The Student Who Read Everything Twice
by Jack Farrell
Consultant Teacher
Conejo Valley Unified School District
[Editor's Note: I wrote this article in 2001, before the research that produced the Common Core Standards was conducted by the A.C.T. It was an early insight based on my observations in contemporary classrooms while working as a mentor to new teachers. It accounts for why I was an early proponent of the Common Core Standards when they were first released in 2010.]
You may remember Yossarian, the malingerer in the Air Cops. on Pianosa in World War II’s Catch-22.1 The novel opens in the hospital where Yossarian has “a pain in his liver that falls just short of being jaundice.” Yossarian’s efforts to avoid combat meet with mixed results since the world of war, as conceived by the author Joseph Heller, is a nightmare of irony and contradiction. But events turn fortuitous when, in Chapter 18, Yossarian meets the “soldier who saw everything twice.” Heller’s comedy reaches its height in this clever character who buffaloes the medical brass with a set of symptoms only Yossarian can recognize as sheer genius. No matter how many fingers the doctor holds up, the “soldier who saw everything twice” responds “two.” Yossarian follows his lead and also sees everything twice.
"The soldier who saw everything twice nodded weakly and sank back on his bed. Yossarian nodded weakly too, eyeing his talented roommate with great humility and admiration. He knew he was in the presence of a master. His talented roommate was obviously a person to be studied and emulated. During the night, his talented roommate died, and Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.
“'I see everything once!' he cried quickly." (p. 191)
The dark humor of Catch-22 is often lost on students who read it only once, or not at all, relying on class discussion and teacher lecture to prepare them for its test. Too many of our students read next to nothing at all, certainly not the myriad, expensive texts the taxpayers have purchased for them. A precious few read everything once. Where is the student who reads everything twice?
Governor Davis of California announced his reading initiative two years ago, terming reading the “gateway skill.” But students, as early as the 4th grade, know that the gateway skill is not reading, but listening and taking notes. It is not that students cannot read, for most can. It is that reading is peripheral to learning. Nearly all learning, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, comes to students orally, often supported by visual overheads and charts. It is no wonder that the multiple intelligences remind us continually that students are auditory and visual learners. They have spent a dozen years becoming both. For how many students is the preferred learning style independent reading and study?
I am not talking about reading novels. English teachers have done a marvelous job with their sustained silent reading programs, matching reader to engaging reading. But who among us has taught students to read and study informational texts, such as content area textbooks, and then tested them on their independent reading and study of that text and not our rendering of it?
Dr. Kate Kinsella of San Francisco State University describes the relationship between teacher and student as co-dependent2 and I have witnessed such a relationship in my own classes and those of my peers, that is, teachers become facilitators of student learning in the absence of student reading. I have also watched a troubling inversion in teaching skills and student competence; that is, teaching practice has improved impressively since I joined the profession in 1968 and, ironically, learner skills have fallen. I think the latter also drives the former. The more students abdicate their role in the learning process, the greater the drive on the part of idealistic teachers to offset that slide. But the former also drives the latter. Teachers have armed themselves with such an impressive array of strategies and are so committed to their students’ learning that the typical student knows psychologically that the system will “enable” him to learn, in spite of his low-level of involvement, that teachers and counselors and principals will provide whatever scaffolding is necessary to ensure his success.
How did we arrive at such a critical juncture? The root of the problem is a misdiagnosis of the reading problem and is grounded in a faulty reading of test scores. Conventional wisdom says that reading instruction in the primary grades has failed a significant portion of our students and remediation in the upper grades, middle school and high school is necessary for the success of these students. The reading task has been sundered into segments and strategies created to bring these students up to grade level. But J. David Cooper in Literacy: Helping Children Construct Meaning, concludes, with regard to reading research:
"The research does not clearly support the identification of any set of comprehension skills; nor is there specific evidence that teaching students main-idea, sequence, cause-and-effect, or other concepts will make them better comprehenders. . . . comprehension is not a set of discrete skills. (p. 6)"3
Conventional wisdom assumes that these students don’t read because they can’t read, or that they read, but don’t comprehend what they read, because they cannot comprehend it. A different set of assumptions would still recognize the same problem, that students don’t read, but would lead to a far different solution. Students do not read because reading is not necessary to success in school. The absolutely critical skills in school are listening to what your teacher and your classmates say, taking good notes and asking the right questions. If this is, indeed, the correct diagnosis of the problem, then what is the solution?
