Are Teachers Really that Insecure?

While researching the District of Columbia Public Schools' new IMPACT teacher evaluation system, I came accross the following quote from Charlotte Danielson, whose work, Framework for Teachers was cited by the developers of IMPACT:

Educational psychologist Lee Shulman (2004) illustrated the complexity of teaching by comparing the fields of teaching and medicine. He noted that teachers have classrooms of 25–35 students, whereas doctors treat only a single patient at a time. Even when working with a reading group of 6–8 students, teachers are overseeing the decoding skills, comprehension, word attack,performance, and engagement of those students while simultaneously keeping tabs on the learning of the other two dozen students in the room. "The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity," Shulman pointed out, "would be in the emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster" (p. 258). He concluded that classroom teaching "is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced,and frightening activity that our species has ever invented" (p.504). http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/summer09/vol66/num09/A-Framework-for-Learning-to-Teach.aspx

This got me thinking, are teachers really that insecure? Must we be told that teaching is the hardest thing on the planet? I've taught in the lower grades (K-3rd) for twelve years, and I'm here to tell you that teaching little ones is alot more than wiping noses and zipping zippers. But I'd be exaggerating just a tad if I said it was the most complex, challenging, nuanced, demanding, and frightening activity ever invented by the human species.

A similar exaggeration came from one of my heros, Harry K. Wong. I love Harry and Rosemary Wong's classic book, The First Days of School: How to be an Effective Teacher, but always thought Harry's dedication was over the top:

Dedicated to my father and mother,
Who wanted me to be a brain surgeon.
I exceeded their expectations.
I became a scholar and a teacher.

-Harry K. Wong

In fairness, Harry is using hyperbole and that's fine. Nothing wrong with a bit of hyperbole, but if you listen to what other educators are saying, you can't tell if they're merely using hyperbole or if they really do have an unrealistic view of teaching. Exhibit A comes from Marion Brady, author of numerous articles and books on education, who wrote of teaching, "No other profession, not brain surgery, not rocket science, not politicking, is as difficult as is altering the images of reality in young minds." According to Brady, the "inherent complexity" of teaching is what attracts the best teachers to the field - not a love of children, not a desire to help others, not a passion for the subject matter. http://www.marionbrady.com/PrimerForReformers.pdf

And then there's the Superintendent of schools where I used to teach first grade. She recently told an assembly of several hundered teachers that "teaching really is rocket science." That teaching "really is rocket science" was the theme of her speech, which had to do with how critical every moment in the classroom is and how difficult the teacher's job is. But why would any teacher compare himself or herself to a rocket scientist?

Our work as teachers is important and hard and nobody is questioning that, so spare us the comparisons to brain surgery and rocket science. Or do we suffer from an inferiority complex? (My wife tells me that at her college,"bunny classes" was a common pejorative for education courses. Perhaps those who compare teaching to rocket science and brain surgery are raging against the idea that education courses are nothing more than "bunny classes?")

In 1999, the American Federation of Teachers published an article entitled, "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science: What Teachers of Reading Should Know and be Able to Do."
//http://www.aft.org/pdfs/teachers/rocketscience0304.pdf

That's embarrassing, frankly.

Failure is Information

"Failure is information." I'm going to remember that little gem the next time I have a child complain about getting the wrong answer in my classroom.

The quote comes from Carol Deiner, who as a graduate student in psychology worked with Carol Dweck, author of the book, Mindset, the New Psychology of Success. (2006) What Deiner and Dweck are saying is that we can view failure with a good or bad attitude. The bad attitude says something like, "I'm not smart enough to do this." The good says, "This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” Think Thomas Edison and his endless lightbulb experiments. (Okay they weren't endless, but don't be a nitwit - you know what I mean!) Failure is information.

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/dweck.html

According to Deiner and Dweck, our level of success depends on which of these two attitudes we take. If we view ourselves as not smart enough, not capable enough, or just inherently limited in some way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But if we view failure as information to use in solving a problem, our chances of ultimate success are so much the greater.

