52 Short Books for 11-CCR Students: TLDR and What HS Students Are Reading (and NOT)

image: from OpenClips on Pixabay

TLDR: Too Long, Didn't Read.  Scroll down if you want to skip this short read and go directly to The List.

A recently released study by Renaissance Learning finds that HS seniors read on average 5.2 books a year, down from 55.4 in grade 2 and 16.2 in grade 6.  There is also a decline in the number of words contained in the reading, from a high in grade 6 (419,121) to 304,252 in grade 12.

Wait a minute.  Do the math.  The books read by HS students must be longer.  That must explain the decline in the number of books read.

Nope. My quick study of the Top 20 lists for 6th and 12th grades provided in the report suggests that 6th graders are actually reading longer books, on average, than their HS counterparts, who are overwhelmingly reading fiction under 250 pages (must have small print). With the exception of The Hunger Games (which first appears on the grade 5 list, 810L) and another light read titled Safe Haven (830L), the longer texts read are found in the bottom (least read) 10. These include some zingers: Twilight (another light read but 544p 770L), Kite Runner (402p  840L), and Divergent (501p HL700L). Hardly a sterling list in terms of challenge.

Supporting my contention that 12th grade students are selecting books well below what they should be reading is the report's finding that the average ATOS book level (similar to the lexile scale) in grade 12 is 7.1 (one month into 7th grade).  The average ATOS in grade 6 is 5.3, which is not great, but at least it's not embarrassing.

I don't think too much should be made of this report, although it purports to be important (it's important for Renaissance Learning). How many of these titles are assigned and how many are choice independent reading?  The titles are all Accelerated Reader quizzed titles, which certainly directs choice and limits what titles are entered into the data.  The identity of the cohort is unclear; the HS students in the sample may not - probably do not - represent the full top-bottom range of student readers.

On the other hand, today's NPR post Why Aren't Teens Reading Like They Used To? reiterates the Renaissance report's finding that HS students are reading well below the level recommended by CCSS and other standards. It is possible to chalk the Renaissance report up as representative of the American public school student reading population.  OK through 5th grade in terms of fiction reading quality and quantity, but downhill from there.  Too far downhill in the 11-12 grades.

The essays which "pepper" the Renaissance report stress the importance of e-reading in today's classroom, suggesting perhaps that digital texts will spur students to read more.  I believe it is valid that e-reading is engaging and, for readers who use the tools, supportive of deeper reading. But a page-turner is a page-turner and a plod is a plod and long is long and a tool can not change that. What needs to change is access to better reading choices.

If we want our HS students to read more than 5.2 fiction titles a year (I am not mentioning nonfiction because the report finds it amounts to no more than 15% of their reading, despite recommendations to the contrary), we need to consider the fact that, in their/our culture of e-communication and e-research, TLDR (Too Long Didn't Read) is a message HS students send out every day.  By not reading.  By selecting short rather than longer titles.  By selecting easy reads with ATOS reading level 5-6.

This is not helping/challenging/growing our students.  What we need to offer HS students are high quality, high challenge, high engagement short books.

I have spent some time with lexile.com and with good lists over the last few days.  It is possible to mine the classics and good contemporary fiction for excellent short books.  Alas, many of these probably are not in the Accelerated Reader quiz bank.  You may not have read or heard of many of them.  But it's high time HS readers were encouraged to make better reading choices, so gather up as many of these titles as you can.

My arbitrary short book cutoff is 250 pages.  Where possible, lengths are from lexile.com. Amazon.com is the backup.

Here is my list of 52 short fiction books (and one or two nonfiction titles) for 11-12 grade readers, generated by mining lexile.com (for pages and lexile ranges) and other lists.  They are in lexile order, something a bit questionable, but at least this is a consistent measure in line with Common Core standards. More about that later. Only two titles have been carried over from the Renaissance report's grade 12 top 10.  It adds up to one book a week for a year.

Note: We can not really rely on lexiles to determine suitability and challenge. Examples: most of Gary Paulsen measures well over 1100L and ditto with the best of Zindel (e.g. The Undertaker's Gone Bananas measures 1050). Both novelists are great for MS, but with only a few exceptions are not suitable for HS. Ray Bradbury and Steinbeck, on the other hand, score much lower on the lexile scale than this reader would expect and are suitably complex for HS. Of Mice and Men belongs on this list, but since it is often read in grade 9 or 10 anyway, I have omitted it.

Moreover, many non-Western titles and short story collections have not been lexiled. Surprise! My list is more multicultural than most lists.

