Short and to the point, ROMAN Reading gives readers the five tools they need to understand sophisticated books, and presents them in a way that is easy to remember:

R: Read the book/story all the way through once.

O: Outline the major events or elements of the book.

M: Mark the book.

A: Ask the right questions.

N: Name your experience.

In this expanded practice edition of ROMAN Reading, students get the chance to apply their new skills immediately with stories by some of the world’s greatest writers:

• “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov
• “God Sees the Truth But Waits” by Leo Tolstoy
• “The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde
• “How Much Land Does a Man Need” by Leo Tolstoy
• A Christmas Carol (unabridged) by Charles Dickens

Each story includes a checklist so readers can work their way through the five different skills and keep track of their progress.

ROMAN Reading is ideal for classrooms or home schools, as each section could be taught as a single lesson, and the entire book could be used for a multi-week introduction to how to read literature. The included stories offer thought-provoking issues and themes that make for lively discussions.

I’ve used the information in this book for many years, and I’ve seen the difference it can make in teen readers. ROMAN Reading also includes my own reading list of great books, collated from thirteen other “great books” lists.

Try ROMAN Reading today, and help the young men and women in your life begin their journey to becoming literate, skilled readers.

If you’re interested in reviewing ROMAN Reading, let me know and I’d be happy to provide you with an electronic copy.

“A wonderful story of triumph over imperfection, shame, and loss. Large, awkward, learning-disabled Maxwell Kane, whose father is in prison for murdering his mother, and crippled, undersized Kevin are both mocked by their peers; the cruel taunting they endure is all too realistic and believable. The boys establish a friendship-and a partnership. Kevin defends them with his intelligence, while Max is his friend’s “legs,” affording him a chance to participate in the larger world. Inspired by tales of King Arthur, they become knights fighting for good and true causes….The author writes with empathy, honoring the possibilities of even peripheral characters; Kevin and Max are memorable and luminous.”

For the past three years, my eighth graders have found it engaging, entertaining and moving. Here are ten reasons why you should consider reading it to your seventh or eighth grade class:

1. The main characters are seventh graders going into eighth grade, and they’re portrayed like realistic junior high kids.
2. Both characters are social outsiders, which does two important things: a) it gives the social outsiders in your own class someone to identify with; b) more importantly, it helps the rest of the kids in the class be more accepting of the differences of others.
3. There is a strong pro-reading anti-TV message to the story that doesn’t come off preachy, corny or phony.
4. The novel shows that a person’s value does not come from what they can do or not do, but from their very being.
5. The book constantly makes reference to Arthurian legends, always a popular subject with 8th graders.
6. Both boys and girls find the story compelling, from the adventurous antics and kidnapping subplot to concern over the treatment of those with disabilities.
7. The chapters are short enough to read at the beginning of class without cutting into the period too much.
8. With only 23 chapters, the book can be read in about a month.
9. Kevin is a loveable geek, and there aren’t enough loveable geeks in fiction
10. Finally, there are at least a half a dozen ways the book can be incorporated into literature, reading or religion class; a few examples:
    • As an exploration of what writing fiction is – Kevin often talks about the power of remembering, and the control a person has over what he or she remembers
    • As an example of how writing can be therapeutic – Max writes the story to get over the traumatic events of that year
    • As a discussion-starter for how to treat people with differences – Both Max and Kevin struggle with being different, and the book offers hope to those who feel left out

In a gesture of great generosity, Rodman Philbrick has made available at no charge a version of Freak the Mighty as a one- or two-act play. To get a copy of the play as a pdf, visit Mr. Philbrick’s website and follow the directions you find there. While you’re at the site, be sure to look at the teacher’s guide.

I also highly recommend the movie adaption, The Mighty, starring Sharon Stone, Kieran Culkin, Gillian Anderson, and James Gandolfini. Even the soundtrack is incredible, with the title song performed by Sting. Be sure to preview the movie before showing it due to some swear words and few “birdies” flying, if you know what I mean.

[Cross posted at Catholic School Chronicle]

Mortimer Adler on the Cover of Time Magazine, March 17, 1952

I firmly believe that Mortimer Adler is one of the most misunderstood and neglected thinkers of the last one hundred years. Often labeled elitist and Eurocentric, people often confuse his views on education with people like Allen Bloom and Ed Hirsch, who advocate a kind of cultural literacy as a key component of education. On the contrary, I believe Adler’s views on educational reform are deeply democratic and innovative. He was recommending changes to the educational system decades before other more trendy names were found for them. The concepts behind educational buzz words like “critical thinking,” “literature circles,” “project-based learning,” and “inquiry learning” are found throughout Adler’s writings.

