A report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that 65 percent of Maine fourth-graders scored below grade proficiency in reading in 2009. Although the remaining 35 percent of students who met or exceeded the standard was slightly better than the national average, this is not a statistic you should expect the Maine Department of Education to be shouting from the rooftops any time soon.
Thirty-five percent is pretty good if you are talking baseball. Any ballplayer consistently hitting .350 in the big leagues would be assured of fame and fortune, regardless of his reading ability. In the business of teaching kids reading skills, however, batting .350 is not considered a great accomplishment. Once a child morphs into an adult and is thrust upon the real world to fend for himself, low reading ability can translate to low pay and the low quality of life of a dead-end job.
“From kindergarten to grade three, a child learns to read. From grade four on, a child reads to learn,’’ said Dean Crocker of the Maine Children’s Alliance, in commenting on the report. Newspaper editorialists seized upon the sound bite to call for greater effort at the state level to fix the reading skills glitch.
The reading skills news story broke the day after I had become engrossed in a yellowed and frail old reading textbook — a book I bought for a pittance at a yard sale years ago and had forgotten was lying unappreciated in an upstairs closet. When I say the book is old, I mean old — as in Abraham Lincoln and Civil War era old.
The title page of Sanders’ Union Fourth Reader, published in 1863 by Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor and Co. of New York and Chicago, guarantees that the textbook “embraces a full exposition of the principles of rhetorical reading; with numerous exercises for practice, both in prose and poetry, various in style and carefully adapted to the purposes of teaching in schools of every grade.’’
A preface by author Charles W. Sanders explains that in his work “the greatest variety of style and sentiment has been sought … The labor extended in this direction, though all unseen by the casual observer, has been neither light nor brief.’’
He promises teachers that there is “scarcely a tone or modulation, of which the human voice is capable, that finds not here some piece adapted precisely to its best expression. There is not an inflection, however delicate, not an emphasis, however slight, however strong, that does not here meet with something fitted well for its amplest illustration.’’
“No tenderness of pathos, no earnestness of thought, no play of wit, no burst of passion, is there, perhaps, of which the accomplished teacher of Elocution may not find the proper style of expression in these pages, and, consequently, the best examples for the illustration of his art.’’ Although the man may never have met the comma he didn’t absolutely love, he did have a great way with words.
In a section on elocution — “the art of delivering written or extemporaneous composition with force, propriety and ease’’ — he stresses the importance of articulation, accent, emphasis, inflection, modulation and pauses. Articulation, he suggested, “is the basis of all good reading, and should be carefully practiced by the reader.’’
The Fourth Reader also offers Rules For The Use of Inflections — “the monotone, the rising inflection, the falling inflection, the circumflex’’ — when reading aloud. “The inappropriate use of the monotone — a fault into which young people naturally fall — is a very grave and obstinate error,’’ he warns. “It is always tedious, and often even ridiculous. It should be studiously avoided.’’ Which, I suppose, could be what some readers may be wishing they had done wherein it concerns the reading material presently before them.
In any event, my articulation of the bottom line would be this: I have no idea whether today’s teachers might employ any of the Sanders devices to introduce their young charges to the joys of reading. Nor do I know why the wheels appear to have fallen off the enterprise. But I am certain that to slog through life without the ability to read — and to distinguish what’s worth reading — would be one long and tedious grind best not attempted by amateurs.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.