At a recent educational meeting I attended, the presenter said, “Re-structuring is easy. All you have to do is pass a law. Re-culturing is much more difficult.” The entire culture of the K-12 educational establishment is committed to this oral model, from staff development to the kindergarten classroom. It is beyond the ability of any single teacher to change it.
Recall any recent conference you have attended. Perhaps some of what follows will sound familiar. The presenter takes pains to tell you that his presentation will be “brain compatible,” acknowledging the very latest research on adult learning. The content will come at you in chunks of no more than 20-30 minutes in length. Then time will be given for you to process the information, usually with your table partners, occasionally by writing. Often what follows the table group collaboration is a whole group recapitulation of what has been learned, by charting a few responses from each table group, or getting the participants on their feet to carousel the ideas on chart paper mounted on the walls. This is usually followed by a brief break and then the presenter chunks more material and the process repeats itself. Generally notebooks or hand-outs of written material are given to participants in support of the learning, but no time is given to read this material, except as “homework.” If the in-service is multi-day and the homework is skipped [as is the case with our own students] the presenter will chunk out the homework material the next day for us. At the end of the conference, the participant will leave with scads of written material, which will find its home in a file drawer or on a bookshelf, never to be perused.
Much may have been learned at the conference, but all learning essentially was oral and visual. In fact, charting has become such big business at conferences, that I attended a recent demonstration of “graphical recording.” The recorder demonstrated a series of icons, which essentially turned the chart into a cartoon. The ideas were more memorable, and that was the point, of course, but the content was severely trivialized. And all this has been sold to us as “brain compatible!” Is it any wonder that our own classrooms often embed this model? This raises the age-old dilemma of the chicken or the egg. Has brain research actually revealed the way the brain learns best, or simply the way the brain has been trained by our school system to learn? Is it possible to train the brain to learn through written discourse? We think we do that now, but I don’t agree.
Even reading in-services I have attended recently have relied on the above model, with the majority of the ideas being communicated orally and visually. The ideas themselves have “scaffolded” reading with both oral and visual support, urging such strategies as read-alouds, whereby the teacher demonstrates how good readers read, pausing to ask questions and make predictions; “popcorn” reading, where the material is read orally by the class, with each student reader “popcorning,” or designating the next reader; graphical organizers which allow students to organize ideas from their reading, and many more.
When my youngest daughter was learning to ski, we enrolled her in ski school and after two days of lessons, her instructor told me that she needed to put in some miles on the snow, that further lessons wouldn’t benefit her until she had done so. Too often in school we instinctively reach for the other solution. If the lessons aren’t working, we just need better lessons.
What, then, is the solution? I would like to offer first baby steps and then bigger ones.
First, some small steps, and these are steps designed for the language arts teacher.
1). Ask your students about their reading, specifically any textbook, or informational reading assigned. Students are honest, especially if you ask them directly and teacher to student. “Did you read the assignment last night; how much did you read; did you understand what you read; did you take notes; did you highlight or make marginal notes; if not, how much did you read; how much did you understand?” Move around the room and query as many students as possible.
2). Make reading a truly gateway skill, that is, crucial to success in the class. Assign some readings that you do not explain at all. Assign others that are subjected to nothing more than partner or small group discussion. Assign some readings that you conduct whole class discussion of, but provide no teacher interpretation about. The Great Books society offers outstanding training in this inquiry technique. Finally, assign readings that will be subjected to the standard teacher treatment: interpretation, close textual analysis, figurative language, symbols, mood, tone, point of view, etc. But try this twist; hand out your interpretation in writing. Ask the students to understand your view on the reading from the written word alone. Conduct discussion only after you are convinced they can go no further with your essay. You can use this sparingly, but it is a wonderful change of pace and honors written discourse.
3) Try a portion of a period every so often, or even one period a month, where everything transpires in writing, from the directions for the lesson, all questions and answers, and even partner discourse.
4) Discuss the reading your students are doing in other classes. Encourage them to read their texts. Perhaps, once or twice a month, give them half the period to read a text from another subject while in your class and help whomever you can.
