Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => Politics => Topic started by: Levant on September 24, 2013, 10:36:38 PM
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/19/new-york-librarian-fired-after-defending-child-who-dominated-reading/?intcmp=obinsite
A librarian in upstate New York believes she was fired over comments she made in support of a student who dominated a reading competition for five consecutive years
http://poststar.com/news/local/librarian-suggests-turning-the-page-on-longtime-reading-club-winner/article_bdbebbc6-0625-11e3-b6f4-0019bb2963f4.html
During a phone call Tuesday to Gandron, the library director said Tyler “hogs” the contest every year and he should “step aside.”
Gandron further told the reporter she planned to change the rules of the contest so that instead of giving prizes to the children who read the most books, she would draw names out of a hat and declare winners that way. She said she can’t now because Katie has come forward to the newspaper.
Winners chosen by drawing names out of a hat. That's how liberals would like it.
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Comment from the fired librarian:
“My feeling is you work, you get it. That’s just the way it is in anything. My granddaughter started working on track in grade school and ended up being a national champ. Should she have backed off and said, ‘No, somebody else should win?’ I told her (Gandron), but she said it’s not a contest, it’s the reading club and everybody should get a chance,” Casey said
I like this lady. She should be library director. With that attitude some of those kids might actually accomplish more in life than the library lottery.
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"Look, Ma! I'm thirty-second place winner!" (Said by a kid in a class of 31 kids.)
Everybody gets to be a winner, even if they put forth no effort. :facepalm:
Read a minumum of 10 books over the summer to qualify to attend a cake&coke party at the end? That's just 1 book a week! (Yeah, some of us were reading way above grade level back when we were that age.) The former daughter was bright but no outstanding scholar. She read at breakfast and dinner, on the throne, and in bed until I had threatened her with evil punishments at least twice. She also had more than one book going at any given time. She cranked through 3 or 4 books a week during the school year, and added 1 or 2 more per week during summer vacation. I'm not sure she would have added any additional effort if there was a prize at the end, unless it was a pony.
The former head librarian had no idea of how to encourage reading by young children. (But she did have a decent idea of how to stop scammers and cheats.) Instead of eliminating the top reader she should have tried to figure out how to get the other kids more motivated. Heck, a "Beat Tyler!" campaign might have worked (while still giving recognition to Tyler).
Kudos to Lita Casey for dropping the dime on the head librarian (who I will not dignify by using her name).
stay safe.
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"Look, Ma! I'm thirty-second place winner!" (Said by a kid in a class of 31 kids.)
This reminds me when my wife was teaching third grade, and one of her students told her that she was the student's 'fourth most-favorite teacher'. I had to count on my fingers: K, 1, 2, and 3 before I got it.
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Let kids read books they like, and many of them will become avid, if not voracious, readers. (And by books I don't mean comic books.) As a youngster, I used to read a lot of stuff like Tom Swift, Doc Savage, and the novels of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and John W. Campbell. In due course I added Teddy Roosevelt, Carl Akeley, and a host of other authors to my reading list; sometimes when we got an old bat running the checkout station at the library, she didn't want to let me check out books from the adult section (no, not THAT type of adult reading matter!!) because I was only a kid and should stick to the kiddie books, so my mother had to take them out on her card.
Elementary schools kill interest in reading by assigning cr@p books to students - few 12 year olds have any interest in things like Uncle Tom's Cabin or Vanity Fair, and not many more than half will appreciate Animal Farm unless the teacher draws them into it as a satire on the Bolshevik Revolution.
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Let kids read books they like, and many of them will become avid, if not voracious, readers.
My wife the teacher agrees with you. Reading/literacy/writing is her field of teaching expertise, and she is a big advocate of recreational reading to spark interest. In fact, she schedules her classes to allow for 20 minutes of 'free reading' where the kids can read anything they like. She says it is interesting how many kids now pull out their Kindles or iPads and read from them.
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The other day I had my kids read their "Accelerated Reader" books to our pets. My son read to the dog, and my daughter read to the chickens. (You laugh, but this is my system: they read twice silently by themselves, ask me about big words they do not know, and lastly out loud to a live audience with some animation, like they were giving a show. "Live" to be interpreted liberally. Brought their scores up significantly.)
My son read a book we bought for him of the appropriate reading level, a kid's version/translation of The Odyssey. My daughter's was one of the mediocre new-scrubbed PC-pablum inclusive titles on the mandatory reading list. Five minutes later she runs in from outside, hollering, "Daddy, the chickens ran away after I started reading!" I looked at the book and decided that the chickens may be bird brains, but they knew crap writing when they heard it. I told her to chase one chicken down, hold it under her arm and make it listen. And that this was a lesson by itself in that sometimes you have to put up with fools and foolish decisions.
