Monday, July 11, 2011

learning

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My six year old girl child, is learning how to read. I am generally letting her get on with it, not particularly concerned with how fast she is moving from illiterate to scholarship, but I am running a lot of interference with others who have more defined ideas about how much she should go about the business of learning to read.

However well-meaning yet unwanted the personalized ‘help’ with the reading is, the reading programs or ‘adventures in literacy’ as they sometimes bill themselves, have chiefly provoked my ire. Particularly suspect are summer reading programs hosted by libraries. We have steered clear of any reading done under the promise (or threat) or incentives. But now, as the summer reading program is once again underway at our public library and our reading of Lemony Snickett’s Series of Unfortunate Events has been interrupted by the sudden increase in juvenile patrons annoying borrowing the next book in the series out from under us, I am wondering if my reading program ire needs be provoked. Perhaps I have unfairly judged the programs?

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The reading programs offer sticker and free books as rewards for a certain amount of books read. This is what is called extrinsic motivation, otherwise known as a bribe. I have read somewhere (a suspicious phrase, I know, but bear with me) that all children have an internal drive to learn to read in the same way that they will learn to walk and talk. Given enough time, raw materials, opportunities to ask questions and literacy experiences (such as being read to out loud), most children will teach themselves to read. If, however, you offer an extrinsic reward (stickers and books) for a naturally intrinsically motivated activity (reading for pleasure and learning), the extrinsic motivation will replace the intrinsic. The focus on the shiny external reward murders the quiet inner drive. Eventually, in a reward based reading program, children will begin to read only for the prize. Reading will become a chore to do before they can move onto the good stuff. Consequently, after grade school, already doing the minimal amount of reading they can get away with, using Cliff Notes and illicit internet essays to grimly squeak through literature classes, they cease all reading except celebrity gossip and spend their free time watching reality television.

Now that I type it all out, I suspect the initial culprit for this theory may be John Holt with my own particular brand of paranoia overlaid. As a new parent and, I admit, a particularly insecure one, I tended to swallow these kinds of theories reflexively. My daughter was born with a congenital heart defect and I had what seemed to be a vast amount of time to sit in hospital chairs, watch her sleep fitfully, and to read great tracts of parenting literature. Feeling maudlin and frightened at the invasive medical start to my child’s life, I began to lean heavily upon the editorial content of Mothering Magazine, a ‘natural’ family monthly, from which the glossy pages with pictures of shiny, healthy babies soothed my troubled heart. When facing these sorts of life and death situations with your own child, there is no such thing as critical thinking. At that point, among the magazine pages, I was looking for something to believe in. Natural family living became my religion.

A discussion for another day, perhaps, is how attempting to parent ‘naturally’ has recreated some difficult and guilt soaked situations for our family, often pitting me against my husband, extended family and, sometimes, my children. It is through these struggles, however, that the theories that I so naively, unquestionably, melded to my synapses during my daughter’s infancy come into the light and reveal themselves as just one way of thinking and, given that life is not conducted in a sunny field of organic poppies, not necessarily the best way.

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When one of the things that I think I know about children becomes inconvenient, either by the way in which I want or must live my life or through embarrassingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, my latent reserves of critical thinking once again dryly grind back to work and I am able to shake off some of the more rigid and unforgiving rhetoric of the natural family movement.

And here we are at the actual question: Does extrinsic motivation destroy an innate love of reading?

I don’t know.

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But I do remember learning how to read myself. I was six years old, in grade one. There was a poster size chart on the wall with the names of my classmates in a column, a row of boxes beside each name. Inside each box was either a star or emptiness. Each star represented a book read or pretended to be read.

I recall encountering our first reader books, of ten or less words, and being rendered inarticulate with frustrated tears and misery. I believed I was never going to master this perversely difficult task, the connection between sound and character was elusive and devilishly irresolute. Each evening, slogging through the assigned reading, became known to me as the hour of torture. I hated reading.

Every day at school there were those who had completed their reading and those who had not. Each child with a finished book to hold up was given a coveted star sticker to place with their own hand on the chart. Before long, the poster visually revealed an intellectual hierarchy among the rows. Most names had only two or three stars attached, a few sad cases had none, and there were just a couple of names with a dozen or more bright shiny stars trailing behind like comets.

Looking at my two stars in the row directly beneath the name of that girl with the clipped tone and neatly combed hair who parked her colour coordinated pencils and novelty erasers in the shape of animals at the front by teacher and never got in trouble for playing rough games with the boys at recess. She who had a virtual universe of stars lined up stately behind her name. Under her and her stars, with my messy hair and boring pink erasers, each of my spaces sat empty as an accusation of idiocy.

