Cardinal Points

Issue date: 4/27/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Anubhav Agarwal Literacy Education Associate Professor Robert Ackland's fundamentals of reading curriculum and instruction class has given many students a new appreciation for reading.

Senior Dan Birch loved his mother's bedtime stories. In elementary school, he became an avid reader. Yet when Birch entered high school, with sports, clubs, and an increased workload filling his schedule, his literary days seemed to be over.

SparkNotes.com, the Web site of quick plot summaries, was senior Jessica Morse's best friend in high school. Morse never read a chapter of assigned reading, but SparkNotes got her straight As in every class.

Senior Brian Defayette hated reading "Lord of the Flies" in 10th grade. Every word was dissected and discussed to death. He said he even contemplated skipping class to avoid the force-feeding of vocabulary lessons, symbolic explanations and overly deep analysis of William Golding's tale.

Such attitudes seem to be typical in an age where, according to Dianna Jean Schemo's Feb. 23 article in The New York Times, many 12th-graders have not mastered basic high school reading skills.

Schemo reported the results of The National Assessment of Educational Progress, an exam commonly known as the "national report card" showed that the reading skills of high school seniors have declined significantly in recent years.

Although the mean grade point average of college-bound seniors was higher than ever (2.98, a high "C+"), 27 percent of America's 12th-graders could not extract data about train fares from a brochure. America's age of literacy, the article suggests, is coming to an end.

Yet in a classroom at Plattsburgh State's Sibley Hall, plans are underway to reverse this trend. Birch, Morse and Defayette, people who read as little as possible during their high school days, developed an appreciation of reading in college. Now, along with six other students in Literacy Education Associate Professor Robert Ackland's fundamentals of reading curriculum and instruction class, they plan to share that newfound love with others.

"I missed out on so much by not reading," Defayette said. "I don't want my students making the same mistakes."

Ackland said student "mistakes" can be reduced by quality teaching.

Continued...

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