Writing, the Internet, Reading Development. . .

I had an interesting but strange event occur last week -- I learned that a superintendent in New York has been plagiarizing my writing, copying from my newsletters at Trottier and, a couple of weeks ago, from a posting on this blog, and passing it off as his writing in the newsletter that he sends to parents. I have a copy of one of his recent newsletters, the one that uses part of my previous blog entry, and it feels strange to see my writing in that context. I guess it's a compliment, in a way, but certainly a backhanded one. It's also a reminder that I think is a good one for everyone -- possibly particularly for young adults -- that the kind of Internet presence you establish is important, and that hiding and subterfuge are becoming less possible with the increasing "publicness" of life in the age of the Internet. For an insightful comment on the way in which posted material spreads rather than disappears, see last Sunday's Doonesbury cartoon (Sunday, November 8th) -- http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html. A very interesting book that I would recommend on this topic is Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, about the ways in which the social media are changing our lives; Shirky points out that the costs of group organization have in some contexts simply collapsed, and continues with a fascinating discussion of the results. Meanwhile, to the New York superintendent, if you are reading this -- thank you for the compliment, but please stop plagiarizing my work!

On a related topic, I have been thinking about reading a lot this fall. One thing that has been fascinating for me in my new role at Neary is to see the process of literacy development in children at an earlier stage, prior to middle school, and I have loved what I've been seeing in the classrooms that I've been in during the past couple of months. In the reading classrooms, students are learning and practicing reading strategies, instruction is tailored to the needs of particular students, and students are choosing their own books, spending time reading, and excitedly talking about the books they are reading. Teachers are using a variety of strategies to help students learn, including modeling strategies during read-aloud time, work with groups of students who are working on the same strategies, individual work with students, and providing time for students to practice. I'm talking every day with kids who are excited about reading, and having great conversations with them about the books they are reading!

To support what our teachers are doing in the classroom, I have a couple of suggestions for parents on the reading front, although you're probably already doing both of them. First of all, do read aloud to your children, as much as possible, and while you're reading discuss the story and occasionally talk through and model what you do as a reader to understand what you're reading (maybe you don't remember a character, so you go back and reread part of the previous chapter; maybe you don't know a word so you look at the context and think about what would make sense). The other suggestion, also emphasized by Dr. Ilda King, a reading consultant who gave a presentation on reading development last month (sponsored by the Northborough-Southborough Parent Advisory Council), is that kids develop into better readers by reading many easy books, so do encourage your children to read books that they understand and love to read. And your modeling is excellent -- if you are reading, and kids see that you enjoy it, they will, too. Obviously, I love reading -- and I hope that all our kids will come to love it and find it a source of lifelong pleasure!