Unfortunately for today’s schools, Adler’s work is often buried behind a prejudicial wall of misunderstanding, based on an incomplete and inaccurate picture of what Adler stood for. Adler is often invoked by homeschoolers (another misunderstood group), great books programs and private academies, leading to the false impression that his work is somehow arch-conservative, perennialist or exclusive. To be clear, while I consider Adler one of my intellectual heroes, I don’t agree with everything he proposed, and he sometimes comes across as arrogant. But I think many of his ideas are so important they deserve to be considered by everyone interested in educational reform.

To that end, I’d like to periodically share some of his ideas in his own words, with my occasional comments. Ideally, I’d love to get a conversation going about the reforms he suggests. So please feel free to drop in and leave comments whenever he or I touch a nerve.

To begin with, people often think that because Adler advocated great books programs that he is just another advocate of the “dead white male” approach to literature, whereby reading a limited set of writings gives us the truths of the universe. But as he explains below in his introduction to Reforming Education, this is not his idea of reading great books at all:

Some basic truths are to be found in the great books, but many more errors will also be found there, because a plurality of errors is always to be found for every single truth. One way of discovering this is to detect the contradictions that can be found in the books of every great author. Being human works, they are seldom free from contradictions. Skill in reading and thinking is required to find them. But, given that skill, finding contradictions in a book puts one on the highroad in the pursuit of truth. The truth must lie on one or the other side of every contradiction. It is there for us to detect when we are able to resolve the contradiction in favor of one side or the other….

The difference between [Leo] Strauss’ method of reading and and teaching the great books and the method that [Robert] Hutchins and I had adopted…lies in the distinction between a doctrinal and a dialectical approach. The doctrinal method is an attempt to read as much truth as possible (and no errors) into the work of a particular author, usually devising a special interpretation, or by discovering the special secret of an author’s intentions. This method may have some merit in the graduate school where students aim to acquire narrowly specialized scholarship about a particular author. But it is the opposite of the right method to be used in conducting great books seminars in schools and colleges where the aim is learning to think and the pursuit of truth.

A “dialectical approach” where the aim is “learning to think and the pursuit of truth.” In reading classrooms across America something very similar to this is done under the title “Literature Circles.” If more teachers read Adler’s ideas of how to conduct a seminar with students, the level of thinking in literature circles would skyrocket. In any case, I think it’s clear that Adler is less interested in a cultural language that everyone speaks than he is interested in true dialogue about important ideas. Of course, some people will deny his assumption that objective truth exists at all, but perhaps that’s something we can take up at a later date. At this point, I’m simply interested in clarifying what Adler’s intentions were in promoting the use of great books in education.

Some might wonder what Adler means by “great books.” In an entertaining essay called “The Great Books of 2066” Adler lists seven characteristics:

1. Great books are original communications. Their authors are communicating what they themselves have discovered, not repeating what they have learned by reading the books of other men.
2. Great books have intellectual amplitude; each draws light from and throws light on a large number and variety of ideas, all of them basic.
3. Great books are universally relevant and always contemporary; that is, they deal with the common problems of thought and action that confront men in every age and every clime.
4. Great books are the only books that may be deemed indispensable, every one of them, to a genuine, sound liberal education.
5. Great books are the only books that never have to be written again — that do so well what they set out to do that they cannot be improved upon. (For this simple but penetrating statement about the nature of a great book, I am grateful to my friend Carl Van Doren.)
6. Great books are inexhaustible; they are indefinitely reread-able, each time with additional profit; understandable to some degree on the first reading, they continue to deepen our understanding every time we reread them, and we can never exhaust their power to enlighten us; no matter how many times we read them, there is always more for us to understand.
7. Great books are addressed to human beings, not to some special group of students, scholars or experts; they are seldom written by professors and, if they are, they are never written exclusively for professors.

I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have on Mortimer Adler and/or his ideas, especially as they relate to teaching.

Cross-posted at One Catholic Life.

Megan Pavelich

Megan Palevich of Middle School 101 has a must-see project for teachers who want to tap into students’ use of social networking to bring literary or historical people to life. Students create fake Facebook, Twitter and instant message interactions between characters or historical people. Everything is done with templates that students work on in class or at home, so there’s no need for them to actually log in to the social networking sites. It’s an innovative, motivating idea, and one that students are sure to love.

The original instructions are posted as a Google Document here, so be sure to check it out and let her know how you like it.

Thanks to Kelly Tenkely’s Stories of Learning blog for posting the article that introduced me to the project.

If you’re looking for interesting and relevant Shakespeare resources, be sure to check out Schmoop, a site “lovingly created by Ph.D. and Masters students from top universities.” I’ve just started looking into the site myself, and it looks like a must-have resource for literature and history teachers.

If you use Schmoop, leave a comment sharing your opinion.