I cannot say that this is the time that the world of knowledge suddenly became open and interesting to me, but it is when my intellectual competitiveness became strong enough to overcome the inertia of my general slackertude. It was that girl and her smug fucking stars that motivated me to push away my helpless tears and put my game face on.

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I worked harder than ever before to learn the sounds and words, memorizing and puzzling and fitting it all together into a finally coherent message about throwing balls and running dogs. Every night I sweat and cried still, yet I did keep picking away at the clues until I finally found myself not only reading the words but actually comprehending the message.

This is also when I realized that many of the readings given to children for study at school was vacuous fluff, but that is, also, a discussion for another day.

I do not think I ever caught up to Miss Snotty Stars but I know I managed to pack away quite a few books that year. Enough to earn me the title of a ‘smart girl’, an honour and accusation that haunts me to this day. Whatever else happened with my social aspirations, extrinsic motivation – stars and prestige - is what got me reading. So what has become of my intrinsic drive?

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Today I am a voracious and incorrigible reader. No matter how much I complain that I have no time for anything, I still manage to zip through two or more books a week. That is because I make room for reading the same way that I make room for bathroom breaks. It is just something that I have to do. Otherwise terrible things will happen. Nobody makes me read and, if I am truly honest, my house would be cleaner and my children neater if I took up television watching instead. Yet here I am, the readingest reader I know.

Perhaps I am an exception but I suspect that the case between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is not clear cut. Each works to encourage or undercut one another, given the proclivity of each person’s individual brain chemistry and general disposition towards authority, and it is best not to make definitive statements about the right or wrong way to learn to read.

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I have yet to sign up my daughter for the summer reading program. This year, given my girl’s dislike of pressure or score keeping, we will skip it, although when next June rolls around I will have to give it some serious thought. Perhaps she will enjoy keeping track of the number of books she had read and enjoy periodic reinforcement in the shape of a free book from a commercial enterprise such as Scholastic who sponsors such programs. It is just as likely that she will start to glean over the words and book to rack up the points in order to show up some other pint-sized Type-A.

The real question now is, what will you give me to find out?

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15 comments:

  1. Oh so interesting! I have a four year old who has taught herself to read and gets through a couple of little books each day. As a voracious reader myself (just like you, two-three books a week even if claiming that I am nuts-busy) I love watching her. My public library had a reading achivement programme when I was seven - you could get certificates and stickers for reading books and completing reading activities.

    Now, I wasn't so very sporty. Or good at singing. So these certificates were validation of my skill and passion - reading.

    I sometimes wonder if the structures/ programmes in place to support young readers (particularly those learning) imply that reading is a chore, not a passion?

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  2. Make-do Mum,

    No one gets a sticker for watching an hour of tv or for playing legos or building forts. Prizes (rewards, certificates, paychecks) are given for doing the unpleasant. Reading is a chore? That doesn't make sense to me. Maybe the library will start paying us to borrow books?

    Just between you and me, I reward each minute of housework with two minutes of reading ;)

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  3. For myself and my sisters, the library's summer reading program (similar to the one you described) was a way for us to get books our parents could not afford to buy us. We read incredible amounts (checking out 10+ books a week), and reveled in the free books. We still have some of them, secondhand donations and cheap paperbacks. Most are not high quality literature, but we didn't care. At ages 7-12, I read whatever was put in front of me. We had a positive experiance with summer reading programs, but we were already blessed with a family that loved to read, and with teachers who let us learn at our own pace, and encouraged our progress. My grade 1 teacher gave me the Little House on the Prairie series since I already could read when school started. She remains my favorite teacher, and the series one of my favorites as well.

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  4. I don't remember learning how to read. I was taught and learned in kindergarten. I too am and was a voracious reader, and was unimpressed with summer reading programs as it was just a nuisance to write down all the books I read to get a sticker. However my husband only read for the sake of the program and is very competition and extrinsically motivated and thus always argues with the theory that rewards are "bad".

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  5. But now I love librarything.com as I can keep track of all the books I read, because I have a tendency to forget if I have read a book or not. Sort of ironic.

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  6. As a reading teacher, I struggle with this daily. I find that I change sides nearly as often. Because I am at the middle school level, working with reluctant and struggling readers, I find that extrinsic motivation is sometimes the only way to get a child to read. The difficulty at this level is to get them to read the entire book (while hoping and praying that they fall in love with it and want to read more.) Otherwise, they just slog through what they have to in order to get the requirements completed.

    Class charts are out. I, too, had a similar experience and still recall the name of the stellar reading girl (in my case) just below my own name. Beating her became my first grade obsession. (I never did.) It did, however, launch me into the world of literacy in a most unexpected and pleasurable way. I have found limited success with personal, unposted in the classroom, reading charts and stickers or reading logs, depending on the child. Funny, even in middle school, they adore stickers.

