English department teacher Christian Barner teaches his “hybrid class” during fourth period on Jan. 24. The class was reading a play aloud, with each student taking on a part. “There’s no elaborate strategy or even simple strategy. You just read, and then read some more, and read some more,” English department teacher Ian Altman said. “That’s how you get better at reading. There’s no secret to it, and there’s no psychological mystery to it. You just have to read a lot. And there’s decades of research showing that you became a better writer by reading a lot.” Photo by Katy Mayfield.
By KATY MAYFIELD – Print Viewpoints Editor
To combat below-average literacy at Clarke Central High School, English department teachers Ian Altman and Christian Barner are teaching Lit/Comp 9 from a new angle.
English department teachers Ian Altman and Christian Barner are thinking outside the box to combat illiteracy in Clarke Central High School: they teach combinations of the Lit/Comp 9 credit and traditional reading classes.
“So they’re small sections of Lit/Comp 9. They carry exactly the same credit as all the ninth grade credits that (English department teachers) Mr. (Zachary) Thrower and Ms. (Judy) Johnson and Ms. (Sharon) Barnes teach,” Altman, who proposed the hybrid program, said. “But the difference is that we’re not following their planning teams’ units and all of that, and we’re trying to run it differently. And what it amounts to is–on the theory that you become a better reader by reading a lot–we just read.”
Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) scores from the 2015-16 school year showed that 60 percent of Clarke County School District high school students read below their grade level. With the hybrid program, Altman and Barner aimed to improve students’ reading ability.
“The students were chosen based on SRI scores, which are not really a good indicator of reading ability, but they’re the best we have, so that’s what we used. We didn’t choose the students who are really low on the SRI scale,” Altman said. “So there’s grade level for ninth graders, then there’s this group that are not quite to grade level, and that’s who we chose. Our hope is we can kind of bring them up to speed by the end of the year.”
Altman and Barner each teach one “hybrid” class of fewer than 18 students, which usually consists of whole-class reads of a selected text, followed by independent reading.
“(We) read. That’s all we do, read, read, read, read. Beginning of class, read for the first twenty minutes. Go to lunch. Come back. Read even more. And that’s all,” freshman Emma Goldman*, who takes Altman’s hybrid class during fourth period, said.
Goldman occasionally gets tired of the reading, but notices a difference in her abilities.
“It’s helping me with my reading and comprehending skills and all that stuff because I used to be like, I could read and not really know what I was talking about,” Arnold said. “Now I can like read the first page and know what was happening.”
Altman hopes for his students to take from the class what Goldman describes.
“I want A) for students to realize that they can read and can get something out of reading beyond just good scores on a quiz. And I want them to be able to read better and more deeply, and to have some capacity for analysis beyond the basic concrete level of plot,” Altman said.
As for the 2017-18 school year, Altman says a large part of the program’s continuation hinges on scheduling.
“Part of the difficulty of having these sections is that while we’re taking, between the two of us, about 32 students away from the ninth grade classes upstairs, we’re taking two sections. We’re taking a Lit/Comp 10 section and a Lit/Comp 11 section away from those two grade levels, meaning that the other Lit/Comp 10 and Lit/Comp 11 classes are a lot bigger,” Altman said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t do it again, it’s just, we don’t wanna do this at the expense of our colleagues and the students in their huge classes.”
*The ODYSSEY has decided to use the pseudonym ‘Emma Goldman’ to protect the student’s identity.