Dweck's book, Mindset, is listed as one of the sources consulted by the drafters of the District of Columbia Public School's new IMPACT teacher evaluation system. I am intrigued by Carol Dweck's research and intend to read her book, Mindset. I'll also be interested to see just how her research fits into the IMPACT system.

DC Public Schools Fire 241

The District of Columbia Public Schools, headed by Michelle Rhee, recently fired 241 teachers under its new teacher evaluation system known as "IMPACT" which is noteworthy in that, for the first time, teachers' job status is tied to students' test results. According to the Washington Post, 165 teachers were fired for poor evaluations under a new teacher evaluation program called "IMPACT." The remaining 89 teachers appear to have been fired over licensing issues. The Post notes that those fired for poor performance represent about 4% of the DC Public School system's 4,000 teachers. Rhee also announced that an additional 737 teachers were rated as "minimally effective" under the new IMPACT teacher evaluation system, and that they had one year to improve or be fired. Thus, according to Rhee, about 22.5% of teachers in the DC system was minimally effective or worse.

On his blog, "Inside DC Schools," Washington Post education reporter Bill Turque highlights some of the misgivings many people have with the firings and the new IMPACT system. He quoted one teacher who responded to a survey conducted by the teacher's union, "I think the only thing the IMPACT system has provided DCPS teachers with is an atmosphere of fear and rejection."

Turque quoted another teacher:

IMPACT is an out-of-touch and convoluted corporate construction which has no validity in the gritty reality of teaching in DC public schools," wrote another. "It seems designed by political aspirant edwonk self-aggrandizers who have little or no real teaching experience or any respect for the heroic job DCPS teachers do every day.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/2010/07/impacts_impact_fear_and_reject.html?sid=ST2010072303662

Of course, these are only two voices amid many on both sides. From what I've learned so far, I have major qualms with IMPACT. In my next series of posts I'll attempt to explore them in a fair and helpful manner.

Jaywalking with John Hinderaker (Part II)

I recently linked to a post by Powerline's John Hinderaker, in which he describes how an encounter with a young desk clerk at a gym left him wondering about the state of education in our country. Hinderaker had asked the clerk if she recognized the man on the $50 bill. She didn't. Then he asked her if she had ever heard of Ulysses Grant. She hadn't.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/07/026773.php

Hinderaker acted boldly in giving the young clerk a pop quiz in history, and so did Jay Leno in his "Jaywalking" routine. My hunch is that Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" routine made a lasting impression on many people as to the state of education in America. I have no idea whether Hinderaker was inspired by Jay's routine, but it wouldn't surprise me if he was. If we were to construct a timeline of major events in the public consciousness of education in America, Jay Leno's Jaywalking deserves to be there, just as suredly as Rudolf Flesch's 1955 book, Why Johnny Can't Read, the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk," by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. But I digress.

The very next day I had my own Jaywalking encounter, but unlike Hinderaker, I did nothing to initiate it. Meek and mild as I am, I am a milquetoast to all the young people who serve me at the restaurants and stores I visit. I would never set out to - in the lingo of today's pedagogists - conduct "a probe" into an unsuspecting person's knowledge of history, geography, or any academic area. Unlike Hinderaker, I wasn't going to be giving any pop quizzes. Nevertheless, I found myself confronted with "another sign of the apocalypse" as Hinderaker would put it.

I walked into a McDonald's in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. The computers had just crashed and the cash registers weren't working. A young lady took my order, but she wasn't sure what to do after that. Her supervisor told her to figure the cost with pen and paper. The employee looked flabbergasted. "I can't do that," she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. Her supervisor told her it was easy, that all she had to do was add the amounts and multiply by a decimal to get the tax. At that, the employee became very upset. "I don't know anything about decimals," she stammered. "I can't even add. I was in retard math." The young McDonald's employee was genuinely upset, almost beside herself, and I felt really bad for her. But I didn't ask her any questions. All I did was smile and wish her a nice day. If I wasn't such a wimp, I would have asked her whether she had a high school diploma.

Then again, that would have been pointless, as it's safe to assume she was in school long enough to have learned how to add. And the stories are legion of newly minted high school graduates who lack basic reading and math skills, never mind Ulysses Grant.

