Teen Literacy Tips

Working to Improve the Teaching of Literature

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Mortimer Adler: The Forgotten Educational Reformer

August 3rd, 2010 · Literature, Reading, Teaching

Mortimer Adler

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. [Read more →]

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Increase Student Reading Speed with Eyercize – Free Online Tool

April 26th, 2010 · Reading, Teaching

If you have students who struggle with comprehension, it may be that their reading rate is too slow. Reading experts tell us that anything below 90 words per minute is probably too slow for understanding what we read. Some students may not realize that experienced readers read in groups of words, or chunks. Yet this basic skill can vastly improve the reading rate of slower readers.

Eyercize is a free online tool that may be able to help struggling readers increase their reading rate. The following screencast demonstrates some of Eyercize’s basic functions:

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How to Adopt an Antediluvian Word

April 20th, 2010 · Lessons, Teaching, Writing

Your students can prevent words like succisive, welmish or alogotrophy from fading into obscurity by adopting them through the Save the Words web site.  When students visit Save the Words, they are confronted with a wall of lonely, unused words crying out for new homes. Literally. They cry out. Really. Try it.

As the Save the Words website expresses it:

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted.

Today 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words.

You can change all that. Help save the words!

When you adopt a word, you make a solemn vow: “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to very best of my ability.”

This would be a clever and fun way to get students playing with words. After they adopt a word students could use it in a poem, in their daily work, or in class discussions.

How would you use this site in your classroom?

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