Books books books Unit 2

Unit 2: Books, Books, Books 1

Unit 2: Books, Books, Books

I. Looks through the list of sayings about books. Choose 5 that you strongly agree or disagree with, or want to comment on, and share what you think with the class:

1. I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

(Groucho Marx)

2.A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. (Daniel J. Boorstein)

3.Never read a book through merely because you have begun it. (John Witherspoon)

4.Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested. (Francis Bacon)

5.If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. (Toni Morrison)

6.Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. (Charles W. Eliot)

7.A dirty book is rarely dusty. (Author Unknown)

8.It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. (Oscar Wilde)

9.Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. (Abraham Lincoln)

10.Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. (Jessamyn West)

11.TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book. (Author Unknown)

12.Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (Mark Twain)

13.Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life." (Helen Exley)

14.Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. (Henry Ward Beecher)

15."Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread. (François Mauriac)

16.To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. (Edmund Burke)

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17.Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. (John LeCarre)

18.Never judge a book by its movie. (J.W. Eagan)

19.He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. (Arabic Proverb)

20.No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. (Mary Wortley Montagu)

II.These questions are taken from a survey “What are your reading habits?” From a – u, find the suitable answers for each of the questions. Then give your own answers to the questions:

1.What is your favorite childhood book?

2.What are you reading right now?

3.Do you have an e-reader?

4.Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?

5.What is your reading comfort zone?

6.Can you read on the bus?

7.What is your favorite place to read?

8.Do you ever dog-ear books?

9.Do you ever write in the margins of your books?

10.What makes you love a book?

11.What genre do you rarely read but wish you did?

12.What is your favorite reading snack?

13.How often do you agree with critics about a book?

14.Who is your favorite poet?

15.What books are you most likely to bring on vacation?

16.Name a book that you could/would not finish.

17.What distracts you easily when you’re reading?

18.What is your favorite film adaptation of a novel?

19.What is the most disappointing film adaptation?

20.How often do you skim a book before reading it?

21.What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?

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a)A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. This is one of those terrific books that is just as good to read for adults as for children. Maybe better even.

b)Anything and everything. Usually fiction, though. I’m a sucker for big 800 page novels, which is really a pain for packing.

c)Big comfortable chair in my kitchen, big comfortable chair in my living room, bed, the deck, you name it.

d)For some reason that escapes me, I tried to read the first book in the dismally written Left Behind series. I might have gotten 20-30 pages into it before I wanted to burn it in the backyard.

e)Great characters, first of all. A story that keeps you wondering what’s going to happen next helps, too. I also love writers who have a command of the English language and use just that perfect word that keeps you going back and re-reading the sentence just for the sheer pleasure of it. Wallace Stegner is an example. His Angle of Repose is one of my all-time favorite books.

f)Hmmm. Perhaps the Mists of Avalon. I loved that book so much. The movie wasn’t bad, but it just didn’t live up to the book.

g)I don’t actually read a lot of poetry. One that’s currently on my nightstand is Wendell

Berry, I dip into it from time to time.

h)I don’t ride the bus, but I’d guess that my motion sickness issue would prevent that. I can’t read in the car, either.

i)I tend to not eat and read, but a glass of wine and some cheese wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.

j)I tend to read a lot of historical fiction recently. I got sucked into a bunch of Philippa

Gregory novels earlier this year. Somewhat fluffy, but fun. I like reading the “classics” as well. There are a surprising-to-me number of them that I’ve never read, so I’m trying to correct that. I also tend to buy and read a bunch of books by the same author. I’ll read one, get sucked in, and go out and buy everything they ever wrote.

k)I usually have at least one fiction and one non-fiction book going. Sometimes I get carried away and start a bunch of things, but I usually only am actively reading one or two.

l)I’m partway through Drums of Autumn, by Diana Gabaldon (Outlander series), and just started a biography of Catherine de Medici by Leonie Frieda.

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m)If I don’t like it, I don’t get to half way. Silly writing, boring characters, plot that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, all of those things will make me banish a book. I don’t give a book more than 40-50 pages if I don’t like it.

n)Lord of the Rings, easily. I loved the books, so was skeptical about the movies, but I’ve watched them all several times.

o)Noise. I like to have quiet when I read. It didn’t bother me much when I was younger, but it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. I think my ability to multi-task isn’t as good.

p)Nope. I’m a Luddite, I like the feel of a “real” book in my hands.

q)Not usually, but not because I’m opposed to it, I just don’t take the time to write notes, since I tend to get rid of books once I read them.

r)Not usually. I’ll glance at the first few paragraphs when I’m buying a book or checking it out at the library, but I generally read from beginning to end.

s)On occasion, when I don't have Levenger Page Points that I generally use.

t)Science fiction. I try to like it, but just don’t get into it much. I like sci-fi TV and movies, so I can’t explain that. I also wish I liked fantasy fiction more than I do. I love multi-book series, which is common in that genre, but I just can’t get into it much.

u)Usually, though on occasion I think “they” might have a screw loose. John Grisham comes to mind. Why those books hit the best seller list is beyond me.