Meanwhile, my son and dog are having a grand old time. Kid & dog-smiles all around. "Daddy, he told the cyclops his name was 'No Man.' Get it? Then they poked out his eye and the cyclops yelled to his friends in the other caves that 'No Man has attacked me!' and his friends said, 'If no man is hurting you, stop crying like a big baby!'" This followed by paralyzing guffaws. Throw in sword fights, sea voyages and a princess at the end and he ate that sucker up.
Quality counts. Stories & authors tested over hundreds or thousands of years beat most the new PC-plot affirmative-action-author batch every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
FTR, I just dug out all my old out-of-print Tom Swift books. My son will be ready for them next year.
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Let kids read books they like, and many of them will become avid, if not voracious, readers. (And by books I don't mean comic books.)
While I agree completely with the first part, the parenthetical statement is puzzling. I'm an avid reader who started with comic books as a kid. I then found a box of old Doc Savage books my dad had stashed away and that transitioned me to non-picture reading. If a kid wants to read comics let him. But try to help them find something else they enjoy (even if it's not something you'd particularly care for).
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While Robert has always read books (and I read books to him), he never really was a "reader". If he did 8-12 books a year that was about average, above and beyond "Required" school reading.
This summer I had to stand over him and say things like, "Look this is really hard for me. I'm proud of the fact that you are reading 5-10 books per week, but get your ass outside and play. Run around, find your friends, go get into trouble. You can read after dinner or when it's too dark to play outside. But this is your summer vacation, I don't want to hear any crap this winter about "I never got to go play or run around with my friends. Play during the day, read in the evening before bed. NOW GO!!!"
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While I agree completely with the first part, the parenthetical statement is puzzling. I'm an avid reader who started with comic books as a kid. I then found a box of old Doc Savage books my dad had stashed away and that transitioned me to non-picture reading. If a kid wants to read comics let him. But try to help them find something else they enjoy (even if it's not something you'd particularly care for).
Agreed. Comics got me started in reading AND enjoying visual art. I still read them regularly.
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i tutored guys in jail that couldn't read. i got books that interested them some it was sports others hunting or cars.
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we got an old bat running the checkout station at the library, she didn't want to let me check out books from the adult section./quote]
I had the same problem in 1951-52 in Detroit. My mother went to the library and got "special permission" for me to read adult books — primarily Indian lore.
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While I agree completely with the first part, the parenthetical statement is puzzling. I'm an avid reader who started with comic books as a kid. I then found a box of old Doc Savage books my dad had stashed away and that transitioned me to non-picture reading. If a kid wants to read comics let him. But try to help them find something else they enjoy (even if it's not something you'd particularly care for).
At some point a kid should outgrow comics. I found it disturbing to see some high school kids still reading comic books . . . and moving their lips as they struggled through the dialog.
There's more to the printed word than Superman and Batman.
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I was that kid.
My mom still relates the story about the 6th grade math teacher who told her, "I wish I could complain about this more often, but I can't get Liz to stop reading in class."
Middle School, the library was my zone. The school started this reading program in my 8th grade year. The library computers had a library of tests on a list of books. You accumulated points on each test you took and how well you scored. Every month, you took your points and "bought" whatever donated items the library got from the PTA.
I basically walked in, took anything that caught my eye, and never actually managed to use all my points.
I also wrote several new tests for the program (including one for Fallen Angels, which is a great book)
As far as I'm concern, the parents who's precious little darlings who can't keep up with Tyler should STFU and they should be embarressed for taking their dissatisfations with their own kids on the poor boy.
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While Robert has always read books (and I read books to him), he never really was a "reader". If he did 8-12 books a year that was about average, above and beyond "Required" school reading.
This summer I had to stand over him and say things like, "Look this is really hard for me. I'm proud of the fact that you are reading 5-10 books per week, but get your ass outside and play. Run around, find your friends, go get into trouble. You can read after dinner or when it's too dark to play outside. But this is your summer vacation, I don't want to hear any crap this winter about "I never got to go play or run around with my friends. Play during the day, read in the evening before bed. NOW GO!!!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p680aaJDxVA
At some point a kid should outgrow comics.
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I still read comics, actually I didn't even get into comics until a few years after high school. It's just another medium to tell a story. It's like a movie that you read. Really not any different than if you were to turn on subtitles on a movie.
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You can tell who on most Internet forums is a reader and who never was a reader. So many have terrible grammar and spelling skills - and are often college graduates. You learn more about spelling and grammar from reading good literature than a teacher can ever teach you.