Jaywalking with John Hinderaker

The most memorable thing Jay Leno ever did on the Tonight Show, at least in my mind, was his Jaywalking routine. You probably remember it well. Jay would walk up to people on the street, generally young people in their teens or twenties, microphone in hand, and ask them simple questions about current events or history. We were supposed to laugh as these people would be stumped by such questions as, "What happened in 1776?" or "Who was President during World War II?" etc . . . It was all supposed to be just a gag, but I think Jay performed a valuable public service in opening people's eyes to the state of education in America.

Sometimes the people on the street were faking it. You could tell they knew the answer but wanted to go along with the routine so they pretended to be ignorant. My dad once told me about a time he saw a guy hypnotize people on stage. He'd asked for volunteers from the audience and after weeding out most of them, had a few saps left who would do anything. One guy barked like a dog, another pretended to be a houseplant. My dad thought they were all faking.

I can see how that would happen. Put yourself in their shoes. Nobody wants to be a wet blanket. Suppose you're at some performance. You raise your hand without thinking, now you're up on stage. Pretty soon you're one of the only one's left and it's up to you to pretend you're in a trance, or the act dies and no one has a good time. Same thing with Jay. You're walking down the street on a beautiful day. There's a commotion. "Wow, is that . . . " you say to yourself, "Jay Leno?" Next thing you know he's standing right in front of you. You can't believe you're actually face to face with Jay Leno himself! You're nervous, excited, everybody's laughing, he pops the question, "Who was this man?" he asks. [He shows you a portrait of Ben Franklin.] You know it's Ben Franklin, but you don't say that because it wouldn't be funny, so you say something else. (laugh, laugh)

That happened, but most of the time people weren't pretending to be so ignorant. For me at least, that's what was so disturbing and revealing about the Jaywalking routine. These people really didn't know what ocean is to the west of California, whose image is on our penny, or some such thing.

John Hinderaker of Powerlineblog.com has a recent post about his own Jaywalking experience. http://powerlineblog.com/ "Another Sign of the Apocalypse" Hinderaker tells about how he showed a $50 bill to a desk clerk at a local gym, asking her whose image it was on the bill. She didn't know, so he proceeded to tell her. "Do you know who he was?" Hinderaker asked. "You don't recall ever hearing of him?" he asked. She didn't. I have been reading Powerline for years, and I admire Hinderaker a great deal, but in this case it strikes me as rude what he did. I think he stepped over a boundary just as surely as though he'd asked her how much money she had in her pocket. "It's none of you're damn business!" could have been her rightful reply.

Whether or not Hinderaker overstepped his bounds, the point remains that the young clerk probably didn't have a clue as to who Ulysses Grant was. We can thank Jay Leno for helping to open our eyes to the crisis, and for propmting ordinary people like Hinderaker to take matters into their own hands and test the premise behind Jaywalking, which is that many of today's young people really are that ignorant.

www.kids: It's About Time

The July issue of National Review contains a great piece by Jonah Goldberg and Nick Schulz, in which they propose the creation of a new "top-level domain" reserved exclusively for material appropriate for children under the age of eighteen: www.kids.

http://article.nationalreview.com/437945/gated-or-x-rated/jonah-goldberg-nick-schulz

Currently there is a growing handful of top-level domains: .com, .gov, .edu, etc . . . . Goldberg and Shulz give a chilling (if you're a parent) account of just how easily a child can be exposed to harmful content on the Internet:

But even on YouTube things are not so safe for children. For example, one of the more infuriating gags is to re-dub the voice tracks on clips from children’s cartoons. A friend of the authors’ once let his very young daughter watch a YouTube clip of Thomas the Tank Engine while he worked at his desk nearby. He had to shut the computer off when one of the characters brought up oral sex. On another occasion, one of the authors tried to play a YouTube clip of the opening song from the old 1980s Transformers cartoon, only to have to pretend there was a technical problem when the profanity started to fly. Even browsing the undoctored content on YouTube, a child is merely a click or two away from something offensive or otherwise ill-suited for kids.

Goldberg and Shulz make the case for a children's domain persuasively. It's likely to draw support from everybody but the "frontier culture voluptuaries," who are always on high alert for any form of encroachment on the Internet's "Wild West" atmoshpere.

