Ah, back to school! My children had their second day of school today, and I will tell you I am enjoying their willingness to crawl sleepily into bed by 8 p.m. No more bedtime battles from kids whose brains have been on hold for the past six weeks. It's "hit the books' for you, Buster. And we're all glad.
My kids, 8 & 10, are voracious readers. That is, they can read Walt Disney comic books for hours. I love the sound of them reading. An occasional whip-schwufffff as they turn the page; a sigh; a giggle; an elbow that falls from the table as they lose themselves in the storyline.
Uh. Storyline?
Well, there is one. Always. It's just masked by the cutsy illustrations, is all.
Then I got to wondering if we're doing our kids a disfavor by being so lenient in the literature department. In a panic, I raced to the bookstore with the kids late last week and bribed them with two new books. Chapter books, I might add. They had very few pictures and the print was even smaller than the stuff they squish into those bubbles over Mickey's head. I told them they were allowed to go back to school on one condition. That they each read their entire book by Tuesday.
They both finished them in one sitting.
I suppose comics aren't all that bad after all. But if you believe a new report from Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY), Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Readiness, adolescent literacy is the thing we have to watch out for. U.S. students in fourth grade score among the best in the world, yet by tenth-grade students score among the lowest in the world. Add to the mix that the US economy was recently trumped by the Swiss one when named by the World Economic Council as the most competitive economy on the planet, and you've got yourself some concerned leaders.
In a phrase: readers are leaders.
So there will be many more chapter books in our household before their school days are over. We certainly won't be Mickey Mousing around on this one.
