9-10-15

The Pleasure of Work

Book Trailers / Commercials

Review:

Readicide = killing [the joy of] readingCauses: valuing test-takers > readers,

limiting authentic reading experiences, over- or under-teaching books

Antidotes: provide interesting books to read, provide time & place to read

Balance: 50% academic, 50% independent

Review:

Whole-class books

Small-group books

Individual books

(academic)

(independent)

(can go either way)

BOTH kinds of reading are important.

BOTH kinds of reading can be pleasurable.

From last week:•Read Between Shades of Gray•Make a list of questions/issues you’d like to address during class•Consider: How might you use this book as a whole-class novel?

How might you “start with the guided tour” before letting students take the “budget tour”?

What you do to set up the novel should depend on what you want to accomplish with the novel study.

What you do to set up the novel should depend on what you want to accomplish with the novel study.

If you don’t know WHY you’re teaching it, thendon’t try to teach it – just let the students read it.

What you do to set up the novel should depend on what you want to accomplish with the novel study.

If you don’t know WHY you’re teaching it

What you do to set up the novel should depend on what you want to accomplish with the novel study.

If you don’t know WHY you’re teaching itGOAL =

GOAL = WHAT you want to accomplish

If your goal is a destination, your lesson plans describe how to get there – how to reach that destination.

What you do to set up the novel should depend on what you want to accomplish with the novel study.

If you don’t know WHY you’re teaching itGOAL =

GOAL = WHAT you want to accomplish

If your goal is a destination, your lesson plans describe how to get there – how to reach that destination. Remember, there might be multiple ways to get there – more than one “right” way to reach your destination.

Unless you have a goal, you can’t tell whether (or how well) you reached it.

If your goal is a destination, your lesson plans describe how to get there – how to reach that destination.

ASSESSMENTS

LESSON PLANS

http://faculty.citadel.edu/thompson/552/lesson-plan-rubrics.pdf

Goals? Methods?

The Work of Pleasure;The Pleasure of Work

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.Haruki Murakami

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.Vera Nazarian

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.Author Unknown

There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.Maya Angelou

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.Oscar Wilde

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.Edward P. Morgan

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.Abraham Lincoln

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.Joseph Brodsky

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.Frederick Douglass

http://ebookfriendly.com/best-quotes-books-reading/

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/pleasure-of-reading

Two Sources of Pleasure

PLAY:There are cases where action is direct and immediate. It puts itself forth with no thought of anything beyond. It satisfies in and of itself. The end is the present activity, and so there is no gap in the mind between means and end. All play is of this immediate character.

WORK:A child engaged in making something with tools, say, a boat, may be just as immediately interested in what he is doing as if he were sailing the boat. He is not doing what he does for the mere sake of an external result—the boat—nor for the mere sake of sailing it later. The thought of the finished product and of the use to which it is to be put may come to his mind, but so as to enhance his immediate activity of construction.

John Dewey, qtd in Wilhelm & Smith 24

Ludic reading - state of blissful engagement that avid readers enter when consuming books for pleasure

Requirements:•reading ability•positive attitude to reading•an appropriate book

“If those antecedents are in place, a reader will choose to begin reading. Once a reader has begun reading, he or she pays a kind of effortless attention to the text (the continuing impulse to read), employing both automated reading skills and consciously controlled comprehension processes.”

Wilhelm & Smith 21

Two Kinds of Value

Instrumental - helps us accomplish something else(Reading is valuable because it helps the student develop reading and writing skills, improves vocabulary, improves comprehension, creates a positive attitude toward reading, and makes it more likely that the student will read for pleasure later in life.)

Intrinsic - on its own, without respect to anything else(Reading is valuable because it is a pleasurable activity.)

From Wilhelm & Smith:Our findings . . . [suggest] that children’s leisure reading is important for educational attainment and social mobility . . . and suggest that the mechanism for this is increased cognitive development. Once we controlled for the child’s test scores at age five and ten, the influence of the child’s own reading remained highly significant, suggesting that the positive link between leisure reading and cognitive outcomes is not purely due to more able children being more likely to read a lot, but that reading is actually linked to increased cognitive progress over time. From a policy perspective, this strongly supports the need to support and encourage children’s reading in their leisure time. (34)

Sullivan & Brown, “Social Inequalities in Cognitive Scores at Age 16: The Role of Reading”

Reasons students “like” a story:

• They like the surface features of the story.• They like the experience of reading the story.• They like the effects of the story.

Wilhelm & Smith conclude that “adolescents gravitate to texts whose surface features match an existing interest. Once they pick up those texts, they value the quality of the experience that they have while reading. The texts that they like the most are ones that stay with them in some way once the reading is over.”

More Pleasure

Intellectual pleasure:The pleasure of figuring things out

Social pleasure:Engaging with and learning about others

When can this pleasure occur?

Before reading

During reading

After reading

(ex: anticipating the next chapter or the next book in the series)(ex: “getting lost” in the book; escaping for a while(ex: thinking about the book or discussing it with friends)

To what extent was reading Between Shades of Gray pleasurable for you?

To what extent did the pleasure derive from play? from work? Why?

With a classmate, discuss the instrumental value and intrinsic value of reading Between Shades of Gray.

To what extent did you derive intellectual pleasure or social pleasure from reading and discussing the novel? When did this pleasure occur?

Increase vocabulary

Build endurance as a reader

Improve comprehension skills

Gain knowledge of history and culture

Learn about WWII politics & policies

Escape from stress of school (cheap therapy)

Anticipate next book about WWII

Compare fiction to actual events

What “incidental” learning did you gain from this week’s book?

Reading journals can disrupt reading.

World of the Narrative World of School

Next week:

Read Mexican White Boy.

List some possible goals for using it as a whole-class novel.

List some possible strategies (or lesson plans) to reach those goals, and ways to measure progress toward reaching them.