Not Being Allowed to Read

misslissy said:

So I was talking with my boss the other day, who has a very bright son who loves to read. We were discussing libraries and she mentioned to me that her son wants to read books above his level and he's capable of reading books above his level, but they have very strict policies about it. He's a second grader and he can only check out second grade books at the library. Even if he can handle the third grade books, his school librarian won't let them check them out.

Now two questions and one statement: First question, why not let the kids read books above their grade level if they can handle it? It's not like he wants to start reading 6th grade books, he just wants to read the third grade books.

Second question, does this seem discouraging to anyone else? Because it does to me.

And for my statement, for the record, I think this is dumb.

Click to expand...

It happened to me as a kid. I was encourage to go back and re-read the stuff I had already re-read before. It wasn't long before I was staring out the window, daydreaming.

It's ridiculous. Thank God for public libraries and Amazon.com.

What a strange policy. I never heard of it growing up.

I don't think our school library has that policy, but then my 8-year-old always checks out books too young for him. Maybe they need to police that.

And the school has a reading list of books for which they can get "points" for my older son and many of the books on that list go far beyond the 8th grade level the school goes up to.

And our public libraries have no such policy that I'm aware of.

Maybe the school does it so the kids don't "get ahead" of the program and end up reading a book they'll read in the next grade.

They threw this at my daughter when she was in the 3rd grade. She wanted to read Lord of the Rings because she'd enjoyed The Hobbit. LOTR was listed as a 7th grade reading level (her school went up to 6th Grade).

She wasn't allowed to read it because it was "above her grade level" and came home in tears.

This policy got my Irish up, so I took my kids back to school (2 blocks away) and went straight to the librarian's office. She immediately called in the vice-principal, who called in the principal and my daughter's teacher got dragged in too as I challenged this moronic policy.

The point that won them over, actually, was "If she checks it out and can't understand it, she'll do one of two things. One, she'll give up on it and return it to the library unread. Like that never happens. Or, Two, she'll become determined about what words mean and learn to use the dictionary and enrich her vocabulary. The way I see it, you'd rather keep her stupid and bored than encourage her to learn by not allowing her to challenge herself in her free time."

Then Mrs Bennett (how's that--I remember her name after almost 20 years) added that my daughter already used words like "inane" and "ubitious" correctly.

To make a long story short(er), my children were immediately allowed to check out any book they wanted in that library. Within a month, the school board discontinued the policy city-wide.

Never had a problem with the city public library--but, then, I used to work there and I think they knew better. LOL!

I just offered a possible explanation for why. Didn't say it made sense.

It actually sounds like they just dont want the kids exposed to higher curriculum, as if they're deliberately dumming down the kids. Discouraging independent curiosity.

Instead of allowing the children to reach their level individually at their own pace, they're suppressing them all back down to the average so the entire class reaches it at the same time.

No child left behind, no child allowed to move forward.

I remember my grade school being very strict about that, which sucked. I also remember being rather annoyed that kindergarteners weren't allowed to go to the library because we weren't supposed to be able to read. (Yeah, well, bumblebees aren't supposed to be able to fly, but apparently they didn't get that memo...)

ETA: Shadow's post reminded me of one of the more frightening thing I ever heard anyone utter. It came from a former co-worker, who, in all seriousness, declared that schools were "ruining these kids teaching them to think for themselves. They should be taught that you don't question teachers, you don't question authority and you don't question our Americcan leaders. Ever. End of discussion!"

That's idiotic. The only possible reason I could come up with for maybe having something like that is if some parents complained about kids checking out books above their maturity level. For instance, when I was in 7th grade I checked out Carrie. This was the only book my parents ever asked me not to read; my dad told me it contained stuff he didn't think was appropriate for me yet. I said okay and put it back. But I could imagine some other parents going ballistic over something like that.

Anyway. Yes. Idiotic. TOTALLY idiotic.

DeleyanLee said:

The point that won them over, actually, was "If she checks it out and can't understand it, she'll do one of two things. One, she'll give up on it and return it to the library unread. Like that never happens. Or, Two, she'll become determined about what words mean and learn to use the dictionary and enrich her vocabulary. The way I see it, you'd rather keep her stupid and bored than encourage her to learn by not allowing her to challenge herself in her free time."

Click to expand...

Hey, that's funny. The Lord of the Rings was singlehandedly responsible for the rapid expansion of my vocabulary in the third grade.

I also blame Tolkien for my tendency toward KJV-style English when writing, which I have to edit ad nauseum into something ordinary mortals can read.

Pagey's_Girl said:

I also remember being rather annoyed that kindergarteners weren't allowed to go to the library because we weren't supposed to be able to read.

Click to expand...

What I find interesting is that when I took my daughter to Kindergarten Round-up in 1990, I was informed that she might not make it into kindergarten because she couldn't already read and write her numbers up to 100.

I studied the principal, aghast. "If I'm required to teach her that at home, what the H*** am I sending her to school for?"

He just stared at me. I seem to remember his mouth falling open a tad.

Since my kids started school, I've really come to hate public school systems.