The Common Core, by the way, has realigned lexile bands with grade levels to make "stretch" reading the norm. Only the last 2 books on my list fall within the 11-CCR band.  That's absurd. A book does not have to have a lexile over 1200 in order to be great or to be an intellectual challenge for a 16 year old. I stand by all of these short books for 11-CCR.

The List, in lexile order (do you notice a pattern in the titles not lexiled?):

1. Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue - Lester - not lexiled
2. I See You - Shukri - not lexiled (fictional contemporary African country) - a Best Book of 2014, Africa is a Country
3. Every Day is for the Thief - Cole - not lexiled - selected for many Best of 2014 lists (Nigeria)
4. Citizen: An American Lyric - Rankine - not lexiled - America Book Award 2014 shortlist - poems and short pieces
5. The Thunder that Roars - Garda - not lexiled (South Africa, Muslim)
6. How to Escape from a Leper Colony (stories) - Yanique - not lexiled 
7. The Strange Library - Murakami - not lexiled
8. The Dead Lake - Ismailov - not lexiled (trans. from Russian)
9. Family Life - Sharma - not lexiled - India/America - Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review and New York Magazine
10. Things We Found During the Autopsy - Manickavel - not lexiled - South Indian short fiction - a Best Book of 2014, Africa is a Country
11. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood - Satrapi GN380 (Iran) or American Born Chinese - Yang GN580
12. The Metamorphosis - Kafka 670 or The Room - Karlsson - not lexiled - find a great short film of the Kafka here.
13. When the Emperor Was Devine - Otsuka  810
14. Snow Country - Kawabata 820
15. Drown - Diaz 830 (stories, Dominican Republic immigrants)
16. If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home - O'Brien  830 or How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America - Laymon - non-lexiled (NF)
17. Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut 850
18. Things Fall Apart - Achebe 890
19. Ceremony - Silko 890  (Laguna Pueblo)
20. Grendel - Gardner 920
21. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith - Keneally - 920
22. The Thing Around Your Neck (stories) - Adichie  920 (estimated) (Africa and United States)
23. Montana 1948 - Watson 940
24. Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel - Coetzee 940
25. The Bluest Eye - Morrison 960
26. July's People - Gordimer 970
27. Being There - Kosinski - 980
28. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids - Oe 1000
29. Nothing - Teller 1000
30. The Pearl - Steinbeck 1010
31. Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction - Oates, ed 1020
32. The Secret Agent - Conrad 1030
33. Frankenstein - Shelly  1040 
34. The First Fast Draw - L'Amour 1040
35. Interpreter of Maladies (stories) - Lahiri 1050 (India, United States)
36. The Heart of Darkness - Conrad 1050
37. The Crying of Lot 49 - Pynchon 1060
38. The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald 1070
39. The Time Machine - Wells 1070
40. Bridge of San Luis Rey - Wilder 1080 (or perhaps The Scatter Here is Too Great - Tanweer, set in Karachi - not lexiled)
41. The Bad Seed - March 1100
42. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Spark 1120
43. Picnic at Hanging Rock - Lindsay 1140
44. The Bridges of Toko-Ri - Michener 1140
45. My Life in Dog Years - Paulsen 1150  (NF)
46. Animal Farm - Orwell 1170
47. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Haddon 1180
48. Hiroshima - Hersey  1190
49. Ransom - Malouf 1200 (estimated lexile)
50. Forrest Gump - Groom  1210
51. Eighteen Best Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe - Poe 1220
52. Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Marquez 1270

It goes without saying that most of these books will require more effort to read than The Hunger Games trilogy. That effort is one of the reasons that readers find Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men and Gatsby turn-offs and Percy Jackson so captivating, and it is probably the real motivation behind TLDR. Educators can give in to this, or they can combat it with titles like those above. One approach builds lists of easy, long, page-turners; the other approach builds better and better-educated readers. Your choice.

This is, of course, just one solution to our national non-reading dilemma. There are others:

• If you really want students to be stretched, assign books and articles about fiction and authors.  That's the best place for students to meet those higher lexile texts.  Some might find these essays lead them to great novels.
• Allow/encourage your students to read multi-culturally and diversely.
• Celebrate the humanities as well as STEM.
• Write and read.  Introduce students to living writers and their works.
• Encourage collaborative reading in 11-12 grades.  What?  This means groups encouraged to read like a book club reads.  
• Invest in great audio books for your students. Time well spent.
• PBL: Oral histories of the reading memories of parents and seniors; Twitter reading selfies and campaigns.

Want to add a book or an idea?  Write a comment or email me directly.