5) Turn your class into students who read everything twice. Informational texts, especially most high school textbooks, are very difficult reads. The comprehension rate rises dramatically on a second reading. Encourage your students to wait until the 2nd reading to take notes, highlight or make marginal notations. Routinely ask the students who finish a reading in class to begin over again. This approach must be continually modeled and praised. If necessary, and it probably is, cover less material. You’ll find the learning goes deeper and lasts longer, especially if your students are getting most of the way on their own and only need you for the really tough parts.
6) Honor the very special relationship between writer and reader. For the most part, it is a silent communication and, all too often, the teacher, in an effort to be helpful, comes between the two. Read-alouds, where the teacher pauses to check for understanding and ask for predictions, are particularly intrusive. In our effort to be more helpful, we constantly interrupt the flow of the discourse and, among other things, ask struggling readers what is coming next. Research asserts that good readers are constantly predicting where the author is going and that is why their comprehension is so high. I challenge that. Good readers attune themselves to the writer, suspend their disbelief, and enjoy whatever revelations or surprises he may have planned for them, and, as it happens in real time, during the reading. In such a situation, the reader is “in the moment” with the writer. Predicting only makes struggling readers feel more incompetent.
7) Recent research also stresses the role of prior knowledge in the construction of meaning in a text. Many of my colleagues, and myself included, have gone to absurd lengths to connect their students’ prior knowledge with Hamlet or The Odyssey. Prior knowledge is crucial to comprehension, but prior knowledge is the first reading. And that is exactly why second readings bear such amazing fruit. The comprehension of the 2nd reading is based largely on the prior knowledge of the first reading. Textbooks are so committed to the concept of prior knowledge, and so much material is front-loaded, that the special journey the author has envisioned for his reader, the light ironic tone, for example, is often compromised or completely aborted.
These small steps can be taken by any language arts teacher. The larger steps involve the reculturing of schools, from the 4th through the 12th grades, and in all secondary disciplines. It flows from the same essential premise: that students do not read because they do not need to. Reading must be made integral to every class in which there is a text, even mathematics.
I am a former English teacher who is now a consultant teacher with my school district. As such, I work with 1st and 2nd year teachers in all disciplines. I have observed scores of math classes and have yet to see homework that involved any reading at all. Invariably the homework consists of problem sets. Why can’t the mathematical ideas, at least part of the time, be presented in written text? Why can’t teachers in any subject area be the last recourse for explanation, rather than the first? The TIMMS study indicted the American mathematics curriculum as being a “mile wide and an inch deep” and depicted American math teachers as constantly rescuing students with the correct answer. But it isn’t just math teachers who do this. In nearly every discipline teachers tell students what the text says. Students take notes. If they read at all, it is only once, and, more often than not, they don’t get it. Teachers see it as their job to make sure they do. So they front-load as much information as they can, dictate incredibly detailed notes, review test questions and have no satisfactory answer when students say, “You can’t put that on the test; you didn’t teach us that.” How about this answer: “I didn’t need to teach you, because the author did. If you didn’t get it, go back and listen to him again?”
The goal of education should be to wean the student from the teacher, to create a life-long independent learner. Much of what we call teaching, orally presented, with visual back-up, the essential curriculum, breeds dependency and passivity. The gateway to independence is reading. The Governor got that right. And the gateway to reading is re-reading.
Lest you think I’ve tossed all contemporary reading strategies aside as counterproductive, let me clarify my view. There is a place for those strategies, and certainly for readers whose ability to decode is severely lacking, or whose comprehension level is so low as to put him at risk for retention, early intervention is necessary. But it does not follow that early intervention is the best course of action for the reader in the middle, what some have termed the dormant reader. Most conventional strategies have enabled his dormancy, rather than eradicated it. Until he comes to believe that he cannot succeed without reading and re-reading, he will wait us out, in the secure knowledge that alarm bells have rung and scaffolding is on the way.
I spent six years as a medic in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. I met many a malingerer trying to avoid the daily drill. But I never did meet the soldier who saw everything twice. Nor have I met the student who read everything twice either. I think we need to find him.
1Joseph Heller,Catch-22 (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1955, 1989), p. 191.
