By Anonymous
Filed Monday, February 20 at 10:23 AM
Much of the criticism of Open Court, etc., dwells on the fact that these approaches do not teach comprehension. As a child, I got comprehension. But reading was still a drudgery. Although I understood what I read, I hardly ever remembered any of it. Why? Because I was told to read certain things, to produce certain acceptable answers based on what I had read, to produce responses that fit specified formats (the much-dreaded book report), and had little to no personal connection to what I had read. This characterized the vast majority of my reading experience from K to grad school.
What was missing for me was the opportunity to connect reading to my own interests and to the world. This would have made the act of reading not simply decoding and not simply regurgitating what I had read. It would have made reading more explicitly about meaning-making. In my life after my formal education, reading has become an essential and critical part of my identity. Reading literally causes me to invent and reinvent myself on a regular basis. As I read, I engage my sense of self and my sense of purpose as I encounter what I already know and don't know, what I believe and don't believe, and what I aspire to.
Had this latter experience been part of my earlier experience as a student, who knows where I would be or who I would be now. Maybe I would have remembered more of what I had read in school. Maybe the hundreds and hundreds of dollars I invested in books I skimmed in college would have paid off. Hard to say. But what I can say for sure is that my experience was one of privilege and opportunity. I at least had the money to buy the books and was offered the opportunity to engage them, albeit in a superficial manner. For inner-city children who are "taught how to read" using a scripted program that aspires to nothing more than being able to sound out words, I can only begin to imagine how reading must occur to them. If reading was dull and meaningless to me, what is it like for them?
Peter Campbell
Missouri State Coordinator
Assessment Reform Network, The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest)
http://www.fairtest.org/arn.htm
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