10 Ways to Use 10: The Rule of 10 in the Classroom

A recent piece in the Huffington Post, 10 Reasons Why Handheld Devices Should Be Banned For Children Under the Age of 12, has gone viral. The post (column, piece) has spawned intelligent criticism from many fronts, very good ones found in the Huffington Post and in Slate (read together, these are a terrific example of how the written word can make both argument and opinion.) Undoubtedly this is largely because of the provocative nature of Rowan's proposition, but I suspect an additional reason is the piece's construction: any post with a title beginning "10 Reasons" will be read.  There are currently 601,000,000 results for a Google search on this phrase.

Why is this?  Maybe because we are a decimal culture.  Maybe because 10 is stronger than 5 or 3, but not overwhelming like 50 or underwhelming like "a dozen." The power of 10 is as great as, but very different from, the power of 3.  

I teach both The Rule of 3 and The Rule of 10 as essential elements of literacy.  "3" is concise. It is a comfortable number of repetitions that can be changed incrementally without the reader becoming lost or bored. It is symmetrical but also edgy. In almost any array of 3, no matter how presented or communicated, one element will come first, one will be in the middle, and one will be at the end, which is both satisfying and suspenseful (variations on this are more interesting).  "3" is the foundation of the standardly taught paragraph and the 5-paragraph essay (BOO to both).  

However satisfying, The Rule of 3 is also childlike in its simplicity. It is the stuff of tales that wrap up neatly and of short-lived arguments.  It is about keeping within the frame.

On the other hand, "10" begs for busting out.  Any list of 10 is really just a tenth of a list of 100. Any list of 10 can easily be expanded. Readers intuitively understand this. A list of 10 is affirming, authoritative, solid, and, potentially, endlessly entertaining.  

The Rule of 10 is about growth and possibility, change and conflict, energy and age.  I have also always found something compellingly chilly in the combination of the loneliness digit and the emptiness digit.  Flipping them creates a neat reduction, repeating them results in a confusion of binary code streaming across a pale green monitor... 10 is the stuff of the digital age as well as The Age of Kings.

The Rule of 10 is a rule for today's students.  

So how can we make it work for us in the classroom?  Here are 10 Ways to Use of 10 at any grade level:

• I think lists are basically boring, but if you must make lists, require 10 items.  10 favorite...  10 examples of... 10 expressions...  10 adjectives...  10 poems...  10 novels... Where once you stopped at 3 or 5, to make it easy, make it challenging with 10.  Work with ordering or sorting the list in various ways.  4 + 6 is calming.  5 + 5 is a study in antithesis.  3 + 3 + 3 + 1 is a powerful structure for making meaning and conveying emotion.  Write about choices made.
• 10 letter words are wonderful.  There are many collections online. Study them, record them rolling off your tongue, play vocabulary games with them.  Require them.
• A great middle school exercise to improve listening and communication is pair-drawing.  Allow only 10 lines.  On partner draws (allow 10 seconds) behind a screen.  He then gives oral directions for his partner(s) to create the same drawing.  Practice!
• Read 10 (blog posts, articles, opinions, analyses, summaries, novels, poems).  This can also be applied to visual literacy.  Draw 10 connections.  
• Write (draw, illustrate, record) 10 different/connected/overlapping...  
• Memorize in groups of 10.  Old school, yes, but it worked then and it works now.  Use the same groupings from #1 to create mental collections.  Very powerful skill.
• Model the 10-sentence paragraph (most students will quickly see how this can be expanded).  In fiction study, have students seek out 10 sentence passages that convey meaning, theme, etc.  Share them and use them as models.
• Study The Gettysburg Address.  It has 10 sentences.  Why?  How is it organized?  
• Apply The Rule of 10 to a longer text as a framework for analysis.  Where is the Rule found?  How does it improve or effect the overall construction?  (characters, chapters, settings, conflicts...)
• Expand or contract something 10 times.  This is a ripple or pattern exercise that can be used for multiple outcomes: a slippery slope argument (or the reverse, which I call "up the ladder"), brain storming, visual thinking, story-telling, creative narrative, description, development of arguments, coding...  I like to start with If You Give a Dog a Donut and also to use a simple paper-chain group activity to demonstrate how 10-step growth can create a complex or straightforward product.  The math link is obvious (multiplication, division, permutation - and what is a fraction anyway?).  

And why stop at 10?  If you remember playing Crack the Whip as a kid, on the field or on the ice, you know that the longer the whip the more forceful the lash. 3 is simply not much fun. Sometimes it hurts to be at the end of the whip, but it's worth it.  