Here are a couple of great resources to help you introduce this epic to your students:

Dante’s Inferno – A Virtual Tour of Hell

The World of Dante

Don’t let its age fool you–Dante’s Inferno is still one of the most captivating, readable, and thought-provoking works of literature in the world. Its division into relatively short cantos make it easy to use as a read-aloud. I started reading it once to a group of eighth graders with the intention of giving them a taste of it, but they wouldn’t let me stop until I had finished the entire Inferno. Students from that class still come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed it, and how vivid it is in their minds still.

But don’t take my word for it–try it yourself.

The ten volume Gateway to the Great Books was published in 1963 by Britannica, and was designed to be a sort of literary boot camp to prepare readers to read the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World. The Gateway collection includes short fiction and essays by authors like Emerson, Hawthorne, DeFoe, Kipling, Voltaire, Lincoln, Pliny, Tacitus, Hume, and Chekhov. The works are divided into categories like imaginative literature, critical essays, society, natural science, and philosophy.

To get back into the habit of reading, this morning I chose Virginia Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” I’ve never ready anything by Woolf before, and I was immediately drawn in to her prose. I don’t wish to write a full review here, but I will say that her essay is definitely don’t-miss reading for all literature teachers, and would be worth teaching to advanced junior high students or high school students. For a little more information on Woolf’s essay you can read Danielle’s reaction at A Work in Progress.

I’ll leave you with two quotes that stuck with me after I finished the essay this morning:

 Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.

And,

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly on imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

There are other sites that offer free mp3s of public domain books (such as Librivox and Ejunto), but what sets Lit2Go apart are the educational materials that go with each title.

Take, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for instance. The main page offers a brief summary of the book and links to each chapter. Clicking on a chapter link takes you to a new page where you have the opportunity to download the chapter’s mp3, read the text online, or download the chapter as a pdf file. In addition, each chapter page gives the reading level, genre, country of origin, themes and reading strategies. It also includes support material, which is usually an open-ended question that could be used to start a discussion or lead to a writing assignment.

All of the recordings I sampled seemed professionally done, if sometimes a bit stiff, and many of the titles are available through iTunes. Authors include the usual suspects: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Brothers Grimm, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

There were a few surprises, however–authors and titles I didn’t expect to see: James Baldwin’s The Story of Siegfried, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, George MacDonald’s The Light Princess, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

All in all, Lit 2 Go is a superb literature resource for teachers and students. I’ll be visiting it often and telling my students about it in class this week.

The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a young German foster child living in a small town during the late 1930s and early 1940s. What she witnesses and experiences is tragic enough, but what makes Zusak’s novel especially compelling is that the person narrating Liesel’s story is Death himself.

The brilliance of Zusak’s novel is the way Death relates the events of Liesel’s life. The narrator is possibly the most interesting of all the characters in the novel, and Zusak does a masterful job of creating a believable persona for Death. He has a kind of wisdom and sensitivity that one might find surprising from a being whose job it is to cart away the souls of the dead. Death also foreshadows and in some cases pointedly reveals all the major events of the story because he wants to spare his readers emotional pain. This is a caring, insightful narrator, and I came to think of him as the Angel of Death, rather than as simply death personified.

The characters are just as compelling, and though Zusak’s favorite character is Rudy, my favorite was Liesel’s father, Hans, probably because I’m a father myself. There are many characters with whom readers can identify: Liesel, the main character; Rudy, her best friend; Hans, her father; Rosa, her mother. Each of them comes alive on the pages.

The Book Thief also offers much to the developing reader. Students can study the narrative technique, the use of foreshadowing, and the interesting way the narrator interrupts the narrative with bold declarative statements and questions. The book also illustrates the power of words (both positive and negative), and the therapeutic value of reading.

For parents concerned about its content, The Book Thief can be disturbing at times, but, gratefully, Zusak shows remarkably effective restraint. There are occasional mild swear words (including German profanities), but these are minor compared to some other “young adult” books I’ve had to suffer through. The Book Thief also avoids the all-too-common tendency of many young adult authors to dwell on and overemphasize sexual topics.

The Book Thief is a powerful, important story that people will still be reading decades from now.

• Literature Circle Rubric – If you have your students gather in small groups to discuss the books their reading, have them self-evaluate using this rubric.  It can also be easily adapted to other classes.
• Sustaind Silent Reading Rubric – This tool lets students know exactly what you expect from them when they’re given time to read silently in class.  It’s fairly generic, and can be customized as you like.
• Reading Portfolio Rubric – My students have 3-ring binders in which they keep their notes, handouts, reading logs, and texts we’re studying.  I use this rubric to assess their binder once or twice a quarter.

If you have any questions about using the rubrics, or if you have suggestions to improve them, please leave a comment.