III.Reading 1:

Boy's own story (by Susan Ormiston)

a)Pre-reading questions. Think of how boys' performance at school might be different from that of girls. Who do you think are better students – boys or girls? What subjects are boys usually better/worse at than girls? Can you explain these differences?

b)Read the text and say whether your predictions were correct. What issue does this text

address? What are the solutions suggested in the article?

A boy's day is like a comic strip, full of conquest and bravado. Every boy is a superhero. But ask most boys and they'll say they'd rather live the adventure than read about it.

This is the story of too many boys who don't read enough, and why passing it off as "boys will be boys" doesn't cut it.

Marc Dowd is 10. His biggest passion is Game Boy. He's spent hours at it and can tell you everything about the characters.

"First was Pokemon," he says. "Then came Digimon. Took out Pokemon. Pokemon was finished. Then Yu-Gi-Oh – Yu-Gi-Oh destroyed Digimon. And Pokemon was finished. Yu-Gi- Oh would slaughter them."

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But put a book in front of Marc and forget it.

He had everyone fooled for years. "First I tried to fake read just with my eyes, moving line to line," he says. "And that seemed to work, so I kept on doing that and then finally my teacher asked me to read and… yow!"

Nothing worked. His parents tried reading to him, they bought books, which gathered dust. Sue and Albert Dowd felt defeated.

"He was seven and I said he's still not reading and then eight and nine and then it was 'he's 10 and something's not right,'" Sue Dowd says.

Albert adds: "[The] worst part, I think I failed. I mean I had done everything I could think of. I liked to read."

But Marc, like most of his chums, would rather kick a ball, watch TV, even sleep. "I just thought books were useless," he says.

At 10, Marc was at risk of becoming part of a worrisome statistic: there are more boys than girls in trouble with literacy.

"It's mainly girls in the class that enjoy the reading. It's just not a boy habit to read," Marc says. Marc knew what parents have talked about for years. Many boys lag behind girls in reading and writing for a while. But somehow we assumed developmentally they'd all catch up.

Now it appears that's not so. Educators now say some boys are falling further behind in reading and writing. The gender gap in literacy is significant; it's growing, and some boys may never

catch up.

The Canadian Council of Education Ministers tracks these statistics.

Paul Cappon, the director general, says, "We've certainly seen over the last eight or nine years that, whereas girls have closed the gap with boys, because they were behind in math and science, boys have not closed the gap with girls. If anything, they've fallen slightly further behind [in reading] than they were nine to 10 years ago."

It's true of boys here in Canada and in other developed countries: gender influences reading, a revelation for Marc's parents.

"Apparently it's something to do with gender. And I never thought of it in those terms," Albert says.

"I'm hearing it, too," Sue says. "I'm talking to friends and associates and 'Yeah, you know my son's in high school and he's never reading, he's never picked up a book and he's not going to do it.' The girls are reading. The girls are up at night with the flashlight reading under the covers." Ironically it was the girls we were most worried about 10 years ago. They were falling behind boys in science or math.

Teachers and the women's movement came up with a cottage industry of strategies. Girls-only

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physics classes, math and science camps, and female role models aimed at closing that gap. That science-math gap was only half as big as the reading gap today with boys.

The efforts with girls worked. Today 30 per cent of engineering students at Canadian universities are young women. More women than men are applying to medical schools. The demographics are rapidly shifting. Only 10 years ago it was 50-50.

"Now we see that only 44 per cent of university students are men and only 40 per cent of graduates are men, which means 60 per cent of graduates are women. That change in half a generation is an enormous change," Cappon says.

"I can tell you that across the developed world, countries are looking very closely at this issue, trying to figure out strategies and innovative policies and approaches that will work for boys." You don't have to convince Doug Trimble. He's been a respected principal for 25 years in Hamilton, Ont.

This September, at Cecil B. Stirling elementary school, he launched his own "boys" strategy. "It's great what we've done for girls, but boys, we're not doing what we need to for boys in school," Trimble says. "[It's a] common fact. People can't argue. Can't debate that one."

In fact, last year at his school boys in Grade 6 scored only half what the girls did in reading. So, this September, Trimble offered kids in Grades 7 and 8, and their parents, a choice. Girls-only, boys-only or co-ed classes. Surprisingly, the single-gender classes were most popular.

