than ever before. Simply put, there are different types, different means and different levels to it. And unfortunately, in our schools we are mistakenly conjoining conversations about reading things such as Les Miserables in with reading twitter, with reading the lifestyle page of the USA Today, with reading an email and with reading GQ magazine… as if reading is reading is reading.

And it’s not.

There are different types which require different styles and different skills because they have different objectives.

Moreover, the conversation many people in education are having about reading right now strikes me as if we are all-too-often talking about apples and oranges, almost as an agumentative tool. One person will salute the literacy skills requisite to reading the Huffinton Post and another will take umbrage with the comment on behalf of reading Crime and Punishment. Another speaks thoughtfully about the benefits of reading Ayn Rand and someone else will counter with the detriment that reading txt messaging is doing to student writing in the classroom.

Reading is fractured. Our conversation is not. This schism is giving me schisms.

Is it time for the implementation of a new reading lexicon?

Just when you think the bubble tests are over I get slammed with a bubble test that all my 9th grade students must take in order to “place them” in an appropriate 10th grade class.

70 questions. Passage upon passage of reading that is almost purposefully dry and needs a sense of prior knowledge of its historical context to appreciate… and what’s it going to show?

Zilch, if you ask me. I mean to give this kind of test to my kids right now is to beg them to simply Christmas tree the thing. Didn’t we just undergo a HUGE series of bubbles tests, the kind that shut down the entire school? And aren’t we but weeks away from the end of the year? And aren’t I about ragged about fighting with the higher-ups about the ridiculousness of these tests?

Are we over-testing? Geesh, we just got done with state tests, we we required to give district worksheet pre-tests as practice for the tests and now they want us to simply give these tests?

What the hell do they expect these tests to prove? Let me guess:

Our English Language Learners have low literacy skills. Check.
Our Gifted and Talented Kids overwhelmingly do not score in the “Highly Proficient” realm when standardized tests are given thus calling into question whether or not our “gifted” kids are really gifted. Check. (But if you know anything about G.A.T.E. one can be identified as G.A.T.E. as a result of aptitude in any number of modalities and just because a kid is wicked with visual puzzles doesn’t mean they are going to score off the charts in the grammar section of Bubbleville, U.S.A.)
Our district is struggling with how to do something to get the state off its back because we keep sliding lower and lower down the NCLB Dante Circle of Hell Scale since it seems we are a wee bit behind when it comes to having all of our kids be at “proficient level within the next 5 years” — so they are starting to turn the screws on us now. Check.
Our kids have absolutely no breaking point and if they do, we are going to find it so we know what not to do in the future. Check.
Our teachers? Oh they are just chimps-for-hire… it’s their job to simply do what they’re told. Check.

It’s freakin’ lunacy! And I stormed out of school ready to pop a blood vessel cause, of course, there was no notice given to me. There was no feedback sought about the sanity of this system. There was no input asked for whereby my opinion — or any other teacher’s — was courted to see how this might fly. I mean, what are we, chopped liver?

But these bubble tests were simply delivered to my door today with the mandate that they get administed so that kids could be properly placed in next year’s class sections.

Huh? Excuse me. A couple of questions? Are these tests the only criteria for their placement next year?
No answer.
If not, what weight do they hold?
No answer.
Are there other mitigating factors in determining who will be “placed” where?
No answer.
Who wrote this test?
A textbook company. That’s right, they simply copied it from one of the pre-packaged, corporate monsters that have their meathooks in our school’s wallets. Here’s question number 30.

The following question is not about the reading selection. Read and answer the question.

We borrow words as well as customs from other cultures. From the names of the Norse gods Odin, Thor, and Freya we get which words?
F) Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
G) origin, thirsty, frightened
H) alpha, beta, kappa
J) January, February, March

Like I said, this is just one of 70 questions. Anybody else think that there might be something wrong with this.
1) I taught absolutely NO Norse mythology this year.
2) Why do they use an F, G, H, J system. First of all, 99% of bubble tests use A,B,C, D and if you work with real kids, you know that to throw in F, G, H, J is to throw them for an unnecessary loop. Furthermore, why did they skip the letter I? Look at it, it goes F, G, H, J — it’s ridiculously and unnecessarily disconcerting.
3) Not even the teacher knows the answer. Burn me in the pyres of Odin but I don’t really have a freakin’ clue what the correct answer choice is — and I have a master’s degree in cross-cultural language arts. My 15 year old English Language Learners though, I am sure they are gonna nail this.
4) How much money did my school pay to this textbook company for these kind of resources again? And in light of the fact that a big percentage of our staff was laid off due to budget cuts, might we not be accused of financial imbecility?

Do I need to go on? About a thousand demoralizing questions popped up… and so, I left. I left school without even raising the issue.

Way too infuriating. Way to mindless. Way too cooked up in the ivory towers of people who do not really know what’s going on down on the ground floor. And no one even explained that we’d be giving this test to me face to face.

Then again, I can kinda see why? I mean would you want to be the one to tell me this is the program, now jump onboard and close your mouth please? That’s why they simply sent a student, an office T.A. with a pile of tests and answer sheets and absolutely no information at all so that if I dared to interrogate this kid, he’d legitamately know nothing.

Of course I snapped at him, “Who gave these to you?”

“I was just told to give these to you.”

“Who told you?”

“They did?”

“Who?”

“The front office.”

“Who?

“I dunno. They just told me to give you this.”

Yep, they sent a patsy!

Makes my blood boil. But of course I know where it came from. But that person got it from a person who is having the screws turned on them. And that person is having the screws turned on them. So in the midst of all this screw turning, stuff like this happens. “I mean we gotta do something, right?”

Aaarrggh!

And then, just when I thought all is lost, I came home to this email… and I calmed down.

Dear Mr. Sitomer,
I just received my copy of your newest book, The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez and felt compelled to write you to tell you not only how excited I am to read your newest book, but how much of an impact your books have had on hundreds of my students.
I am a middle school math and reading teacher in an low-income, high minority, industrial area of Denver, CO, called Commerce City. (Not much unlike the Commerce City in California.) I discovered your books 2 years ago when I was attempting to instruct quite possible the most reluctant readers on the planet. Since that time, I have purchased over twenty of your books and used them to convince hundreds of teenagers, especially boys, that reading in fact does not “suck.” Your stories more closely resemble my students’ lives and they are able to see themselves in the characters. I anticipate your new book will hit even closer to home for them.
I hope you continue to write for along time so that my students will always have something amazing to read.
Thank you for what you do,
Lacey S Taschdjian
Adams City Middle School
Commerce City, CO

Is it just me or is every teacher’s life one of mood swings from depression and I hate this shit! to Man, it’s great to do what I do, trying to help kids and other teachers… like every day of our professional lives?

Aaarrggh!! And to think that some people are on summer vacation and I am going through this right now. For those of us on staff still, we approaching the point of requiring medication.