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Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris | Burkins & Yaris

Learning Life Lessons from Books

Recently, the Huffington Post published an article titled 9 Life Lessons Everyone Can Learn from these Beloved Classic Children’s Books. In this article, Amanda Scherker included titles like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and noted poignant life lessons such as “Setting out on an adventure is thrilling, but coming home is even better” and “Don’t suppress your individuality for the sake of conformity” and “We give our lives meaning by helping others.” While we enjoyed reading through Scherker’s list of books and reflecting on how these books have impacted us as readers, we took special note that every book on Scherker’s list was fiction.
At a time when schools are making adjustments to align instruction to the Common Core, we have seen many incidents of over-adjustment.  We have visited schools where teachers long for the days “when they used to read fiction” because “these days,” they are only reading “informational text“ with students. When we hear this, we remind educators that the Common Core calls for a balanced diet of literary and informational text and cite one of the very same reasons that Scherker notes in her article as an important reason why we cannot forego fiction in our Language Arts curricula: the very best children’s books help us understand the world around us.
Reading fiction allows us to experience the world vicariously.  It allows us the opportunity to peer at life’s issues and events through multiple perspectives and try on an array of responses and personalities—all while nestled beneath the safety of our bed covers. There are many things that children will never have the opportunity to experience firsthand, yet, they long to understand. Reading fills this need.
To conclude, we wish to add a few more life lessons we have learned from children’s books and invite you to share your favorites as well!

3 Reasons Increased Standardized Testing is Truly a Great Thing

More and more, we are encountering schools where students are not only engaged in the traditional weeks of standardized testing across math, reading, writing, science, etc., but also in regular benchmark testing and test preparation that are aligned to the summative assessments. The influence of standardized testing is particularly prominent in the area of reading instruction. For example, Kim’s son’s fifth-grade class recently had a full week of practice testing where the practice was thoughtfully designed to replicate the actual assessments the students will take in May. This means that all the routines and procedures, including the amount of time allotted, were factored into the rehearsal. You may find it surprising that we see a number of benefits to such increases in standardized testing and all the supporting standardized preparation.

Reason #1: Children’s books are expensive. Using excellent children’s literature to teach children to read and write requires that schools research and purchase excellent literature. As time spent testing and preparing to test expands, hopefully, it will push children’s literature right out of classrooms. This will free up more money for practice test materials, while eliminating the need for school libraries. Focusing time and money resources around testing promises that children will score better on tests, which means that they will know more about reading and writing.

Reason #2: Now, teachers have to spend a lot of time getting to know the individual students in their classrooms. They have to differentiate instruction based on the needs of their students. Student skill levels vary broadly and it is time-consuming and challenging for teachers to modify each lesson to meet the needs of every child. Why in the world aren’t more teachers–who know the time it takes to plan excellent lessons that differentiate support for varying student needs–thrilled that more and more instructional time is dedicated to test practice, which utilizes one-size-fits-all materials and requires little (if any) planning from them? If standardized testing and the surrounding preparation continue to expand, students will have truly equal learning opportunities and teachers won’t have to know their students or plan for instruction at all. It’s a win-win.

Reason #3: Most importantly, the long range implications of increased testing promise us all a better future. By standardizing instruction through standardized testing, we can finally standardize children. By narrowing the ideas we expose them to, we can narrow the things children think about and, subsequently, narrow their actions. Children who conform are more likely to grow up to be adults who conform. Imagine a world where there are no random, wild ideas causing disruptive public debate. Imagine a world where no one breaks any laws because everyone thinks and acts the very same way. We are on our way to the kind of conformity that only the most creative of dictators has ever imagined.