Reading: Up or Down?

Give a child today the option of reading or playing the latest viedo game and which ones do you think they'll pick? Reading takes time-time to absorb the ideas that the writer is trying to convey. To form a mental picture of the story which can take you to places that no viedo game can. Reading develops critical thinking skills that help the child devlop personality which in turn helps build social skills needed to interact with his peers. Viedo games take away those skills and instead leave the child socialy isolated as he/she retreats into a fantasy world of death and destruction.You may be able to best Ghost Squadron, Doom and become king of the video hill, but if you can't read and understand the syntax on the printed page, then you have lost the war before the battle has begun.

I strongly believe that READING is fundamental...the school is so taken up with the test scores that it seems the kids are a part of a" production line" . The school encourages high reading levels however not all schools have interesting reading incentive programs. I agree with the previous post that sports seems to be the way to go at some schools, but a child's education must be foremost and needs help from all of us ; parents,family,etc to make it work...learning does not only happen in the classroom, it's all around us!

A Parent's prospective...My children are so burned out from school, because all they do is cram all day for testing, they loose recess, specials, and even social studies...which apparently is not as important as reading and math, so that they can pass the test. They come home with 1 to 2 hours of homework, and 30 additional mins for reading. They have no time to be children anymore, let alone have time to want to learn and to enjoy learning...instead they are forced and demanded to learn. All they want to do when they get home is let their fustration out and go outside and run, afterall they have been cooped up all day. I am strong for education and I push my children hard, but they are just kids and they need a break too, this system is pushing our children over the edge.

No, it can't all be done at school. I am a middle and high school reading teacher. Those who excel in my classes actually READ the assigned 100 pages a week. They take part in class. They work-hard. Those who don't almost always do not have a parent backing me up at home. I send letter after letter home , week after week telling parents that the reading isn't completed and logged, that their students are not participating. Those are the kids whose test scores remain flat or even worse, drop as the the curriculum gets tougher. I stay after school, every day, often until 5:30 or 6:00 and offer the extra time to these kids;very few, if any most days stay and take advantage of the extra help. Moms and dads don't want to tell them they have to stay after until their grades improve.They don't want to "upset" them--or really, they don't want to parent. It is sad, so sad to see these kids fall behind day after day week after week-when they could be saved.

As an educator for close to 20 years, and the principal of a school. the answer is simple. Other countries place a value on education that US parents do not. You can have the most qualified teacher, certified administrators, best curriculum and textbooks, however if learning is not reinforced at home, none of these make a difference. Perhaps todays parents need to make their children spend less time in front of the idiot box (tv) and less time on the gossip box (cell phone) and more time reading their books and studying.

We can and should encourage students to read ANYTHING that interests them, just to get them to read. If you have a high school student comfortably reading picture books to elementary students because s/he is many grade levels behind in reading (and it happens a lot more than you think, for myriad reasons) we should applaud that. However, when that student goes into Science or Social Studies class, and the texts are too advanced for him or her to comprehend, we are doing a huge disservice to the student. Reading improvement programs used to be prevalent in schools (I remember the schools I attended had a "reading room" for students who were trying to improve their skills.) Now, I teach in Self Contained Special Education an inner city high school, and there is no reading program for my kids. Instead we are teaching them the same material (in a slightly different way) as the students who read at or above grade level. Would more reading at the early grades have helped? Perhaps. Would concentrated instruction on the rules of spelling, phonetic and phonemic awareness have helped? Probably. But the question now is, what can we do about it now?

It is shown that good readers differ from poor readers both in their ability to decode words and the amount of sight words they know. The best way to educate today's students is to take a balanced approach to reading instruction.

NOT THE LIBRARY, YA KNOW! Going to our nation's libraries would NOT benefit students who need to read better...we all know the agenda of the National Library Association (or whatever it is called) is to make any and all materials, regardless of content or age-appropriateness, to any and all ages. There is no way to learn to read in a library. As a teacher, I have seen firsthand how our children have been let down for years by our educational system. Hmmmmm, before the progressives removed phonics from our schools, we sure didn't seem to have much dyslexia or attention deficit disorder. Hmmmmm, maybe, no, absolutely for sure we could remedy the nation's reading dilemma with proper teaching of reading. Phonics first! Eliminate sight-reading and inventive spelling and unnecessary focusing on non-academics and do right by our children ~TODAY!

The love of reading and the personal drive to be proficient in reading and writing is not important to many school children and their families in our great country. Educators are absolutely swamped with nonacademic classroom requirements and continuous demands to better themselves and be superior instructors to disadvantaged children in our communities. Educators are required to meet the individual needs of diverse populations of students under poor conditions and do their best to instruct all.

Here goes my two cents: Let's concentrate on the very, very young. Instead of rewarding them for being cute and doing cute little projects, let's make sure they learn to read and write and do basic math before passing them to the next grade level. Let's go back to teaching the 3 Rs. I have taught in high school. Students come unprepared. At 14 their hormones are raging, peer pressure is high, they lack respect for authority, often because they do not respect their parents and other authority figures. Top all this with their inability to function in serious subjects (I won't mention the parents who are either too busy or just plain indifferent and/or highly critical of the system without contributing to help improve it) and friends, teachers struggle for results. Teachers are under so much pressure to raise the reading level of the students that unfortunately our beginning teachers become discouraged and leave the profession and go where they get respect and a better salary.
So, let's not allow students into high school until they have demonstrated a fair level of competency in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. High school teachers are pretty darn good (I saw them, believe me) but they are not magicians.