"Cyberspace," says Godberg and Shulz, "is a big place, with plenty of room for the Wild West saloon and the gated community." In discussing Apple's successful App Store approach, they relate an exchange between one such voluptuary and Apple CEO Steve Jobs:

By reserving the right to decide what third-party programs can be sold or used on their platforms, Apple has introduced a kind of zoning to the Internet. Ryan Tate, a tech blogger, wrote in a now-famous e-mail exchange with Jobs: “If [Bob]Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution?’ [sic] Revolutions are about freedom.”

. . . Jobs’s reply: “Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery.” And finally: “Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’.”

Tate was horrified. “I don’t want ‘freedom from porn,’” he complained. “Porn is just fine!”

To which Jobs replied, “You might care more about porn when you have kids . . .”

School Nurses on Splinter Removal: "No We Can't"

It seems to be standard practice in many schools that school nurses don't remove splinters, or even attempt to. The following account from a parent posted on webmd.com is illustrative:

DD1 got a splinter in her hand while playing at school yesterday. She told her teacher who sent her to the school nurse. The nurse cleaned her palm where the splinter was, put a band air on it and sent her home (with the splinter still inside her palm). When dd came home and told me she had a splinter and that she went to the nurse and got it fixed, I didn't worry too much. Later in the evening I took the band aid off to look at the wound and found the splinter still inside.

I took it out with a pair of tweezers - this is a feat because I'm the most squeamish person imaginable. I am not good at these kind of things. So, if I can do it, why couldn't the nurse do it?

http://forums.webmd.com/3/parenting-elementary-ages-exchange/forum/886/8

Now I'm not saying all splinters can be removed. If a splinter's in too deep, that's one thing. Nor would I expect, as one parent responded to the above entry, for a school nurse to physically restrain a child and wrestle a splinter out. But to not even try? I'll never forget the little boy in my own second grade class, Dalton, who came back from the office with a bandaid over his splinter. It was a fairly large splinter, just under the skin. Anyone with a pair of tweezers could have easily removed it. The little boy even stood patiently and bit his lip a time or two as I tried removing it with a pair of needle nosed pliers I'd fished out of my desk. As another parent noted on webmd.com, "Splinters hurt & can be quite bothersome. I know for my kids they complain continuously until it is removed."

Our school did not have a licensed nurse on staff. Instead, bandaids were administered by the attendance secretary, who was a loving, intelligent, and always helpful person who had raised a number of children. She would probably have been more than happy to remove Dalton's irritating splinter had she not been prevented by our District's policy. I have told Dalton's story to at least two licensed school nurses, and neither was surprised. If I remember correctly, and it's been a while, both of them told me they were prohibited from removing splinters.

Whenever someone asks me why I think our public schools are dysfunctional, I tell them the story of Dalton and his splinter. I also think of Little Loewy from Darkness at Noon. Little Loewy was a disillusioned Bolshevik, a true believer whose eyes were opened by the seemingly corrupt and counterproductive actions of his superiors in Moscow. The problem was, Little Loewy only thought of his communist ideals. He had no broader vision, no realpolitic. That's why he felt betrayed when Moscow began secretly shipping arms to Nazi Germany. In the story, he's just finished telling Rubashov, the protagonist, some bitter tale of woe about some incomprehensible thing the Party leaders in Moscow have done. "What are you telling me this for?" Rubashov asks. Little Loewy responds:

"Because it is instructive . . . because it is a typical example, I could tell you of hundreds of others. For years the best of us have been crushed in that way. The Party is becoming more and more fossilized. The Party has gout and vericose veins in every limb."

There is a parallel here. Just as Little Loewy couldn't understand the broader vision of realpolitic that led the party leaders in Moscow to do what they did, many parents and teachers don't understand why school nurses can't remove a splinter from a child's palm. But just like Little Loewy, we too lack the broader vision of our superiors. All we see is the face of the little hurting child, imploring us to do something about that splinter. We lack the broader vision, which is the fear of lawsuits that those who run our public schools are all too aware of.

Attorney Phillip K. Howard, author of Life Without Lawyers (2009) says that fear of lawsuits has upturned our society's "sense of balance on ordinary life choices."

