Quick review of the New York Times essay this weekend on Accelerated Reader, a software that grades books so students can earn points for their out-of-class reading and score great literature: The horror.
Far More Reasoned Post-Sleep Post-Coffee Second Opinion: I'm still waiting for the West Coast Bureau to weigh in, but I can see how pedagogically, this could be a useful tool. It acknowledges that not all books are created equal and that the student who tackles JANE EYRE should get more credit than the student tackling I LIKE IT LIKE THAT: A GOSSIP GIRL NOVEL. But as the article points out, the criteria it uses are murky -- and probably not adaptable to an individual class' needs. Say for example you (as a hypothetical teacher) wanted your students to specifically read older books, so you could weight books before 1900 differently than contemporary literature. (Arbitrary criterion, but you see what I mean.) If you didn't want your students to be able to count the Harry Potter series for major points, you could "tell" the system to get stingy on those.
All that said, when I had classes that required free reading, the progress was usually measured either by books read or by pages read, and neither of those are necessarily any better ways to measure -- and I still measure my years in the former, if not the latter. In some classes, my English teachers would solve this problem by offering us a choice among 2 or 3 books for outside reading, and that's not necessarily a better system either. And in a longer view, assigning outside reading is very much a preoccupation for schools or school districts in which the majority of students have solid reading skills to begin with; a student body that lacks those skills might just get disheartened at how little its education is "worth," if it even got the chance to use a program like this.
Also, since this is the theme of the summer, I wish the author had input INFINITE JEST to see if it unlocked a secret scene like at the end of video games. (NERD.)
4 days ago
4 comments:
Accumulate enough points, and you can trade in your card for a free video game of your choice. And a new card.
My old summer reading program used to give out coupons for free Dilly Bars after you'd read a certain amount.
Whitnall Middle School used the Accelerated Reader, way back when I was in sixth grade! It was really horrible!
I read some really terrible books because I found them on the list and they had the number of points I needed for the quarter. (Meanwhile, higher quality books I had read on my own were not yet added to the list, because no one had yet bothered to write incredibly inane multiple choice questions for them.)
I have always been of the opinion that essays are a better way to judge whether a student has actually read a book and understood it: it also gives them the opportunity to practice saying interesting things about the book, instead of just practicing clicking bubbles on a computer.
Elizabeth, your input as usual is invaluable. I had no idea this program has been around for a while.
Ironically, the people like you who can effortlessly cheat the system are the ones who don't need it in the first place -- and it punishes you for picking outside the bubble. Oh, this modern world.
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