Hillgrove SSP Action: Increase critical reading skills across the curriculum.
Some ideas of things we can do: Get excited about reading! And books! I’ve linked an article (featuring Neil Gaiman), you can read it or watch the speech. It is not short but it is powerful and definitely worth the time . I’ve added some excerpts as a preview. Advertise it. There will be an “I read” card placed in your mailbox. Post it somewhere prominent. Let’s pass on the message to the students that reading is important. Discuss it with your students. There will also be a “what I am reading” page in your mailbox. Post it on your classroom door for all students to see. Or post it in your class. Just post it! There are some whole schools that are using this approach and some individual teachers doing it now here at Hillgrove. When students see what you are reading they will start conversations with you about books. How cool would that be? We’d love to help ~ if you email us your book title we will deliver you a color print of the book cover that you can tape on your page. | Neil Gaiman lecture: Reading and obligation (click to open full article) I want to talk about what reading does. What it's good for. I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons - a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth - how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten and eleven year olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure. It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction. Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end... ...that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. _________________ I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved of Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed? It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls. _________________ Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood. |
READ. @ your library.