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You can tell who on most Internet forums is a reader and who never was a reader. So many have terrible grammar and spelling skills - and are often college graduates. You learn more about spelling and grammar from reading good literature than a teacher can ever teach you.
Reading is EXACTLY is how I learned proper grammar and spelling.
You see I was much like BSL posted about above. I read a staggering amount of books when I was a kid.
The teachers started off teaching grammar and such just fine. Then as soon as we hit the higher grades they stopped teaching what we needed to know and started instead teaching us only how to pass a test so the standardized testing scores would be excellent.
Real knowledge? Screw that, testing is the only thing they need to know how to do.
To this day I cannot diagram a sentence. I cannot tell you what the *expletive deleted*ck "indirect object" means. Tell me to show you a "predicated adjective" and I will look at you like you are nuts. I know virtually nothing about what the terms defined at this link http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/ mean.
But I damn well know when a sentence is correct and when it is not 98% of the time. Thanks to reading. When I have access to a full size keyboard I am at my best as far as writing (a touchscreen phone however does makes me sound like an idiot a lot).
One of the things I hated about school was when the teacher would have sections of a book "read aloud" by randomly selected class members. You could really tell who could barely read and who was well read during those times, and it took forever for the barely able to read students to read a passage (you could feel the epochs age during these moments). It was extremely sad that from elementary school to high school there was virtually no change in reading ability for the majority of my classmates...and by that I mean most of them could barely read at a 4th grade level.
If you can read you can teach yourself a hell of a lot and absorb a lot of knowledge, especially since so much is freely available on the internet today. If you can barely read or cannot read you are screwed IMHO.
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http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/
I used to teach that stuff - but not as discrete factoids to be memorized and regurgitated on command. More of a "How did the author tell you what was happening and why it was happening. Not plot but the traffic signals to tell the reader when to stop, go, turn, yield, use yer durned turn signals!
Grew up on Warriner's http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/172117.Warriner_s_English_Grammar_and_Composition . For a kid being tyaught by corres[pondence courses it was possibly the cost complete, understandable and immediately useful text I ever had. If you can get the full set, try to get the Teacher's Edition - not for the answers but for the explanations of the answers. Because of Warriner's I could both understand transformational grammar http://grammar.about.com/od/tz/g/trangrammterm.htm and identify and explain every failure and fallacy. But diagraming sentences downwards instead of lengthwise on the chalkboard sure saved a lot of walking back and forth. =D
stay safe.
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You can tell who on most Internet forums is a reader and who never was a reader. So many have terrible grammar and spelling skills - and are often college graduates. You learn more about spelling and grammar from reading good literature than a teacher can ever teach you.
:rofl:
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:rofl:
I agree with Liz....have you ever read her posts?....
=D
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. . . To this day I cannot diagram a sentence. I cannot tell you what the *expletive deleted* "indirect object" means. Tell me to show you a "predicated adjective" and I will look at you like you are nuts. I know virtually nothing about what the terms defined at this link http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/ mean.
I remember around 7th grade the English teacher dipped into diagramming sentences for a couple of days; we simply couldn't make heads nor tails out of what he was trying to teach, so he finally gave up. General consensus is that it was just some nonsense "someone" came up with to justify their job or generate a consultant's fee.
Want to make an English teacher's head explode? Ask her to diagram a sentence from some "Great Work of Literature" like Shakespeare . . . or better yet, James Joyce.
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I do have to say that this was my first thought when I read the previous story:
"This lady will be fired, just as soon as they think people aren't watching."
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I remember around 7th grade the English teacher dipped into diagramming sentences for a couple of days; we simply couldn't make heads nor tails out of what he was trying to teach, so he finally gave up. General consensus is that it was just some nonsense "someone" came up with to justify their job or generate a consultant's fee.
Want to make an English teacher's head explode? Ask her to diagram a sentence from some "Great Work of Literature" like Shakespeare . . . or better yet, James Joyce.
Diagramming a sentence can be useful as it forces you to understand the relationship between the words and causes you to have a better understanding of the need for clarity in expression.
Of course, it takes a teacher who is capable of understanding the above and then being able to explain it. Knowing the content of education departments and the quality of their products, I'm betting the number of teachers who fit that criteria is fast approaching zero as the older teachers who actually DO know this retire.
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Back when our home schooled daughers were about 6 to 8 years old, we had a mid week bible study in our house.
It was embarassing how our twins could sound out long old testament names, and many of the adults just said "jishyswab" or something ;/
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Diagramming a sentence can be useful as it forces you to understand the relationship between the words and causes you to have a better understanding of the need for clarity in expression.
This. Not something you use every day, but very useful for how these word-bits are to be assembled.
