Readiside

This book was really interesting and actually something that I discussed with my mentor teacher this morning. He has just got back from his county wide meeting where all the English teachers get together in Whitman county and talk about what they are doing in their classrooms, and he was talking about how the Colfax teacher only required the middle schoolers to read 100 pages a quarter whereas he requires 400 pages a quarter of outside reading to be done for his class. He was questioning me on what I thought and so I pulled this book out of my bag actually and shared it with him. We went over all the statistics of how even just 30 minutes of reading for fun a day can improve a students test scores and their overall achievement in school by overwhelming numbers. So this brought up the question that was also thrown around in the book of why are teachers still teaching to these reading tests and using such a narrow curriculum when we know it isn't working? And why not encourage deeper reading and more reading for fun when we know that is a driving force behind student success?
One reason we talked about was how do you measure if the students are actually doing the reading? You can give book reports or quizzes or all kinds of things, but there are so many movies out there now and summaries on the internet that he was like how do I know if they are really doing the reading or not? It was an interesting point that I didn't really have an answer for, so if anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them! Plus, when so many assessments are added on, it goes back to that forced reading again that kids don't like to do. They want to read things that are interesting to them and if they aren't being tested on it, then it will be a pleasure thing rather than a homework thing.