Schwab's Relection Post

Unlike some people in our group, I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Bauerlein's book, "The Dumbest Generation". It helped me understand many things about my students and how they look at school and their own education. I don't necessarily feel that the author was overly negative but rather more concerned with the outcome of all the research that has been done on why students are the way they are. When "three out of four ACT-tested 2006 high school graduates who take a core curriculum are not prepared to take credit-bearing entry-level college courses with a reasonable chance of succeeding in those courses." (pg 110), something has to be remiss. So I created a short survey for my own students (ninth and tenth grade science students) to determine some of their own likes and dislikes in relation to reading and technology usage. I figured this would give me several key concepts to use as a topic of this post. What I originally thought was going to be my topic--Technology usage versus Reading--was soon changed when 60% of my students responded that they enjoyed reading for pleasure over playing a video game! So I dug a little deeper and analyzed all of their answers on the survey. I soon found a startling correlation to another topic in the book: the difference in the number and types of words used by readers versus students that do not enjoy reading. On page 130, the author states "A low-reading, high viewing childhood and adolescence prevent a person from handling relatively complicated texts, not just professional discourses but civic and cultural media...". Furthermore, "Education researchers have found that children raised in print-heavy households and those raised in print-poor households can arrive at school with gaps in their word inventories of several thousand words." When I read my students' answers to the survey questions, these statements popped into my head and it was if a lightbulb came on. I was seeing the results of many years of viewing habits in my students' answers! Most of the students that responded that they do not like to read did so in sentence fragments with misspelled words, even though they were asked to answer in complete sentences. They were also asked to list reasons why they do not like to read, not to just say it's boring. And they could not follow those directions. Here are a few sample answers, complete with spelling and grammarical errors.
1. boring, dont peak my intrest,
2. I never have I don't get In to books
3. It makes me tired
4. Reading isn't exciting, nothing happens, its really boring.
5. I don't like to read because in my opuinine {opinion?} it is a wast of mytime
And my favorite...
6. i think reading is Really Really Really Really boring

Compare those weak statements to those made by the self-professed readers:
1. Reading builds my imagination, helps my fluency, and encourages role playing.
2. I love reading because its really entertaining as well as beneficial to your brain. It can sort of take you to a different place.
3. I enjoy reading because its fun. You get to have this picture in your head and imagine what's going on. You get to be in your own little world.
4. Because it gives me ideas for my stories. The books I read are full of amazing new things, books are creative, and reading sparks my imagination.
5. Reading gives me something to do when I am bored. I can learn more about different people and how it was during certain times (1970's).
And my favorite.....
6. I like reading because you can go to a place you don't see in video games and you can relate to it at times and for me I have constant flashbacks of what happened in the book so I'm like making a movie in my head.

Even to the casual observer you can see the differences in the writing styles. The readers use bigger words (imagination, entertaining, flashbacks) and write in complete sentences. Their spelling is better and their word usage is more correct. And fewer of them use "really" as an adjective. But what troubled me most was that the readers seemed to have this ability to see pictures in their mind's eye when reading and the non-readers/gamers did not have this ability. Was this why they were drawn to video games, because they couldn't come up with their own images, so they rely on the game's images to entertain them? Is this due to differences in how the brain is "wired"? Are we programmed to be readers and non-readers? Or is it due to habits that are picked up when children are very young and impressionable? The research in the book was all after the fact: those that had high-viewing childhoods knew fewer words before they even entered kindergarten and they were never able to catch up to their peers that were raised in book friendly homes.
So giving a child a book as a gift is really helping them become better students. I don't think this comes as a surprise to any of us.