dren’s writer? There is also a slowness to
this opening, as though he is making his
admission, piece by piece. Gantos has
given us a road map for the rest of the
book—if we pay attention.
Rethinking Time Limits
on Reading Tests
We currently give students with dis-
abilities additional time to complete
standardized tests; we should extend
testing situation can be humiliating, and
they quickly learn that they are set up
for failure. They often just fill in (or
make designs with) the bubbles on the
test. But in the real world, we frequently
compensate for our lack of speedy
comprehension by persevering and
spending more time on a task. These
patient, slower workers are often
extraordinarily valuable. In the folktale,
the turtle always wins.
ordinary miserable childhood is the
miserable Irish childhood, and worse
yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood” (p. 11). We can hear the way
McCourt repeats the words worse,
miserable, and Irish, creating an ascending
scale of misery. It’s a great sentence that
deserves attention.
A variation of this activity is a quote-
and-comment assignment in which
students copy out passages by hand that
they find particularly mean-
ingful and then comment on
why they chose those
passages. Copying a passage
slows us down and creates
an intimacy with the writer’s
style—a feel for word choice
and for how sentences are
formed. At the end of a unit
in which my students have
done a great deal of reading,
we celebrate by selecting
passages we want to hold on
to and reading them aloud
to the class. It always inter-
ests me to see which
passages the students select.
this opportunity to all students. Tests
place too high a premium on speed, and
limits are often set for administrative
convenience rather than because of a
reasoned belief in what makes good
readers.
Even as a strong reader, I felt pressed
in the reading passages section of standardized tests to exceed my normal
reading rate. I would resort to survival
strategies I never used voluntarily—
skimming, sampling, and beginning
with the questions.
For reluctant or slow readers, the
Annotating a Page
In this activity, students probe the craft
of a favorite writer. They pick a page
they really like, photocopy it, and tape
the photocopy to a larger piece of paper
so they have wide margins in which
they can make notations. Their job is to
give the page a close reading and mark
word choices, sentence patterns,
images, dialogue—anything they find
effective
For example, this sentence appears
on the opening page of Frank McCourt’s
Angela’s Ashes (1996): “Worse than the
Reading Poetry
Even in this age of efficiency
and consumption, it is
unlikely that anyone will
reward students for reading
a million poems. Poems can’t
be checked off that way. They demand a
slower pace and usually several read-
ings—and they are usually at their best
when read aloud.
© SUSIE FITZHUGH
My colleague Tom Romano begins
every one of his classes by reading a
poem aloud. He invites his students to
comment on images or lines that strike
them, although without engaging in the
overanalysis that killed poetry for many
of us. More than any other genre, poetry
calls on us to see the world differently,
to break out of conventional perception:
Images can “arrest” us—they can, as