2Dr. Kate Kinsella, Expository Scaffolds for Developing Readers in Content Area Classrooms (Department of Secondary Education, San Francisco State University, 2000) Workshop Videotape
3J. David Cooper, Literacy: Helping Children Construct Meaning (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1997) p. 6.
You may remember Yossarian, the malingerer in the Air Cops. on Pianosa in World War II’s Catch-22.1 The novel opens in the hospital where Yossarian has “a pain in his liver that falls just short of being jaundice.” Yossarian’s efforts to avoid combat meet with mixed results since the world of war, as conceived by the author Joseph Heller, is a nightmare of irony and contradiction. But events turn fortuitous when, in Chapter 18, Yossarian meets the “soldier who saw everything twice.” Heller’s comedy reaches its height in this clever character who buffaloes the medical brass with a set of symptoms only Yossarian can recognize as sheer genius. No matter how many fingers the doctor holds up, the “soldier who saw everything twice” responds “two.” Yossarian follows his lead and also sees everything twice.
"The soldier who saw everything twice nodded weakly and sank back on his bed. Yossarian nodded weakly too, eyeing his talented roommate with great humility and admiration. He knew he was in the presence of a master. His talented roommate was obviously a person to be studied and emulated. During the night, his talented roommate died, and Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.
“'I see everything once!' he cried quickly." (p. 191)
The dark humor of Catch-22 is often lost on students who read it only once, or not at all, relying on class discussion and teacher lecture to prepare them for its test. Too many of our students read next to nothing at all, certainly not the myriad, expensive texts the taxpayers have purchased for them. A precious few read everything once. Where is the student who reads everything twice?
Governor Davis of California announced his reading initiative two years ago, terming reading the “gateway skill.” But students, as early as the 4th grade, know that the gateway skill is not reading, but listening and taking notes. It is not that students cannot read, for most can. It is that reading is peripheral to learning. Nearly all learning, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, comes to students orally, often supported by visual overheads and charts. It is no wonder that the multiple intelligences remind us continually that students are auditory and visual learners. They have spent a dozen years becoming both. For how many students is the preferred learning style independent reading and study?
I am not talking about reading novels. English teachers have done a marvelous job with their sustained silent reading programs, matching reader to engaging reading. But who among us has taught students to read and study informational texts, such as content area textbooks, and then tested them on their independent reading and study of that text and not our rendering of it?
Dr. Kate Kinsella of San Francisco State University describes the relationship between teacher and student as co-dependent2 and I have witnessed such a relationship in my own classes and those of my peers, that is, teachers become facilitators of student learning in the absence of student reading. I have also watched a troubling inversion in teaching skills and student competence; that is, teaching practice has improved impressively since I joined the profession in 1968 and, ironically, learner skills have fallen. I think the latter also drives the former. The more students abdicate their role in the learning process, the greater the drive on the part of idealistic teachers to offset that slide. But the former also drives the latter. Teachers have armed themselves with such an impressive array of strategies and are so committed to their students’ learning that the typical student knows psychologically that the system will “enable” him to learn, in spite of his low-level of involvement, that teachers and counselors and principals will provide whatever scaffolding is necessary to ensure his success.
How did we arrive at such a critical juncture? The root of the problem is a misdiagnosis of the reading problem and is grounded in a faulty reading of test scores. Conventional wisdom says that reading instruction in the primary grades has failed a significant portion of our students and remediation in the upper grades, middle school and high school is necessary for the success of these students. The reading task has been sundered into segments and strategies created to bring these students up to grade level. But J. David Cooper in Literacy: Helping Children Construct Meaning, concludes, with regard to reading research:
"The research does not clearly support the identification of any set of comprehension skills; nor is there specific evidence that teaching students main-idea, sequence, cause-and-effect, or other concepts will make them better comprehenders. . . . comprehension is not a set of discrete skills. (p. 6)"3
Conventional wisdom assumes that these students don’t read because they can’t read, or that they read, but don’t comprehend what they read, because they cannot comprehend it. A different set of assumptions would still recognize the same problem, that students don’t read, but would lead to a far different solution. Students do not read because reading is not necessary to success in school. The absolutely critical skills in school are listening to what your teacher and your classmates say, taking good notes and asking the right questions. If this is, indeed, the correct diagnosis of the problem, then what is the solution?