"We know that boys lag behind girls at age 13, 14. They're about three to four years behind in language development anyways. So to put those kids in the same classroom where they are language deficient to start with compared to the girls…that's why they clam up," Trimble says. The experiment is only a few months old but what do the kids think? We asked Grade 7s in the boys-only class to interview each other.

"I like that there's no girls and you can't be distracted," one boy says. "You get better marks and you can concentrate more."

Would you rather have girls in your class? the boy was asked. "No," he replied

"Do you still like girls?" "They're OK."

"What are your favourite subjects in school?" we asked. "Gym, computers and math," says one.

"Art and gym," answers a second.

"Gym, art and occasionally science," says a third.

Not surprisingly, English never makes the cut. How do you change that?

No one has the magic potion – except maybe Harry Potter.

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But at least this school is trying a few things. First they gave the boys a male teacher, something rare these days in elementary school. Mr. Thorne's kind of cool.

Dave Thorne tries to engage his boys with a book about them. The novel's called Brian's Winter. It's all about a boy in the wild using just his own wits to survive. Participation in English class is up.

Getting the boys to interact on the stories is a crucial step. "One thing the book hasn't talked about is his water supply with the lake frozen. How is he going to get his water?" Thorne asks. "What would you do?"

"Break the ice, collect it and boil it," one student replies.

Even with a story about bears and caves, it's tough to get a 13-year-old boy's attention. That's a fact. They're just active souls, always moving, which makes school and English literature a challenge.

"[For] girls, spelling, reading, writing is so easy for them. [They] just snap their fingers and read well. The same guy who was willing to take a risk a minute ago won't because there's a girl present," Trimble says.

Trimble's experiment with single-gender classes nudges against two decades of gender equity in education. So has there been any backlash?

"I've had maybe four anonymous phone calls, all from women, suggesting we're trying to put the girls back in the kitchen. 'Barefoot, back in the kitchen,' somebody actually said in one situation," Trimble says. "It's based on not having all the knowledge. Again, the key to our program is providing choice. We're not telling anybody they have to be in a certain classroom." "He wasn't interested in any of the Treasure Island-type books, you know, or Wind in the Willows I had grown up with and really enjoyed." Albert says.

Albert played his last card: a bribe. What parent hasn't tried that? He made a deal with Marc: every Saturday they'd go first to the bakery for a treat and then to the library. Brownies for books. Marc agreed.

That first Saturday at the public library, they met someone Dad now considers a hero: Joanne Schwartz, the children's librarian.

"Marc told me he picks up a book and he starts to read and the setup of the book with descriptive passages and so on puts him off," Schwartz says. "He just cannot maintain interest through the beginning of the book.

"He was very interested in adventure, that was an important aspect of a book for him. So with that in mind, we sort of wander over to the shelves and there are obvious writers that might fit the bill for him, keeping that in mind. He wants realistic fiction, he wants action-packed drama, so Eric Wilson writes very much with that kind of reader in mind.

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"From the first page, something dramatic happens. There's dialogue and off you go. So I chose a couple of books for him to take, just a couple. It worked. It clicked. It's what every librarian wants."

Six weeks later, Marc was reading a book a week, not the classics, but something. Treasure Island didn't cut it.

"I was so hung up…he had to read Treasure Island, the most famous children's book ever written that I read every three or four years over again. That wasn't going to do it. So, you know, I was a Treasure Island failure," Albert says.

"Now every week Marc writes a one-page book review for his dad on the series he loves by author Eric Wilson. "

Every Saturday, you'll find father and son at the library, Marc checking out his latest adventure, a warm brownie in his pocket, and Dad poring over, well, you guess.

For Marc there's no more faking it, and it's a huge relief.

"I used to think it's uncool but now I just read books. And on my list in my brain it's a cool thing to do," Marc says.

Did Albert ever worry that the intense focus on reading was going to turn Marc off books forever?

There was a real possibility of that," Albert says. "One of us was going to crack. It was either going to be him or me and I was pretty close to cracking. It got right down to the wire. I think we're all glad Marc's reading."

Just like the storybook promised, for this boy and his dad, a happy ending.

c)Read the text again and define the meaning of the words in bold.

d)Decide whether the following statements are true or false. Justify your choice.

1.A decade ago, girls did worse in math and science than boys.

2.The school authorities developed a plan of how to help girls catch up with boys in math and science.

3.Principle Trimble believes that the strategy used to help girls will work for the boys as well.

4.The hardest part of the experiment was to arouse boys' interest in English.

5.When boys started to read adventure books it became easy to get them involved in discussing the stories they read.

6.Trimble's experiment enjoyed unanimous support from both kids and parents.