Here goes my two cents: Let's concentrate on the very, very young. Instead of rewarding them for being cute and doing cute little projects, let's make sure they learn to read and write and do basic math before passing them to the next grade level. Let's go back to teaching the 3 Rs. I have taught in high school. Students come unprepared. At 14 their hormones are raging, peer pressure is high, they lack respect for authority, often because they do not respect their parents and other authority figures. Top all this with their inability to function in serious subjects (I won't mention the parents who are either too busy or just plain indifferent and/or highly critical of the system without contributing to help improve it) and friends, teachers struggle for results. Teachers are under so much pressure to raise the reading level of the students that unfortunately our beginning teachers become discouraged and leave the profession and go where they get respect and a better salary.
So, let's not allow students into high school until they have demonstrated a fair level of competency in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. High school teachers are pretty darn good (I saw them, believe me) but they are not magicians.

Has anyone out there ever heard the word DYSLEXIA? Does anyone out there know upwards of 20% of all people are DYSLEXIC? Does anyone out there know that most teachers do not know what DYSLEXIA is let alone how to teach the DYSLEXIC person? Smart kids with poor math and reading scores!!! DYSLEXIA!!!!!

I think children (and adults for that matter) today have very short attention span. We used to buy records, then we downloaded songs and now we buy ringtones. No one sits still long enough to give reading a chance. I'd also like to take a shot at 'whole language' as a teaching technique. True story: My friend's 11 year old nephew was reading to his pre school cousins. He encountered a word he did not recognize and skipped it entirely. In my day, phoenics at least taught you to sound it out. He didn't know where to begin. I wish I could remember what word he stumbled on, but a 5th grader should have known it. The child attends a town in Connecticut with a reputation for great schools. Goes to show you, a good school alone won't get the job done.
PS. My husband is a Special Ed teacher in an inner city high school. Many of his students can't read at all, never mind at a HS level. The biggest problem no one is talking about? Truancy.

I read to my children daily, and limited the time they spent watching TV and/or playing video games to one hour per day, even on weekends. Despite that, none of my three children have a love of reading, but instead, became avid outdoor lovers. Now adults, they all have a good functional reading ability, but do not read for pleasure and sometimes have difficulty with complex technical writing.

It is too simplistic to blame the parents and/or the teachers. Our children are responding to an electronic society, and that may not be a bad thing. Those same children who can't read are talented in other areas, such as networking, graphics, and data sharing, that will be part of their future. Our world is past, my friends.

And, umm, just a parting thought...The educational professionals among you who are railing about parents who "just don't care" or are "lazy" should at least spell check your rants. When a statement purporting to have all the answers to our educational problems contains misspelled words and gramatical erros, the credibility of said statement is seriously compromised.

I was hired as an aide for the 3rd and 4th grade last year and have continued this year. It is in direct response to achieving standards for the NCLB. The teachers are SWAMPED. And exhausted. And punished, despite all efforts to help their students. It's NOT the teachers. It's the students not caring, because the parents don't care. They are too busy living the lifestyle. Kids can't read because they don't read for pleasure; why would they? If the book is good enough, it'll be made into a movie, right? And what kid is asking for a book for a gift? Even my kids are begging for a Wii. I love my job, but hate that I have to be here. Please don't blame the teachers; that's just perpetuating the problem. And the problem is the adults NOT leading the way in taking responsibility for poor performance.

As an English/Language Arts teacher I know how little my students read at home. Teachers are under an incredible amount of pressure to teach the standards and if you walked into the majoirty of classrooms you would see teachign and learning taking place. Unfortunately, I cannot go home with my students; it is the parents responsibility to work with their children at home and to make sure they are reading. It's easy to put the blame on others but education is built on three key components: the student, the teacher, AND the parent.

Parents do play a major role in education, but from my experience (I'm 24 y.o.) the public school systems have failed to provide a well-rounded education. I remember taking all the standardized tests and some of what we were tested on we never saw in the classroom. In high school I can probably count on one hand how many reading assignments we had. I'm still trying to catch up on the classics that I missed. I feel much of my K-12 education was "busy work." My parents spent a lot of time helping my brother and I with school work. I did well because I wanted to, my brother studied when my parents helped him, but he did nothing when he went to class. It was social time. Several people in my graduating class were passed from grade to grade because the teacher didn't want to deal with them again. When my parents started moving in high school, I went to five schools in different states. The only schools that were decent were in the upper-middle class areas, the middle/lower class areas were a joke. I've actually helped teach math to the other students in my class because our teacher was so bad, and I got in trouble for it! In my opinion, both teachers and parents are failing when it comes to education. Ok, that ended up being much longer than I anticipated, but the lack of education really riles me up.