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Reading at Risk/Pop Culture as Security
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From: Meg Rothstein <811.52>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:30:01 -0500
Nancy Garden made a point about times changing and Drop Everything and Read or Sustained Silent Reading being dropped in schools.
I don't work in a school setting, so this is a personal opinion I've developed through listening to my friends who are school teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of school and even evening home time is now devoted to preparing students for mandatory test taking. No Child Left Behind, my right eye! It's heartbreaking for many educators and parents who have lost large chunks of time where they
*used* to be able to read aloud to their children. How ironic that, in order to prepare a child for a mandated test, certain aspects of literacy are threatened. I believe so strongly in public schools, so this is not meant as criticism of the schools *at all*. I am not, however, in favor of these tests
(or, rather, the anxiety producing, punitive quality of them), and their effects on teachers, kids, parents and on and on.
In the same email, Nancy Garden also said: "Who among us literary types haven't curled up with a less-than literary mystery or romance of a cold winter's evening, looking for escape from the problemmatic or mundane in our lives?"
That comment made me think about pop culture (in books, movies, etc.) functioning as a kind of security blanket for many people, especially series books. For example, (confession) I read every "Babysitters' Club" book in the main series. Every. Single. One. I guess it started because Liza (who sat next to me in class and was nice, pretty and popular and had twelve Cabbage Patch Kids, a new baby brother, and a cupboard with junk food at her house) ordered the first book through the Scholastic Book Club. My mother said no to junk food, expanding the family, and quantity buying of unaffordable, yarn-haired plastic dolls with butt tattoos-- but she relented on the BSC books. My interest in reading them never really waned, even after I had to switch desks because I was talking to Liza too much, even when I became far too old to be reading them. Then I began to "study them" (Right.) Those stories were what we want sometimes: safe, predictable happily-ever?ters served up as "popular culture". Ann M. Martin is versatile. She wrote those BSC books AND "A Corner of the Universe", "Belle Teal", etc. so I don't think of her as a "popular culture" author. I do think of BSC, and all the tie-ins, as "popular culture", though, and I'm sure a reader response of security was a partial aspect of the series' success.
Quoting Nancegar at aol.com:
Received on Wed 14 Jul 2004 10:30:01 AM CDT
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:30:01 -0500
Nancy Garden made a point about times changing and Drop Everything and Read or Sustained Silent Reading being dropped in schools.
I don't work in a school setting, so this is a personal opinion I've developed through listening to my friends who are school teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of school and even evening home time is now devoted to preparing students for mandatory test taking. No Child Left Behind, my right eye! It's heartbreaking for many educators and parents who have lost large chunks of time where they
*used* to be able to read aloud to their children. How ironic that, in order to prepare a child for a mandated test, certain aspects of literacy are threatened. I believe so strongly in public schools, so this is not meant as criticism of the schools *at all*. I am not, however, in favor of these tests
(or, rather, the anxiety producing, punitive quality of them), and their effects on teachers, kids, parents and on and on.
In the same email, Nancy Garden also said: "Who among us literary types haven't curled up with a less-than literary mystery or romance of a cold winter's evening, looking for escape from the problemmatic or mundane in our lives?"
That comment made me think about pop culture (in books, movies, etc.) functioning as a kind of security blanket for many people, especially series books. For example, (confession) I read every "Babysitters' Club" book in the main series. Every. Single. One. I guess it started because Liza (who sat next to me in class and was nice, pretty and popular and had twelve Cabbage Patch Kids, a new baby brother, and a cupboard with junk food at her house) ordered the first book through the Scholastic Book Club. My mother said no to junk food, expanding the family, and quantity buying of unaffordable, yarn-haired plastic dolls with butt tattoos-- but she relented on the BSC books. My interest in reading them never really waned, even after I had to switch desks because I was talking to Liza too much, even when I became far too old to be reading them. Then I began to "study them" (Right.) Those stories were what we want sometimes: safe, predictable happily-ever?ters served up as "popular culture". Ann M. Martin is versatile. She wrote those BSC books AND "A Corner of the Universe", "Belle Teal", etc. so I don't think of her as a "popular culture" author. I do think of BSC, and all the tie-ins, as "popular culture", though, and I'm sure a reader response of security was a partial aspect of the series' success.
Quoting Nancegar at aol.com:
Received on Wed 14 Jul 2004 10:30:01 AM CDT