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This. Not something you use every day, but very useful for how these word-bits are to be assembled.
Maybe. Tutoring a kid who is 3 yrs behind due to a bad public school. He is home schooled now. I can't help him with English class when they ask about 'verb' or 'relative' clauses. I don't know what they are. I used to know and was pretty good at it. but it's not something I have used since then.
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You can tell who on most Internet forums is a reader and who never was a reader. So many have terrible grammar and spelling skills - and are often college graduates. You learn more about spelling and grammar from reading good literature than a teacher can ever teach you.
+ 1 2 dat.
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This reminds me when my wife was teaching third grade, and one of her students told her that she was the student's 'fourth most-favorite teacher'. I had to count on my fingers: K, 1, 2, and 3 before I got it.
Coming form a third grader, I would interpret that to mean that every year, the student has had a "Most Favorite Teacher", and your wife was the fourth one.
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*shrug*
I was one of the mouth breathing nearly illiterate kids till third grade.
The school put me in a special class. I have no clue how the woman did it, but by the end of the year I was reading several grade levels ahead of my classmates.
Still can't spell and my grammer sucks, but I can read. I hated reading out loud, though. Still have trouble with that. Boomhaurer would have thought I couldn't if we had shared a class. I read so fast that I end up a scentance or two ahead of my mouth. Same with writing (you'll notice I often drop words. Or at least that's what I always try to go back and edit. I thought it in there, just was past that by the time I typed it)
I really wish I remembered more of that class, and how I was taught, because I figure if I could apply the method that taught me to read to my writing, maybe I'd get better.
Anyway, ahh the joys of learning disability. :)
Also, Barnes and Noble should cut that teacher a check, considering how much cash I've dropped in that store over the years.
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I remember around 7th grade the English teacher dipped into diagramming sentences for a couple of days; we simply couldn't make heads nor tails out of what he was trying to teach, so he finally gave up. General consensus is that it was just some nonsense "someone" came up with to justify their job or generate a consultant's fee.
You do not drop diagraming on students without having made the parts of speech a daily part of the clasroom curriculum. But since your class monitor did just that, your response was highly appropriate and I am glad he did give up sooner rather than later.
Want to make an English teacher's head explode? Ask her to diagram a sentence from some "Great Work of Literature" like Shakespeare . . . or better yet, James Joyce.
Bring it on, buddy-boy! Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, or maybe something out of Dubliners?
I'm not sure Shakespeare knew anything about grammar as grammar, but both he and Joyce needed to know how words fitted together to convey meaning. We mere mortals, who do not have their inate ability, have devised a way of describing what they did if not how they did it. (Or, alternatively, we stand slack-jawed and drooling while marveling at their accomplishments.)
stay safe.
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Just one sentence. The last sentnce of ulysses.
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Just one sentence. The last sentnce of ulysses.
1,288 words - The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!.
4,391 words - The last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy.
13,955 words - Jonathan Coe's 2001 novel The Rotters' Club contains a 13,955-word sentence.
469,375 words - Nigel Tomm's one-sentence novel, which does not have a proper subject-verb interaction, The Blah Story.
All of them are easy, but Faulkner's is the easiest because he understands that grammar and punctuation work hand in hand, as opposed to Joyce's stream of consiousness run-on sentence (in which he follows all the rules except for punctuation). The other two are merely run-on sentences that apparently serve as the exemplars for most of what passes for composition by anyone under the age of roughly 35
All I need is either enough rolls of paper or a computer diagraming program that can handle more than about 100 words. And truth to tell, it is more difficult to keep the train of thought when diagraming than when reading any of those four.
stay safe.
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Just one sentence. The last sentnce of ulysses.
Yeaaaaahhhh... I can see the diagram of that one covering all of the school's blackboards and most of the pavement in the parking lot.
Thanks for the laugh!
Terry
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Yeaaaaahhhh... I can see the diagram of that one covering all of the school's blackboards and most of the pavement in the parking lot.
Thanks for the laugh!
Terry
Skip the blackboards - the diagram will be much more vertical than horizontal. And some of the shifts from level to level will make the triple black diamond ski runs look like the bunny slope!
I'm going to need another stick of chalk to do this one.
stay safe.
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Well, the funny thing is that somehow, after all those years, I thought Molly's stream-of-consciousness was more toward the middle of the book. So I had to go look at my copy to see what the "last sentence" was, opened it to the last page, and suddenly had to laugh like hell.
I still love the opening passage, with Buck Mulligan coming down the stairs bearing aloft "a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed."
--Introibo ad altere Dei.
It jacked me back to my altar boy training days.
Terry