At a recent educational meeting I attended, the presenter said, “Re-structuring is easy. All you have to do is pass a law. Re-culturing is much more difficult.” The entire culture of the K-12 educational establishment is committed to this oral model, from staff development to the kindergarten classroom. It is beyond the ability of any single teacher to change it.
Recall any recent conference you have attended. Perhaps some of what follows will sound familiar. The presenter takes pains to tell you that his presentation will be “brain compatible,” acknowledging the very latest research on adult learning. The content will come at you in chunks of no more than 20-30 minutes in length. Then time will be given for you to process the information, usually with your table partners, occasionally by writing. Often what follows the table group collaboration is a whole group recapitulation of what has been learned, by charting a few responses from each table group, or getting the participants on their feet to carousel the ideas on chart paper mounted on the walls. This is usually followed by a brief break and then the presenter chunks more material and the process repeats itself. Generally notebooks or hand-outs of written material are given to participants in support of the learning, but no time is given to read this material, except as “homework.” If the in-service is multi-day and the homework is skipped [as is the case with our own students] the presenter will chunk out the homework material the next day for us. At the end of the conference, the participant will leave with scads of written material, which will find its home in a file drawer or on a bookshelf, never to be perused.
Much may have been learned at the conference, but all learning essentially was oral and visual. In fact, charting has become such big business at conferences, that I attended a recent demonstration of “graphical recording.” The recorder demonstrated a series of icons, which essentially turned the chart into a cartoon. The ideas were more memorable, and that was the point, of course, but the content was severely trivialized. And all this has been sold to us as “brain compatible!” Is it any wonder that our own classrooms often embed this model? This raises the age-old dilemma of the chicken or the egg. Has brain research actually revealed the way the brain learns best, or simply the way the brain has been trained by our school system to learn? Is it possible to train the brain to learn through written discourse? We think we do that now, but I don’t agree.
Even reading in-services I have attended recently have relied on the above model, with the majority of the ideas being communicated orally and visually. The ideas themselves have “scaffolded” reading with both oral and visual support, urging such strategies as read-alouds, whereby the teacher demonstrates how good readers read, pausing to ask questions and make predictions; “popcorn” reading, where the material is read orally by the class, with each student reader “popcorning,” or designating the next reader; graphical organizers which allow students to organize ideas from their reading, and many more.
When my youngest daughter was learning to ski, we enrolled her in ski school and after two days of lessons, her instructor told me that she needed to put in some miles on the snow, that further lessons wouldn’t benefit her until she had done so. Too often in school we instinctively reach for the other solution. If the lessons aren’t working, we just need better lessons.
What, then, is the solution? I would like to offer first baby steps and then bigger ones.
First, some small steps, and these are steps designed for the language arts teacher.
1). Ask your students about their reading, specifically any textbook, or informational reading assigned. Students are honest, especially if you ask them directly and teacher to student. “Did you read the assignment last night; how much did you read; did you understand what you read; did you take notes; did you highlight or make marginal notes; if not, how much did you read; how much did you understand?” Move around the room and query as many students as possible.
2). Make reading a truly gateway skill, that is, crucial to success in the class. Assign some readings that you do not explain at all. Assign others that are subjected to nothing more than partner or small group discussion. Assign some readings that you conduct whole class discussion of, but provide no teacher interpretation about. The Great Books society offers outstanding training in this inquiry technique. Finally, assign readings that will be subjected to the standard teacher treatment: interpretation, close textual analysis, figurative language, symbols, mood, tone, point of view, etc. But try this twist; hand out your interpretation in writing. Ask the students to understand your view on the reading from the written word alone. Conduct discussion only after you are convinced they can go no further with your essay. You can use this sparingly, but it is a wonderful change of pace and honors written discourse.
3) Try a portion of a period every so often, or even one period a month, where everything transpires in writing, from the directions for the lesson, all questions and answers, and even partner discourse.
4) Discuss the reading your students are doing in other classes. Encourage them to read their texts. Perhaps, once or twice a month, give them half the period to read a text from another subject while in your class and help whomever you can.
