The first chapter of Kylene Beers' book, When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do is a familiar story to anyone who has entered the field of education under difficult circumstances. It paints a picture of a young teacher's struggles with disillusionment and inadequacy, as well as a student's silent pleas for the assistance of a teacher unqualified to help. It is a moving story that sheds an illuminating light into the crux of so many problems in American public education: teachers who would like to do more but can't. The story is well-written and compelling. It is also wholly unoriginal.
The story of a young teacher's first year and the corresponding struggles is a story that has been told. It does a good job to frame the rest of the book and personalize the author, but there is very little applicable information, save for a few clever analogies. However, there is one line that I found absolutely fascinating, not so much for it's substance, but for its implications.
On page seven, Beers states that "when kids give up and drop out, they perpetuate the vicious cycle in which their offspring grow up in an alliterative environment and become the next generation of struggling readers." Such a statement asks the reader to see illiteracy not as a collection of individual cases, but almost as a form of intellectual de-evolution in which illiteracy is passed almost like a generic trait to the next generation. By this logic, if illiteracy can be seen as a trait transferrable to the next generation, then literacy can be seen in the same light. Therefore, each teacher/school system that is able to bestow upon a student the ability to read and the love of reading sufficient to sustain that over the course of a lifetime positively impact not only the life of that child, but of generations of children whom that student may eventually produce.
In Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Gladwell defines a sociological tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." He postulates that "[i]deas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." Beers' description of the process of increasing national literacy seems to suggest that proficiency in reading, while not as quick-moving as a virus, is capable of spreading in a similar fashion, albeit somewhat slower due to the fact that the act is only transmitted generationally. Therefore, once we, as a nation reach our literacy 'tipping point,' it is possible that literacy will begin to perpetuate itself, rather than continue as a series of individual and unconnected struggles.
This is a fascinating concept, and something to consider when we look at how literacy has evolved in today's fast-paced world. If 'alliterative environments' produce illiterate children and 'literate environments' do the opposite, what implications might our current societal move away from the relics physical texts and slow, deliberate research and towards multi-media communication and instantaneous answers have for the literacy of future generations. Is there is similar technological 'tipping point' when the act of reading as we know it will be forever altered by our increasing use of technological substitutes?
Incidentally, Gladwell's text is placed on the 11-12th grade complexity band for informational texts accoeding to the CCSS, which one would assume means that students in all classroom across America will be exposed to the text starting in 2014 and continuing in perpetuity. One wonders whether future readers will be reading that text, or watching it on YouTube. Only time, and the 'tipping point' will tell.
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