YET ANOTHER LITERACY RANT
School Library Journal habitually fails both as journalism and industry publication. But despite the buffer of low expectation, this article made my head explode.
SLJ wholesale adopted the press release on a recent Canadian Council of Learning report, without challenge or other viewpoint. And it is a doozey of a report. CCL notes the vast reading fluency gap between male and female students, and that the boys already prefer comics. Its conclusion - entirely unsupported - is: librarians must provide MORE comic books for boys. But let us follow la rue de weasels.
"The [CCL] report says comics serve as an effective gateway to reading prose-based works and contribute to visual literacy, as well as the ability to understand and respond to a visual image. Comics also can help develop many of the same literacy skills as books, such as how to follow a sequence of events; connect narratives to the reader's own experiences, predict what will happen next, and interpret symbols.
Even before children are ready to read text, comic books can give them practice in understanding material printed on a page, tracking left to right and top to bottom, and inferring what happens between individual panels in a story, the report says, adding that thanks to their strong visual element, they're a [sic] used as teaching aids for second-language learners and students with learning difficulties."
([Sic] reflects where School Library Journal mistranscribed its wholesale adoption - here without quotation marks - of the CCL press release.)
This is no gateway, but peering through a path barred. "Visual literacy" is not reading. You aren't literate because you "interpret symbols," unless said symbols are written language. Comics are neither the same path or an intersecting road: they are a parallel track to nowhere. Watch what happens as kids age. I've worked for years with boys who are reluctant readers. An exclusive diet of comics virtually always indicates not preference but crutch; comics lead not to text but (absent active intervention) more comics.
Want data to support that anecdotal? One spandrel of the dreaded Renaissance Learning's Accelerated Reader ("AR") Program is copious data on what kids in fact have read. For the 2008-09 year, the AR database compiled the books read by 4.6 million kids. Third grade is when kids should move to chapter books, with sufficient fluency to read for content rather than decode. Among boys in third grade, Wimpy Kid series books were the first, second and third most popular reads. This is true again in fourth grade, with Captain Underpants (a comic with even fewer and more easily ignored words) books as an additional four of the top ten. Fifth grade: Wimpy Kid takes slots 1, 2 and 3. Sixth grade: Wimpy Kid in slots 1, 2 and 3. Among sixth-grade girls, in contrast, the three most-often read books were those in the Twilight series. Seventh grade boys rank Wimpy Kid at slots 2, 3 and 7. Eighth-grade boys: Wimpy Kid remains the fifth most-read. Most districts do not continue AR in high-school, so the data for grades 9-12 is relatively scant.
Does this data suggest that boys are springboarding from comics to text (of any kind)? Nope. Boys are clinging (sometimes hysterically) to comics like floats. They want to give the appearance of swimming, without expending effort. Many of these kids fear that they would sink in a book, which then becomes a self-fulfilling fact as they go longer without developing fluency.
SLJ appears these days the PR-arm of purveyors of comics to boys. Another article today heralds an elementary school librarian in San Diego selling the same message, indeed at Comic-Con. She would dilute even the most mundane aspects of reading, suggesting that "media specialists make access to comic books easier by letting students place their names on a sign-up sheet rather than go through the lengthier check-out process."
Like the transcontinental railroad, this parallel track is simultaneously being laid from the college end.
On Amazon, Wuthering Heights, Poe's stories and Frankenstein are marketed as "Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classics." Likewise, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, and War of the Worlds. We no longer learn to read fluently to enjoy complex writing and thought, which fluency reflects on tests. Rather, we avoid such writing entirely, and substitute test-prep flash-cards.
Why any SAT vocabulary testing at all? I fear a Wimpy SAT in my lifetime, with "literacy" entirely redefined. An acquaintance recently was instructed by her flight attendant to "turn off your books." We may already have done.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
I came up in my professional life as a hand drafter, standing at the board with a sheet of 34x22 paper, a set of pencils, an electric eraser and other tools, including a bookshelf full of peripheral reference works. We used slide rules. Over on the counter, locked down for office use was a primitive HP calculator for those so inclined. No one else had one, far too expensive. For the rest of us, logarithm and trig tables and hand calculations.
ReplyDeleteMaking a hand drawing has so many anticipations as you draw because you do not easily cut and paste as we do now using computers.
I have long wondered how the young drafters, comning up without the hand training and the side mathematical work are going to fare. Indeed, the way we work still, the dinosaurs I work among, we have no young trainees with us. They would not ever survive. Everyone I work among are old hand drafters. On the other hand, all the young ones are going somewhere. They are learning their own way. There are companies that approach this thing quite differently. I have a feeling I am being left behind. I don't mind.
Computers are a ubiquitous "aid" to labor. They have not decreased the work load. Indeed, I consider that I have two jobs now. I service the computer aided drafting technical requirements, one full time job when you add in data management, and I still perform all the hand drafting skills as well. We are expected to perform the office assistant tasks too. The assistants have become extraneous.
You are right. Literacy is changing its meaning.
Christopher, I shudder that no young drafters are gaining the advantage of your experience. I'm currently immersed in The Master and His Emissary (McGilchrist), which traces Western civilization for evidence that we have overdosed on the left hemisphere of the brain. We may indulge the left hemisphere's denial of reality and love of the man-made, but we lack its ability to sustain focus on details. Grocery baggers (previous hand-register checkers who also bagged) now are unable to fill a complete bag without zoning out. Any extrapolation to bridge-construction, brain-surgery and oil rigs terrifies.
ReplyDeleteFour thoughts. First, I admit to loving Captain Underpants books.
ReplyDeleteSecond, our daughter came close to a perfect reading SAT score two years ago with maybe just an hour or two of practice drills. Her secret was to largely ignore us over the years when we asked her to turn off the light or to get back to her homework. She is just a voracious reader.
Third, I love your images, like "the transcontinental railroad, this parallel track is simultaneously being laid from the college end." And (fourth), speaking of that other end, have you read this?
http://www.theonion.com/articles/girl-moved-to-tears-by-of-mice-and-men-cliffs-note,2029/
Voracious readers (yay B!) balance their own nutrition, and thus can harmlessly ingest jelly beans (i.e., Capt. U). I become rattled, however, when adults shill jelly beans as a complete meal to malnourished kids.
ReplyDeleteI ran across another dispiriting data-point, in the form of a used h.s. textbook published in 1957. It begins: "[i]n nearly every age there are voices decrying the state of society - the decline of morals and the dissipation of public spirit. The Roman Empire, particularly from the third to the fifth centuries, had its share of indigenous critics, but later historians' treatment of the period has given the views of these critics an uncommon weight and durability." In my lifetime, then, this book has climbed out of the reach of h.s. students and, I fear, that of many college students as well.
Thanks much for the Onion, which typically and brilliantly covers the ground. Isn't the Onion second to Shakespeare for quote-mining at this point? "I look forward to skimming her paper" exactly identifies the problem: adults themselves sedulously avoid reading.