Reading

“I’ll charge it up before I give it back.”

“I insist books are not absolutely dead things: they are as lively as those fabulous dragons’ teeth, and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.” –Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

What a fantastic metaphor (pun intended)! Books as lively as dragons’ teeth…

Buzzle.com with its tagline of “Intelligent Life on the Web” is not a surprising place to see an article on the Benefits of Reading Books.

My favorite benefit in their list is the second:

Reading is best for increasing our thinking ability. It contributes in making us more smart and increases our vocabulary and writing skills as well. Obviously, it’s during reading that we come across many new words which increase our knowledge strength. It’s almost like our brain is working out!

Reading as exercise. I like it. No, I adore it! But don’t be fooled. Reading does not equal actual body exercise. Else I would be one of the greatest weight lifters of all time.

While people might argue that you don’t need to read BOOKS to get the benefit from reading, the fact is that people read the net differently than they read books. So books give benefits that net reading doesn’t.

For discussions of net reading on my blog:
Online Reading Not as Good
What Are People Doing Online?

And this one on reading more:
Reading More Does NOT Equal Reading Better

Online Masters, a degree-touting site, has an article that lists the 40 Best for the Classroom.

I think calling them comic books is going outside the level I would teach. For instance, I wouldn’t teach Asterix (39) and TinTin (30) anywhere but a French classroom. However, there are others I would use.

Last year I attended a talk at SCMLA on Persepolis (1) and have seen several on Maus (2). Watchmen (3) and V for Vendetta (13) have been discussed various places, though I don’t think I’ve seen a teacher talking about them. I have heard Sandman (16) and American-Born Chinese (23) talked about for classroom work.

Even if you aren’t sure about the works, at least the list gives you some to look at.

A reading reform initiative succeeded in increasing reading skills, even though its administrative support was let go.

A five-year reform effort in San Diego schools succeeded in raising literacy levels for lagging elementary and middle school students by increasing the amount of time spent on reading, the authors find. Among the other ingredients for success: professional development for teachers, a comprehensive vision and execution by the school district—and considerable patience in waiting for results.

The Educated Guess says

It turns out that it was more successful in improving reading skills of elementary and middle school students than acknowledged at the time, though not in high school, where it was largely a failure.

In elementary and high school, more time helped. Not in high school. I wonder why not. Here’s one guess:

In elementary schools, an extended year for lowest achieving “focus schools” also brought up scores significantly. Less effective was an extended day reading program, in which first through ninth grade students lagging behind their peers were assigned three 90-minute periods each week of supervised reading before or after school.

But what worked in middle and elementary schools backfired in high school, with students assigned to double and triple length classes actually regressing in their scores. Betts and others speculated that high school students felt stigmatized or that some high school English teachers, used to teaching literature, disliked remediation instruction.

So what did they decide about it?

Betts and others concluded that extra classroom time for students who are behind in reading, combined with teacher training “can lead to meaningful gains in literacy.” An extended school year in middle school for students who are behind showed the most promise. The failure of the programs to take root in high school underscored the value of intensive intervention in elementary and middle school. “Early intervention to aid students who lag behind in reading might be far more effective than intervention in high school,” the study concluded.

I wonder what that means for college-level developmental reading.

I doubt it means the same thing, because students learning to read in college WANT to know how to read. It may take longer though, since younger students learn faster than older students.

Found because I read Joanne Jacobs on a regular basis.

An interesting experiment is going on in Ghana.

WSJ Blogs has an article on the nonprofit Worldreader’s lastest plan.

In the developing world, where literacy remains a giant challenge, might digital books be able to leapfrog their print counterparts?

That’s what a non-profit called Worldreader is trying to figure out with a series of trials in Ghana that involve giving students Amazon.com Kindles to read in school and at home.

I think I would like to see what comes of this.

The picture is from toc.oreilly.com.

Girl With a Book, by Pietro Antonio Rotar
Found because I read Happy Catholic, who got it from Art Inconnu.

The Humanities Go Google:

Like others itching to peer into Google’s unfinished telescope, Mr. Moretti and his colleagues here are honing their methods with home-grown prototypes. One lesson they’ve learned is you can’t do this humanities research the old way: like a monk, alone.

You need a team. To sort, interrogate, and interpret roughly 1,000 digital texts, scholars have brought together a data-mining gang drawn from the departments of English, history, and computer science. They’re the rare clique of humanities graduate students who work across disciplines and discuss programming languages over beer, an unlikely mix of “techies” and “fuzzies” with enough characters for a reality-TV show.

I am not sure what it means to the world of literary criticism.

In my life I have thought that it is impossible to have too many books. However, I believe that I now have too many books.

I have entire swathes of shelves which I have not read in twenty years.

And I have over 16 bookshelves full of books. (Over because the books are starting to perch on the top or beside bookshelves.)

I am trying to decide how to purge. I don’t want to get rid of books I might use to teach or write. But other than that, how do I decide?

The Chronicle’s fora offered this advice:

Whenever I move, I give my books the once-over. Did I like this book? Have I cracked it open in the last five years? Will I ever want to read it/reference it again? If I do need it again, wouldn’t it be easier or cheaper to buy/borrow/loan another copy or hire a grad student to look it up for me, as opposed to carrying it around with me like a turtle’s shell? Do I even REMEMBER reading this book?

If the answer to any of the above is “no”, out it goes.

Do you have a good way to cull books? I could really use some advice here.