By Jim Studer
Sitting in the judges’ lounge at a speech tournament in the late 1970s, I overheard a conversation between two mothers. “If my son comes home with another worksheet or workbook from his so-called reading teacher, I will scream.”
The other parent responded, “I know my son hates to read and isn’t very good at it. I think those who are poor readers are driven further away from it by the methods they use to reverse the issue.” I know I don’t have the exact words to the conversation, but I know I have accurately captured the feelings.
A few years later I was assigned the task of teaching a nine week class to below average readers at Maple Lake. I didn’t have a clue as to how to do something that ten or more years of schooling hadn’t already done. I always hated workbooks, worksheets and avoided them in my classroom.
I began by having my students read aloud in class, or to at least try. Most of them knew many of the words, but they had no sense of phrasing, no sense of the rhythm of the language. What they read made little sense to them or me for that matter.
What to do? I knew I had to try something different. I convinced my speech team that it would be fun to put half of John Steinbeck’s short novel, Cannery Row, on tape. I planned to play the tape for my reading class. I got enough copies of the book for each kid. Cannery Row is set in the Depression Era. A half dozen or more unemployed young men with a lack of scruples eked out a living by doing odd jobs such as collecting frogs for a biological researcher, tending bar, and bending rules to their often unlawful advantage. The book is set in Monterey, California amid the many closed fishing canneries. The book is packed with drama and humor.
I told my non-readers that we were going to read Cannery Row. We would start by listening to the story on tape, courtesy of the Maple Lake High School speech team. I outlined the way it would work:
I play the tape; they follow along line by line. I stop the tape and select a student to read the next sentence. If the reader doesn’t know where we are, the penalty is to write out that chapter in long hand and turn it in two days later. If it wasn’t turned in, the non-reader would receive an incomplete for the quarter which eventually turned into an F if never completed. I don’t remember one kid having to do the writing.