Broward County decided to ban running in the playgrounds after it got a report showing that it had settled 189 playground awsuits in the prior five years. "To say 'no running' on the playground seems crazy," said a member of the Broward County School Board, "but your feelings change when you're in a closed-door meeting with lawyers."

The child with the splinter in his palm and the school board that feels compelled to ban running on the playground are of the same piece. What seems crazy is not crazy after all, esecially if you've been "reeducated" during a closed door session with lawywers. That's where you learn that you must remove all risk, no matter what the cost. "Sorry kid, I can't take that splinter out, and be sure you don't run on the playground when you get back out there."

A Plea for More Socialism with a Small but Welcome Nod to Reality

If you haven't visited the American Association of School Administrators website lately, you might not have seen a recent paper entitled, Healthier Students are Better Learners: A Missing Link in School Reforms to Close the Achievement Gap, written by Charles E. Basch and published by the Campaign for Educational Equity, Teacher’s College, Columbia University.
//http://www.equitycampaign.org/i/a/document/12557_EquityMattersVol6_Web03082010.pdf

The topic is "educationally relevant health disparities," which include asthma, skipping breakfast, vision, violence in schools, and physical activity. Urban minority students from impoverished areas tend to suffer from these issues to a greater degree than other students, accounting for part of the achievement gap observed in these students. Mr. Basch says all the things you'd expect from a champion of educational equity. For starters, he makes a plea for more bureaucracy and more regulation in our public schools. Don't believe me? Take asthma, one of the health risks that can negatively impact students. Mr. Basch says it's up to the schools to do something:

• have on file an asthma action plan for all students with known asthma
• use a variety of data sources to identify students with poorly controlled asthma
• provide intensive case management for students with poorly controlled asthma
• minimize asthma triggers in the school environment
• implement a policy to permit students to carry and self-administer asthma medications
• train school staff on recognizing and responding to severe asthma symptoms that require immediate action
• have a full-time registered nurse on staff at school
• provide parents and families of students with asthma information to increase their knowledge about asthma management

As any teacher can tell you, most of the above are currently being done in our public schools to one degree or another. Our public schools are generally clean and allergen free. Teachers are made aware of health issues such as asthma from reviewing the health information contained in the student's file. Conscientious teachers identify children with serious breathing issues and tell their parents. Teachers work with administrators, parents, and school nurses to allow children to use inhalants when necessary. All these things and more are being done every day in our public schools, as they have been for decades. But, according to Mr. Basch, the problem is that these efforts are "categorical and fragmented rather than strategic and coordinated."

In other words, our schools need to hire Asthma Awareness Specialists, Asthma Treatment Strategy Coordinators, and other asthma administrators to create more paperwork, conduct meetings, and make phone calls.

Alongside the plea that more bureacracy and regulation be heaped upon the schools, Basch is careful not to ask anything of students or parents. For example, skipping breakfast was identified as another "educationally relevant health disparity." As noted by Basch, the school breakfast program started as a pilot program in 1966 and became permanent in 1975. Since then, millions of children have participated in the program. Unfortunately, less than half of students currently enrolled in the free or reduced lunch program eat the school breakfast, even though they can get it for free or at a reduced price. Basch identifies two barriers to participation in the school breakfast program: 1) stigma associated with participation in a program intended for low income families; and 2) having to arrive at school early enough to eat breakfast.

To address the first problem, the stigma of participating in a program for low income families, Basch suggests making the free breakfast program universal. To address the second problem, having to arrive at school early enough to eat breakfast, he says that, "allowing students to eat breakfast in the classroom rather than the cafeteria would address the second.” Clearly, Basch's idea of educational equity does not involve personal responsibility.

Nevertheless, Basch does give a nod to reality that is most welcome. For years, teachers have been told to shut up about the problem of students who come to school in no condition to learn. Children who are chronically sleep deprived, from chaotic homes with drug use and criminal activity, among other factors, come to school unable to function in a classroom. But teachers have been told to shut up about that. At the school where I taught, the motto was "SUCCESS FOR ALL, NO EXCEPTIONS, NO EXCUSES!" And we are told that effective teaching can make anything happen in the classroom, no matter what's going on with the child at home.