On Listening to Poetry

The New Yorker has launched a new free podcast series, The Poetry Podcast.  Each episode, hosted by Paul Muldoon, contains a New Yorker poet reading a poem that he/she has selected from the magazine, followed by a conversation about that poem.  The poet then introduces and reads one of his/her own pieces.  

What a powerful tool for the study of poetry!  In this age of poetry minimized as paired text, often read only thematically, it is important for teachers to locate and use tools that support the reading of poetry as essential, elemental, text - deserving of both a leisurely and a personal reading.  

I quote from my own Scoop of this announcement:

Muldoon writes, "the eye is not the only buyer into, and beneficiary of, the poem. The ear has been in the poetry business for much longer, given poetry’s origins in the oral tradition."  What a model for classroom reading of poetry as text!  Share this episode, in which Philip Levine reads and discusses "What did I love about killing the chickens" by Ellen Bass.  A sure winner.  Some students might want to just visualize, some to draw while listening.  The text of the poem is in the New Yorker archive: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2013/02/04/130204po_poem_bass.  Connections are made to Whitman, Bishop, Harte Crane, Williams, Randall Jarrell and others during the discussion of the power of the poem's structure and diction.  Levine also reads and discusses his own poem, "In another country" :  http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2013/02/11/130211po_poem_levine. You might discuss how much - what, if anything - Levine's introduction adds to a reading of the poem.  Perhaps some students should read the poem before listening to the poet. 

I would add now that a careful listening to the discussion reveals not "close reading" but a very personal closing in on what makes this poem special.  I discuss this a bit in a previous post called Close Reading and Poetry. Were Levine and Muldoon to methodically attack the poem's use of image or antithesis, the poem itself would lose its life.  

There are other apps for listening to poetry.  The Poetry Foundation currently lists 1165 Poems with "related content," which includes a reading of the poem by the poet.  I am listening to/reading Douglas Kearney's "Every Hard Rapper's Father" as I write this - a fascinating experience.  His recording brings sense to the inventive presentation of the text as well an an emotional depth that can be missed without audio.

The Poetry Archive of poets-reading-their-own-poetry is another great source. Students can create and share a favorites list and browse by theme, poetic element or form.  Did you know Margaret Atwood wrote poetry?  Try "The Immigrants" for a contemporary (and historical) connection every bit as powerful as most Holocaust YA novels.  

Poetry Out Loud is another good source of audio. Navigate to the Listen to Poetry archive of readings. Additionally, and perhaps more powerfully for the student, are the videos of the Poetry Out Loud contest winners and finalists.  This used to be housed on the web site, but is now found on a YouTube channel.  I have used this to engage middle schoolers in recitation, oral reading, and (for the feint of heart) choral reading.  It often opens the door to a poet's work.

Student readers, as soon as they can read independently or memorize effectively, can create their own audio and video recordings and discussions of poetry.  VoiceThread is a great tool for this, but there are now many, many others.  In fact, just about any "presentation" or whiteboard app will do the job. 

One interesting tweak, and a useful one for many students, is to charge them to play the role of Paul Muldoon.  Find an adult or older student reader who will select, read, and discuss a favorite poem.  You are moving toward a PBL unit!  

Close Commenting: An Essential Skill

Conversation snippit: see 2nd paragraph

Have you ever read a blog post, Facebook update, or online news article then scrolled casually down, only to find CONTROVERSY?  These are not only the liveliest but also often the most thought-provoking scenarios in my web-day.

Consider this post by John Spenser at Education Rethink, a blog which I follow with a critical eye. John is gutsy and writes exactly what he means to say. But do you think he thought that Do We Still Need Schools and Teachers (A Thought on Holes in the Wall) would elicit a series of responses from Sugata Mitra?  I have met with Mitra (in a living room in Maine...) and I am not surprised.  I am a bit disappointed that John did not extend the conversation more.

Another of John's posts (Facebook), resulted in a long discussion about the content of a math test question.  Although I agree with John on this one (he continues his own thoughts in a 2nd blog post), I have to admit that many of the comments gave me pause.  I have not yet done so, but it seems to me that by stepping back and re-reading these comments, I might be able to isolate a significant problem within k-4 math education.

We are talking about small pieces of text in a list, yet the above are examples of the type of discussion that we should require our students to engage in.  In fact, standards ARE requiring students to have these discussions.

Close Comments are comments that extend, critique, further support, refine or otherwise analyze a specific argument or element in a text (yes, this could be a media text).