7.Marc agreed to go to the library only if his father gave him money for that.

8.As it turned out, Marc didn't like reading because he was choosing the wrong books.

9.Though Marc eventually started to read books, he didn't change his attitude to reading.

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10.Albert was always sure that sooner or later Marc would grow to like reading; it was just a matter of time.

e) Answer the following questions:

1.How did Marc manage to fake his ability to read? Why did he do it?

2.How did the statistics in gender gap change over the last ten years?

3.What techniques for closing the gap were invented for girls? Were they different for boys? In what way? Which ones proved the most successful? Why? Why do you think the strategies that worked out for girls didn't work with boys?

4.Why did single-gender classes were such a success among boys? What subject was traditionally the least popular among boys? How was this problem solved?

5.Who and why opposed Trimble's experiment?

6.How did Albert finally manage to get his son start reading books? Who helped him?

7.Do we have similar gender gap problems in this country? Do you think the strategies used in Canada could be implemented in our classrooms? Why/Why not? What policies and innovations might help our kids become more interested in reading?

IV. Reading 2:

Will This Be on the Test (by Laura Miller)

a)Pre-reading questions. When you were in high school, did you read all the books from the reading list? What books impressed you the most? Have you reread any of the books from your high-school reading list? What books would you like to reread later?

Why?

Many of us search for a kinder, nobler social world than the one we encountered in high school, only to find the same petty intrigues over and over again. But one aspect of secondary education hardly anyone is in danger of revisiting is the reading list. This month, teenagers across the nation, under the orders of their teachers, crack open books that will offer them their first taste of serious critical reading, of puzzling out an author's theme and hunting the wily symbol. They might read ''Frankenstein'' or ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,'' and they will almost certainly be assigned ''The Great Gatsby'' -- those works they're likely to return to as adults. But they will also ponder novels they'll never forget but also never re-read, a category you could call the classroom classic; it's the kind of book that never seems

to shake off that fine layer of chalk dust.

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''Lord of the Flies,'' William Golding's 1954 story of British schoolboys going bad on a desert island, is the quintessential classroom classic. My (admittedly informal) survey of people ranging in age from their 20's to their 40's and from various states of the union revealed that all but one had read it for school. They suspect that they got from the book pretty much all it had to give, and in that they're probably right, I found upon returning to it. (Perigee will publish a 50thanniversary edition late next month.) That doesn't make ''Lord of the Flies'' a bad or weak novel - - it isn't. But it also isn't a particularly complex one. The murky, confusing stretches I recalled turned out to be long passages of landscape description that are indeed occasionally hard to follow, and the frightening parts -- that severed pig head chuckling at poor, feverish Simon and the refrain of ''Sharpen a stick at both ends'' -- are still scary, but less enigmatically so. To young readers, Golding's message about the fundamental atavism of mankind seems ever so worldly; to an adult, the transparency of the message on the page pegs it as not quite for grown-ups.

The classroom classic is a literary hazelnut: you crack it open and it easily yields a round, whole meat; that's all there is, no shards or membranes to pick through. You can discuss its theme, but not debate it -- not, that is, beyond saying you agree or disagree, and what 13-year-old would presume to quarrel with the author of a published book? The meaning of Jay Gatsby's fate, and even of his beloved green light, is elusive, mercurial, subject to interpretation. The lots of Ralph, Piggy and Jack are not. Like Aesop's zoological fables, the classroom classic has a clear-cut moral, which is why ''Animal Farm'' rivals ''Lord of the Flies'' as the foremost exemplar of the genre. George Orwell's ''fairy story,'' published in 1945, is unabashed propaganda, though surely he would have flinched to see it used as such in American classrooms during the cold war. As a child, I regarded both books with a respectful dread that only now I recognize as claustrophobic. Like Piggy, Boxer the workhorse and his barnyard comrades are doomed, and the stories they inhabit close in on them with the inexorable indifference of a shrinking room in a horror movie.

When we first read them, we understood that being given books with such bleak endings was a compliment to our maturing sensibilities; finally we were ready for the hard stuff. Yet the determinism of the classroom classic is less tragic than pedagogical, another reason adults rarely go back to them. Golding salted ''Lord of the Flies'' with a few references to adults being no better than the savages his schoolboys become, but they're mere whispers compared to the blaring message we took from the novel: if adults weren't around to make us play by the rules, we'd surely kill each other.

Both ''Lord of the Flies'' and ''Animal Farm'' can be read as briefs against youthful utopianism, the idea that kids, unspoiled by the compromises and corruptions of adulthood, could do a better job of running things if they just got the chance. Golding argues that the flimsy edicts of civilization are all that protect us from our own hearts of darkness, and Orwell (if you read