DeleyanLee said:

What I find interesting is that when I took my daughter to Kindergarten Round-up in 1990, I was informed that she might not make it into kindergarten because she couldn't already read and write her numbers up to 100.

Click to expand...

Gee. Our's only needed to know their alphabet and count to 10 to get into kindergarten. And tie their shoes.

That same thing happened to me in the 1st grade (1986). I remember it very clearly, because it was really upsetting to me at the time. I approached the library desk with a stack of books to check out (Beverly Cleary books and a couple of the "Betsy" books by Carolyn... Somebody). The librarian shooed me back to the picture books section, saying I wasn't "old enough" to check out the books I'd picked. Eh? I was crushed. I'd read nearly every picture book in the school library, and I really wanted to read more of Cleary's Ramona books, which I'd been enjoying so much at home.

I wound up with some really stupid picture book about the seasons. I cried (not in front of the librarian, though).

Eventually I had to get a note from my mom, and another one from my teacher, both saying that I was completely capable of reading chapter books. I was already reading plenty of them at home.

The library's rationale was that a kid might check out a book that was too challenging for him, and he'd get discouraged. Again -- eh? Sometimes it's good for kids to explore reading above their age level. Plus, it's not unimaginable that the kid would be reading the book with a parent or older sibling. I think the policy did more to frustrate above-grade-level readers than to "discourage" on-level or below-level readers. Of course, that was probably around the beginning of the self-esteem movement in the public schools -- better to have little Satori not reading at all than feeling bad about herself for not knowing a word, right?

Bleh.

It happened to me later in high school--I wanted to read The Silmarillion in 10th grade AP English, but my teacher told me I needed to stick to my reading level and the books on the list.

Huh?

The list that she had was a list of recommendations, not requirements. She wouldn't even let me read Pride and Prejudice, even though Emma was on the list, because Pride and Prejudice was too complicated.

Ugh.

Good lord, if they stopped me from reading above my grade level, I never would have finished 2nd grade. The school I went to that year was so small, I wound up taking 8th grade English just so I'd have something to do.

However, I can see a potential reason for the policy. There have been a number of times where parents raised a stink because they found their kids reading books that they considered inappropriate for their ages (my high school had a class in Existentialist Literature that drew pretty heavy fire for exactly that reason). I'd be more ready to believe it's due to that than the possibility of discouraging young readers.

I never ran into this sort of problem at the library, but I did run into quite a few other places where I wasn't allowed to move ahead even though I was ahead of my classmates. (They didn't have test outs for most subjects in high school, and before that was just a joke called 'everybody on the same page'.) I think that a lot of schools don't know what to do with kids that aren't average.

On a different note, my biggest problem in the library was that all the books were rebound hardcover, so there was no blurb and I had no idea what would be interesting to read. =/

It's been my experience as a public librarian that some schools and some teachers are putting much more weight on a rigid grading or leveling system like the Accelerated Reader levels or Fountas & Pinnell levels than they used to. It seems like a move towards more and more empirical measurements - maybe because of No Child Left Behind, maybe because of a general backlash against the more "touchy-feely" curriculum my generation had.

But the difficulty of a book is about a lot more than the length and rarity of the words in it, or the length of the paragraphs, or whatever these systems measure. Books require very different things of their readers in terms of background knowledge about the world, and emotional experience, and vocabulary, and logic, and memory. It would be hard for any system to adjust for that.

DeleyanLee said:

What I find interesting is that when I took my daughter to Kindergarten Round-up in 1990, I was informed that she might not make it into kindergarten because she couldn't already read and write her numbers up to 100.

I studied the principal, aghast. "If I'm required to teach her that at home, what the H*** am I sending her to school for?"

He just stared at me. I seem to remember his mouth falling open a tad.

Since my kids started school, I've really come to hate public school systems.

Click to expand...

Since I taught school, I've really come to hate public school systems.

My daughter's school(s) had the same policy - when she was in kindergarten, the kids were only allowed to pick off the kindergarten shelves. When we moved, she switched schools for first grade, but the policy's the same (same school district)

I think it's stupid - I don't really restrict what she reads (I read Jaws when I was her age. ) and she knows when we go to B&N, she can get just about whatever book she wants (I probably wouldn't let her get Jaws, the ads for Discovery's Shark Week scare her )

It's too bad schools think they have to make this decision for them - it's one I'd really rather make myself. She was waaay beyond each level and really only got interested in reading when I got her a few Ramona books and the early Judy Blumes. The ones she got from the school? They went ignored because they were too simple for her.

When I was younger, I was met with looks of skepticism when I checked out the C.S. Lewis books in the second grade, and the school cart meant for the younger children never had those books. The teachers made it increasingly difficult to get into the school library.
Thank gosh for public libraries. I absolutely love my public library.

I'm so glad my kid's school wasn't like that. I also invested a lot of money in books for my kids. We'd go to Barnes and Noble each month for books. I gave them each a budget of 50 dollars we could spend on books. I don't think I ever spent less than 100 dollars a month on their books. They have so many series books that they have packed and are keeping for their kids one day.

I'm the same way - we go to B&N every few weeks and I'm like a kid in a candy store. Right now, my daughter's reading From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - which I loved as a kid.