I just read a line from a teacher who said this (and oh, it’s so telling)…

I love my school, but this year I’m trying real hard to be positive. I’ve taught novels the past two years and am now being told I must adhere to the textbook curriculum because of low test scores. Wow! Boring textbook anthology and worksheets are going to help my students do better on a bubble test? ARGH!

For me, I wonder where the data is to prove that sticking to the “textbook curriculum” improves test scores? Has this data been published? If so, I’ve never seen it — and I look for it.

On the contrary, I’ve seen a host of stuff from IRA and NCTE coming out against scripted curriculum (not the same as textbook curriculum but most certainly a cousin) because, well, it doesn’t work. Actually, there’s even an argument that it’s proving to be detrimental.

So where’s the proof?

Is it too much to ask for the proof? I mean data, data, data is the mantra that gets drummed into our heads by so many of these “bean counter types” in our schools who think that kids are widgets and if you just press the right mold hard enough, their lives, brain, attitudes and skills will conform in a way that will serve our nation’s schools and society well.

So this year, I am simply going to ask one straightforward question when people come at me with with the, “We need to stick to the textbook curriculum to improve test scores”:

WHERE’S THE PROOF?

And actually, might it not be argued that a textbook curriculum is what has helped to land us where we are right now? I mean they’ve been at the forefront of the educational wheel for a few decades now, particularly in the math and science realm where our scores (internationally speaking) lag in a particularly “ouch, that hurts to see!” type of way.

Perhaps the textbook curriculums are the culprit in some way? After all, in a world where we are all being asked to take ownership and remain accountable, I gotta wonder, how are the textbooks accepting accountability for their shortcomings?

Or don’t they have any shortcomings?

(BTW, if they need my help in assisting them to identify a few of these areas, I’d be happy to help. For instance, how about price, size, weight, tepid material, a one-size-fits-all mentality, overstuffed, sanitized and oh yeah… lacking data-based proof that using these materials actually improves bubble sheet test scores, which are a silly way to measure student success in the first place, but that’s for another post.)

Does anybody read Alfie Kohn? Thomas Newkirk? Readicide? Nancy Atwell? I gotta stop typing now because writing posts like this bum me out. For every ten teachers forced to use a textbook curriculum in the Language Arts (to the exclusion of novels) I’d guess that, based on my own unofficial feedback, that at least 7 or 8 of them are frustrated with the materials and feel boxed in and aggravated… and worst of all, not as effective as they believe they could be if they were unshackled from the mandates of people who do not actually have to eat the food that they are asking other people to dine on themselves.

For those who say, “You must teach the textbook curriculum to the exclusion of novels,” I say, “Hey pal, you go do it first… and prove that it works, because all the best teachers I know use real books in the English Language Arts classroom.”

Okay, I am not saying the book is dead. No way. But reading is changing. It already has.

And this change will continue. And our schools MUST get on the bus if we are to serve the needs of our students in a manner that is authentic to the needs they will have over the course of the next few decades.

Responding to reading in schools is changing as well. After all, for a whole lot of years our schools have been almost Pavlovian about the manner by which we operate:

Red this book… write this essay… repeat.

Now our nation’s best teachers don’t do this — they always bring life to the classroom — but come on, we know that a whole lotta of American classrooms operate — or at least prior to the year 2000 — operated, very much in this manner… with the occasional speech/presentation mixed in to add some flavor, of course. (And don’t forget the bubble test! LOL.)

But I was just reading Thomas Newkirk’s book The School Essay Manifesto: Reclaiming the Essay for Students And Teachers (yes, that Thomas Newkirk… the man who wrote the quite popular new book Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones: Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting For) where Barry Lane says in the intro: “Newkirk’s basic hypothesis is that the school essay as we know it is an obsolete assignment that evolved out of the need for teachers and textbook companies to control student writing, organize student’s thoughts and more easily grade writing assignments.”

Wow, powerful stuff!

And this is why I say the book is dead. Because it no longer is the emperor-type ruler which it once was. Books are being forced to make space on the mountaintop.

It’s also why reading — and writing — as they exist in our schools (how we teach/what we teach) is changing. BECAUSE IT MUST! While we are doing some things well, we are also doing some things poorly and the advent of technology allows us to rid ourselves of what is stale and ineffective (prosperous as some of these “educational solutions” have been for some folks over the past few decades) and bring in a host of “new” tools that add to new abilities to our arsenal. Gunpowder changed warfare. The Steam engine changed transportation. Microprocessors have changed reading.

Fact is, there are new literacies out there — new ways of reading, new tools to use to read, new, new, new. I mean, as I type this right now, there is probably somebody inventing yet another way for me to interact with text of somehow. Truly, I never even knew what hyperlinking was when I earned my master’s degree. Now, well, it’s fundamental to my blogging because reading has changed and readers have changed right along with it.

So the book is dead. At least as the grand emperor, primary, if not sole, mechanism of all reading. I still do not know how comfortable I am with this idea, but just because I do not like the reality of something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Room has to be made at the top of the mountain for more than just dead tree books (which are the primary passion of my life. After all, I read them, I write them, I feed my family by them. Trust me, dead tree books are HUGE to me… and still I blog on a ning.)

Yep, the book is dead. But long live the book!!

I just got back from a day spent out at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. This is a gathering on the campus of UCLA where readers, writers, fans of the written word, students, the famed, unknowns, and bestselling authors from all over the country come to read, sign, chat about books, sell books, buy books and simply celebrate the written word. Not a couple of spinsters from Rhode Island, mind you, but the entire West Coast of the country seemed to be out there today. (Well over a hundred thousand people.) Packed — I mean PACKED — crowds with some of the most famous authors in the nation sitting side by side with absolute nobodies (yep, I was there… LOL!). All in all, probably over a million books available from self-published first timers to genuine literary legends, all of them gathered this weekend to celebrate… you guessed it… books.

It was rockin’!!

Especially because I got to meet S.E. Hinton today. I mean this is the author of The Outsiders, a book which people claim gave birth to the Young Adult novel. Let’s just say that without this genre of fiction, yours truly truly might not be yours truly.

But that wasn’t even the best moment for me. The best moment for me was that I brought my 2 year old daughter out there (this is her second time in attendance — we got a little streak going) and let her choose whatever she wanted. Her choice of titles today yielded an Eric Carle book. (Yep, he was out there today.) And right now, before she goes to bed tonight, we are reading The Very Busy Spider.

Me, I am gonna spend the night with a new title by Thomas Newkirk called Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. I hear the book is great.

And if does for me anywhere near what Eric Carle did for my little girl, consider me a lucky ducky.

Mark Twain once said about his demise, “Tales of my death are greatly exaggerated,” I say, “Fables about the death of reading are exceedingly hyperbolic.”

READING IS ALIVE IN AMERICA. Very much so. Matter of fact, I’d suggest that we are all reading more than we ever have before. Books have simply become a part of the reading pie and not the whole darn thing — yet folks are still drinking ‘em down.

And it looks like they will be for quite long time. Is the book sky really falling? Seems to me, not so much.