So it was most welcome to see Mr. Basch come out against that lie in his paper:

No matter how well teachers are prepared to teach, no matter what accountability measures are put into place, no matter what governing structures are established for schools, educational progress will be profoundly limited if students are not motivated and able to learn.

We may not agree on the role of the schools or what their mission should be. But at least we agree on one thing: healthier students do learn better. It's what common sense educators have been saying for years.

More Safety Regulations?

CNN has the tragic story about a boat full of sightseers that collided with a barge in the Delaware River. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/09/pennsylvania.missing.boat/index.html?hpt=T2

Apparently the sightseeing boat had experienced some sort of malfunction and was drifting in the water without power at the time of the collision. Details are sketchy at this point, but the article noted that investigators are trying to determine how long the boat had been without power and whether the captain advised passengers to jump prior to the impact. The CNN article says that "the boat overturned and passengers were spilled into the water."

According to the article, Robert Sumwalt of the National Tranportation Safety Board commented on the need for more safety regulations:

"We want to find out what happened and issue safety regulations so that this does not happen again," said Sumwalt, who is vice chairman of the NTSB.

As we all know, accidents continue to happen despite safety regulations. It would be interesting to know what safety regulations, short of a complete ban on sightseeing vessels from the Delaware River, the NTSB might come up with.

Speed Reading Baloney

Took an Evelyn Wood speed reading course my senior year of high school. It was the only thing I ever did to prepare for college. Turned out to be useless. The only time it boosted my reading rate was when I was sitting in the speed reading class doing timed reading drills. When I bragged to a friend at school that I would soon be reading 600 - 900 words a minute, he just smiled at me and said, "Why would I ever want to do that? When I read something fine like The Brothers Karamazov I don't want to rush through it."

A couple days ago I got into a discussion with my brother-in-law, a computer engineering professor, who claimed speed reading works, even when reading Shakespeare, Tostoy, or Dickens. So I did a little research.

Cecil Adams http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/863/does-speed-reading-really-work summarized a study done by Marcel Just et al., published in The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension (1987). Marcel Just and his colleagues tested three groups: speed readers, normal readers, and "skimmers"--that is, people who were told to read rapidly but had no special training.

The researchers found that the speed readers read a little faster than the skimmers (700 WPM versus 600 WPM) and much faster than the normal readers (240 WPM). But the speed readers' comprehension was invariably worse, often a lot
worse, than that of the normal readers. What's more, the speed readers out-comprehended the skimmers only when asked general questions about easy material. When asked about details, or when reading difficult material, the skimmers and speed readers tested equally poorly.

Conclusion: speed reading might help you read TV cue cards faster, but for technical stuff, the kind S-R boosters want us to read faster so we can whomp the Japanese, it's pretty useless. Reading seems to be like losing weight--there's just no fast and easy way to do it. For more, see The Psychology of Reading and Language
Comprehension, Just et al., 1987.

Another article at msnbc.news dated March 2007, "Slow Down: Speed Reading is Bunk, Studies Say." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17705002/

When you read, your eyes act like spotlights on a stage. The construction of your eyes allows them only to focus on one small area on the page at a time, so the idea of speed reading is bunk, according to several studies published in the Journal of Vision this month. Although you might have the illusion that you
see the whole page, you can actually only see small groups of letters at the point where your eyes are focused. Only eight or 10 letters fit in this tiny window, called the visual span. The rest of the letters are just a blur, said Gordon Legge, a vision researcher at the University of Minnesota . . . Because of the constraints of the visual span, reading more than 300 words per minute is almost impossible.

"Speed reading is misleading," said Legge, whose research is published in the March issue of the Journal of Vision. "There's no magic there. You're just planting the little island of vision quickly through the page.”

