Hey, all right: according to the Associated Press, the Virginia elementary school textbook we wrote about last week that featured the inaccurate claim that thousands of black troops fought for the Confederacy will be corrected and reprinted early next year. (The publisher is offering white stickers to cover the incorrect sentence in the meanwhile.) This is particularly good news, because early information about this gaffe suggested that Virgina education officials were planning to hang onto the book, but "caution [school districts] against teaching the passage".

Labels: schools, Such wrongness

According to the Washington Post,

"A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War--a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict."

The author of the textbook, Joy Masoff, is a professional writer rather than a trained historian, and says she discovered this information via "Internet research". While I was naturally disturbed by this story, I was even MORE disturbed by the discovery that apparently school textbooks like this one are written by one person. This never occurred to me: I assumed textbooks were written by committee, thereby ensuring that more than one author's perspective was included.

Labels: schools, Such wrongness, Textbooks

In honor of Donors Choose's 10th birthday, Townsend Press is donating $1 million to pay down all book donation requests to below $98. However, for the money to go through, donors like us need to finish paying the rest. Go to their website to donate if you're interested in learning more about supporting this worthy cause!

Labels: Charity, schools

Good news for poor college students (particularly college students who have to pay zillions of dollars for those textbooks that will be out of date about .6 seconds after they pay $95 for 'em): Barnes & Noble announced Monday that it is expanding its textbook rental program. The program began as a pilot earlier this year, and is offered through campus bookstores managed by the bookseller. Users have the option of renting via campus bookstores or online, and the books are offered for at least 50 percent off the purchase price of a new copy.

Labels: Booksellers, schools, Wordcandy on the cheap

Laura Miller wrote an essay for Salon about two recent studies that link the mere presence of books in a child's home with the number of years of education the child will complete. The first study (published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility) looked at samples from 27 nations, and found that "growing up in a household with 500 or more books is 'as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.' Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books."

The second study will be published later this year in the journal Reading Psychology, and found that giving "low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation 'may be as effective as summer school' in preventing 'summer slide' -- the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year."

I suspect the presence of books says a LOT about the value a household places on education (which might have something to do with the number of years a child spends in school, too), but find both of these studies fascinating nonetheless. Read on, my doves! It's good for you!

Labels: Awesome news, Kids' books, schools

Heh. Apparently, Oxford's All Souls College has decided to scrap their infamous one-word exam, which frequently consisted of a question like this:

'Water' (Expound)

Admittedly, this will probably spare whoever grades these suckers from wasting years of their lives wading through impossibly pretentious crap, but I'm sure someone is feeling a slight pang.

Labels: schools

There was an interesting article in the Seattle Times (via the Tri-City Herald) a few days ago about a potential censorship case in the Richland School District. A 10th grade Honors language-arts class was offering Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a novel about a small boy dealing with the death of his father in the 9/11 attacks, as one of their supplementary (not required) readings. The book contains "profanity, sex, and descriptions of violence", and certain parents felt the school district had done an inadequate job of informing them of the book's subject matter. They are requesting some kind of system (flagging, a rating system, whatever) to warn parents about potentially objectionable content.

The parents' complaint was made with civility and reason, but as far as I'm concerned that just makes it scarier. When we start flagging books for content, we are setting ourselves up for one-size-fits-all censorship. What happens next? Do we flag school libraries? Only let kids check out books with a parent-approved rating? These kind of questions freak me out--if you're worried about something your kid is reading, read it yourself and discuss it with them. Hell, feel free to forbid them to read the book. But don't ask the school district to make systematic changes that do your work for you.

Labels: Censorship, schools

There's an article up on the New York Times website about a teacher in Atlanta who allows her students to read whatever they want to* in her middle-school literature class. The students explore their reading via journal entries and one-on-one discussions with the teacher. There seems to be debate over how this unique approach affected the students' standardized test scores, but I think it's an interesting idea--when I was a kid, I had a friend who read nothing but those written-by-committee Nancy Drew paperbacks, and while the stories weren't all that great, she seemed to get a lot from their clear, easy-to-read writing style, and became a solid writer herself.

I'm not saying there's no value to force-feeding kids The Jungle or The Great Gatsby, but this article did have me wondering if there might be some middle ground. What if teachers chose classic novels, and then asked students to choose a modern novel with a similar theme? Let the kids read Stephenie Meyer, but then point 'em at a Bronte novel, or guide them from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park.

Of course, another option might be just to choose more kid-friendly required reading. In my experience, it is very, very difficult to interest a reluctant reader in, say, Ethan Frome. Many children find the language off-putting, and the ones who can get past the language are creeped out by the subject matter. But why not choose something like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, or Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express, or the Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel? All of these stories have their pluses and minuses, but if the idea is to expose a young reader to a classic novel, it might not be a bad idea to choose something highly readable. And if all else fails, I think teachers should stick to teaching the books that they love, because kids do respond to genuine enthusiasm... even if it's genuine enthusiasm over Bartleby the Scrivener.

*Except Gossip Girl books or novels based on video games, apparently.

Labels: newspaper articles, schools

According to an article in The New York Times, children's publisher Scholastic Inc. has decided to stop offering chapter books and spinoff products based on the "Bratz" product line at its popular elementary-school book fairs. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group based in Boston, said that Scholastic’s move is the result of their 18-month-long fight to remove titles like “Lil’ Bratz: Catwalk Cuties” from the book club fliers that go home with students and are distributed at book fairs.

I try not to get too worked up over kids' toys, but those Bratz dolls are pretty crazy:

I'm totally confused by the combination of that outfit, the mouse, and the USB key necklace. Is that the doll's Internet-surfing outfit? Is it indicative of what girls are *supposed* to be wearing while they work on the computer? Because if so, I am seriously under-dressed.

Labels: Scholastic, schools, toys