5) Turn your class into students who read everything twice. Informational texts, especially most high school textbooks, are very difficult reads. The comprehension rate rises dramatically on a second reading. Encourage your students to wait until the 2nd reading to take notes, highlight or make marginal notations. Routinely ask the students who finish a reading in class to begin over again. This approach must be continually modeled and praised. If necessary, and it probably is, cover less material. You’ll find the learning goes deeper and lasts longer, especially if your students are getting most of the way on their own and only need you for the really tough parts.
6) Honor the very special relationship between writer and reader. For the most part, it is a silent communication and, all too often, the teacher, in an effort to be helpful, comes between the two. Read-alouds, where the teacher pauses to check for understanding and ask for predictions, are particularly intrusive. In our effort to be more helpful, we constantly interrupt the flow of the discourse and, among other things, ask struggling readers what is coming next. Research asserts that good readers are constantly predicting where the author is going and that is why their comprehension is so high. I challenge that. Good readers attune themselves to the writer, suspend their disbelief, and enjoy whatever revelations or surprises he may have planned for them, and, as it happens in real time, during the reading. In such a situation, the reader is “in the moment” with the writer. Predicting only makes struggling readers feel more incompetent.
7) Recent research also stresses the role of prior knowledge in the construction of meaning in a text. Many of my colleagues, and myself included, have gone to absurd lengths to connect their students’ prior knowledge with Hamlet or The Odyssey. Prior knowledge is crucial to comprehension, but prior knowledge is the first reading. And that is exactly why second readings bear such amazing fruit. The comprehension of the 2nd reading is based largely on the prior knowledge of the first reading. Textbooks are so committed to the concept of prior knowledge, and so much material is front-loaded, that the special journey the author has envisioned for his reader, the light ironic tone, for example, is often compromised or completely aborted.
These small steps can be taken by any language arts teacher. The larger steps involve the reculturing of schools, from the 4th through the 12th grades, and in all secondary disciplines. It flows from the same essential premise: that students do not read because they do not need to. Reading must be made integral to every class in which there is a text, even mathematics.
I am a former English teacher who is now a consultant teacher with my school district. As such, I work with 1st and 2nd year teachers in all disciplines. I have observed scores of math classes and have yet to see homework that involved any reading at all. Invariably the homework consists of problem sets. Why can’t the mathematical ideas, at least part of the time, be presented in written text? Why can’t teachers in any subject area be the last recourse for explanation, rather than the first? The TIMMS study indicted the American mathematics curriculum as being a “mile wide and an inch deep” and depicted American math teachers as constantly rescuing students with the correct answer. But it isn’t just math teachers who do this. In nearly every discipline teachers tell students what the text says. Students take notes. If they read at all, it is only once, and, more often than not, they don’t get it. Teachers see it as their job to make sure they do. So they front-load as much information as they can, dictate incredibly detailed notes, review test questions and have no satisfactory answer when students say, “You can’t put that on the test; you didn’t teach us that.” How about this answer: “I didn’t need to teach you, because the author did. If you didn’t get it, go back and listen to him again?”
The goal of education should be to wean the student from the teacher, to create a life-long independent learner. Much of what we call teaching, orally presented, with visual back-up, the essential curriculum, breeds dependency and passivity. The gateway to independence is reading. The Governor got that right. And the gateway to reading is re-reading.
Lest you think I’ve tossed all contemporary reading strategies aside as counterproductive, let me clarify my view. There is a place for those strategies, and certainly for readers whose ability to decode is severely lacking, or whose comprehension level is so low as to put him at risk for retention, early intervention is necessary. But it does not follow that early intervention is the best course of action for the reader in the middle, what some have termed the dormant reader. Most conventional strategies have enabled his dormancy, rather than eradicated it. Until he comes to believe that he cannot succeed without reading and re-reading, he will wait us out, in the secure knowledge that alarm bells have rung and scaffolding is on the way.
I spent six years as a medic in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. I met many a malingerer trying to avoid the daily drill. But I never did meet the soldier who saw everything twice. Nor have I met the student who read everything twice either. I think we need to find him.
1Joseph Heller,Catch-22 (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1955, 1989), p. 191.
2Dr. Kate Kinsella, Expository Scaffolds for Developing Readers in Content Area Classrooms (Department of Secondary Education, San Francisco State University, 2000) Workshop Videotape
3J. David Cooper, Literacy: Helping Children Construct Meaning (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1997) p. 6.