According to its proponents, real speed reading, as opposed to skimming or “smart reading” (i.e. strategies intended to boost reading speed and accuracy through such pre-reading techniques as scanning the table of contents, index, headings, identifying specific information sought before reading, and ensuring optimal reading environment, etc . . .) invariably involves the elimination of subvocalization – that little voice in your head that a normal reader listens to when reading. As one proponent of speed reading put it, subvocalization acts “as a speed limit” on reading rate. Eliminate that little voice in your head and a person can read many times faster. It’s what we all do when we see a small collection of objects, we can tell how many there are without counting. It’s what we do when we see the word “CAR.” Proficient readers don’t subvocalize “C – A – R “ when they see that word. They recongnize the word “CAR” on sight just as they would recognize a familiar face. Teachers would call it a “sight word.” The question is, can you have whole paragraphs, if not whole pages, of sight words. Proponents of speed reading claim that you can be trained to read long passages of text without subvocalizing it.

The official Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics website describes the speed reading process this way: “. . . you are taught to see every word on the page, but to read for meaning not words. Speed is increased by reading many words at once...not by reading one of many words.” The Evelyn Wood site also claims this visual process will allow you to read “as fast as you can flip the page.” http://www.ewrd.com/ewrd/index.asp “Once you learn to read by sight only,” the Evelyn Wood site claims, “you will be able to read . . . whole ideas with each glance.” In describing “dynamic comprehension”, the trade name for the specific Evelyn Wood technique, the folks at the Evelyn Wood.com summed it up this way: “It is like watching movie.” (sic)

Of course, the word “CAR” is a whole idea, and any proficient reader can read that whole idea with a glance. There are also one or two whole ideas contained in the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Come to think of it, Hamlet’s soliloquy is but one whole idea. The Evelyn Wood method would have you read the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Hamlet’s soliloquy “by sight only.” As you read these works using her method, you will be reading “whole ideas with each glance.” In the words of the Evelyn Wood website, it will be like watching a movie.

But is reading War and Peace, The Iliad, or Les Miserables really like watching a movie? Can an average person trained in speed reading techniques zoom through them at three, four, or five times the average reading rate without a significant loss of comprehension? I don’t think so. In his 2010 book, Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov says of reading:

“Developing students’ ability to comprehend the full amount of information carried within the text relies on an “expressive ear” that can extract meaning from subtext, tone, register, innuendo, and analogy. Mature books rely even more heavily for their meaning on the portion of the argument carried by these subtextual elements. Unlocking those forms of meaning must be continually practiced and modeled even, and especially, in the later years. The best way to truly understand Shakespeare, experts will tell you, is to read it aloud.”

How, one might ask, would one fully comprehend tone “by sight only?” Even proponents of speed reading allow that speed reading is not the best way to approach complex or difficult material such as an article in a medical journal, a legal contract, or an article on some topic in mathematics.

As one speed reading proponent noted:

"Sub-vocalization is still important in the understanding of complex concepts but, it is not necessary and is undesirable for most of what we read. E-mail, magazine articles, and news articles simply do not require deep comprehension to understand. Subjects like mathematics, philosophy and complex concepts are not suited to speed reading techniques. Speed reading techniques are still useful in covering reviews and summaries of these topics."

The question remains: why would anyone want to zip through Shakespeare, Anna Karenina, or Bleak House or any other great work for that matter - unless they're bored? There are things in life that must be experienced at a slower pace in order to be fully appreciated. Imagine a person gulping down a bottle of the finest wine in one tilt, swallowing a gourmet meal with one or two chews, then zipping through every floor of the Louve in twenty minutes. Now that person claims to have appreciated each of those things – the wine, the gourmet meal, the Louve – as fully and completely as though he’d partaken of them in the conventional manner.

“At all events, whatever the cause, our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading. They have not learned how to read, nor do they have the expectation of delight or improvement from reading.” -Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Lines to a Brass Pot

"Oh, Pott! if you'd have known

How false she'd have grown,

When you heard the marriage-bells tinkle;

You'd have done then, I vow,

What you cannot help now,

And handed her over to W*****!"

* * *


"But I trust, sir," said Pott, "that I have never abused the enormous power I wield. I trust, sir, that I have never pointed the noble instrument which is placed in my hands, against the sacred bosom of private life, or the tender breast of individual reputation - I trust, sir, that I have devoted my energies to - to endeavors - humble they may be, humble I know they are - to instill those principles of - which -are--"

- The Pickwick Papers