Consider your local online newspaper - it doesn't have to be the Times.  On a good day, literate and intelligent readers extend the conversation begun in an editorial, letter or article.  On a bad day (at least in Maine), after reading the comments you might consider moving to another state.  Either way, close comments from readers propel you, the reader, to more closely consider the issues and information, and they might propel you to reread the original text or follow a link suggested by a comment writer.

Think about this: If we expect - require - students to write not just 120 characters but full paragraphs about ideas - as we now must do beginning in grade 3 - why do we not require students to fully comment on the online texts they read, review, or edit?

I have taken to closely commenting on Scoop.it content that does not merit wide dispersal without comment.  More often than not, someone responds to my criticism, often multiple people, and a conversation is engaged. Were I simply to rescoop a scoop, post, or tweet, I would not be entering a conversation.  By and large, sharing tools lead to a scatterplot instead of a conversation. This has its place, surely, in trend detection and trend creation, which are critical thinking elements, but it is not an action that develops an essential thinking skill for learning.

In contrast, Close Commenting is itself a critical thinking skill.  

Excellent comments generate conversation.

But wait - there is more.  As noted in this Dot Earth post by Andrew Revkin, commenting can serve a social, political, and even an ethical purpose. This is all educational, for the reader as well as for the writer. We can view "crowd-commenting" as a mechanism for issue groups to "build their online presence through more engagement in comments on articles or blog posts" (source). What is a student analyst if not an issue group of 1? Through the mechanism of a commenting conversation, that student will develop, refine, and adapt his ideas and their evidence. 

Imagine if student "crowd-commenting" (or comment blitzing, to use Revkin's phrase) were used to:

• analyze a film's use of visual imagery to develop meaning  (sample: respond to The Shining Code 2.0)
• debate, using textual evidence, questions such as "Who is responsible for the deaths of Romeo and Juliet?" (respond to anchor paragraph or essay)
• present evidence supporting a poet's use of imagery to develop meaning (respond to anchor essay)
• trace an author's development of character or POV using textual evidence (respond to a passage or short story)
• explain the use of fairy tale patterns in The Hunger Games (respond to film of HG or to an animated video of "Hansel and Gretel"...)

And so on.  

But this will only work if the comments are factually and logically accurate, precise, and complete.  Emotional, unsupported, or vapid commentary, which often crowd the Comment field, can be effectively drowned out by extensive and documented discussion pertinent to the issue at hand (not necessarily in support of the initial assertion, either).  

The educational value of Close Commenting goes beyond the value of blogging.  When we require deep, critical, commenting, and assess it, we build the skills of both writing and close reading.  It is an essential skill.

At any age or school year or subject, a Close Comment should have these elements:

• a specific reference to a key element of the text (the original text or a comment to which the student is replying), quoted and introduced correctly: __________ [or You] states/asserts/proposes/criticizes X/assumes/identifies X, "______________________.") - this demonstrates that student has done a close reading of the source text
• a transitional or introductory word or phrase, which should avoid using "I" (Another argument/example/interpretation - On the other hand - The opposite is true - etc.)
• a discussion or logical explanation of the validity of the point being made
• (optional) a concise summary of what has been said

Sound familiar?

How to?  Do not just ask a question.  You must provide analytical or informational or argumentative text to which students will respond (not creative text).  I personally like provacative science texts, cartoons, short videos (include ads) and "out there" interpretations of events or texts.  Make yourself a collection of these appropriate to your students and your school.

The space (real or digital) to which you post this text must have a reply feature.  The space must be visual in that all Comments and the reply thread are visible to readers. Some suggestions:

• Safe: 
• digital classroom - using a blogging platform to which students have been given accounts (such as Google's Blogger through Google Education, Kidblog or edublogs), use a private post to post a text - invite students and begin the conversation 
• digital classroom - using an ed.Voicethread account to which students have accounts, post a text - invite students and begin the conversation
• ditto Thinglink
• post text on large paper or paste onto poster board - student can respond on index cards and attach responses, maintaining the vertical alignment of online comments and with horizontal space for branching (replies)
• digital use a "brainstorming" platform (such as to create a web
• Less safe:
• Scoop an article (after you have created an account and a Topic for yourself), send students to the URL or embed your Topic elsewhere online, and let the conversation begin
• use any blogging platform that can be accessed through your school, post a text, etc.
• embed Close Comments in YouTube videos that have been posted to YouTube
• Badges:
• recognize the best student Close Comments by making them source texts or by posting them in some way - in your comment, point out what makes this an excellent example

There are other tools for Close Commenting.  If you have a favorite, let me know.  Other ideas?