    In the end, what works for some will not work for all. If we waited for the intrinsic motivation to kick in on kids who just don't heed its call, I think we'd see a much higher rate of failure. By the time children reach us in school, their families have shaped quite a bit of their personalities and drive to accomplish different tasks. Development is well under way. We are left to sculpt what we can.

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  7. Rachael, I still have every book I was ever given in school. One, I must of been in the earliest of grades, I won as a prize for a draw and inside I wrote my name along with the phrase 'is a winner', though misspelled. My house growing up had next to no books and I remember when I was finally old enough to be trusted to go the library by myself and not have to wait for someone to take me. Access was huge to me. In my children's book saturated world, maybe not so much. We have so many books they use them for building materials to make forts :D

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  8. Laura, I have had that creeping sensation several times of having been here before about 30 pages into a book. It's usually one with a flash cover that I particularly like but the story is meh. There is one I take out of the library every year or so for those reasons. Well, reading a hundred or more books a year, these things happen, though I am loathe to admit it.

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  9. QuiltGuppy, the next book on my shelf is 'Better Than Life' by Daniel Pennac. It is written by a parent with a passion for reading who is dismayed by his son's disinterest. Or so I gather. Have you read?

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  10. Both of my children have participated in the summer read program through the library and they also have one in the elementry shcool here as well. They both have had different experiences with learning to read- one much like your own and the other picked it up fairly easily. But wow they amount they read now it amazing even though they have had the external rewards they are both voracious readers for their age and I like to think ( giving myself a pat on the back) that their love of reading comes from seeing a parent model this love everyday ( or several times a day)

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  11. oh and I'll give you a shiny gold sticker just cause you tried

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  12. This post made me feel funny - when i was 4.5 i started school already a fluent reader. I taught myself at 3, my mother helped by sticking labels on everything when i asked her to, so i could "know all the things" as i put it. I was that girl with the million stickers against her name on the chart. I can still remember the cold shock of being told one day by a girl who was always subtly mean to me for no reason i could fathom, that i was a sticker-show-off and a stinky-face. Until that day the stickers had been to me yet another meaningless ritual in the myriad of meaningless rituals of the school day. Every day those who had read a book were told to stick a sticker on the chart, every day i went. But to me it was like every day at 11am and 1pm the teacher lined us up and took us to the toilet. I did not until that day notice that not everyone had the same number of stickers, purely because i suppose i was lost in my own little world as many 5 and 6 year olds are.

    My own 5yo is teaching herself to read just now. I was not aware of it until at bedtime a few weeks ago she pulled out Hop on Pop and told me "i'll be the Mama and you be the kid" and proceeded to read it to me. She begins school in 4 weeks and i'm assured that they don't "do" publicly visible sticker charts in her school.

    It's so funny to think that those stickers only succeeding in making everyone sad about reading, having them or not having them being an equally miserable state.

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  13. Bec,one thing that I have learnt since childhood, that has been heartbreakingly reinforced since becoming a parent is, no matter which way you turn, you always step in it.

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  14. My 5.5 yo daughter is in the process of learning to read. Some days she wants to learn "now", other days she just doesn't care. I remember hating to read as a child, until I got into high school and could pick books with more interesting stories. I almost failed my senior year because I would stay up till 2am reading instead of doing homework.
    I recently 'gave up' reading because I had felt like I was using it as a way to escape from my life. I also felt like I was neglecting my daughter. I craft now instead, but I am able to multitask better then when I read. But I really miss reading.
    Books are the only thing we will buy even when we are broke. Our local Boarders books store is going out of business which makes us really sad, but who can pass up books for 25%+ off?
    And I agree, no matter what you do, some days you just step in it. All that matters is that you just keep doing the best you can.

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  15. One nice thing about the newer reading programs that I have noticed is that they don't reinforce the number of books read, but rather the time spent reading. That could be audiobooks, looking at books, reading to yourself, having someone read to you or even with graphic wordless novels (shout out to Regis Faller's Polo series and Andy Runton's Owly!), comics, magazines, anything. This evens the playing field for kids at different reading levels.

    Like the reading teacher mentioned above, offering external motivation for things that we hope are intrinsically rewarding is tricky and could be a slippery slope. Hopefully some minor external motivators can lead kids to discover the intrinsic motivation and get some kids interested in reading who might have been loathe to pick up a book outside of school time.

    On another note, as a voracious reader with a bad memory I rely on Goodreads now to see if I've actually read a book, meant to read it or if it just looks familiar. I also get most of my book recommendations through Goodreads now.

    Blackbird

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