Two or three years ago, I had a go around with my daughter's school because they were demanding that books read for school be in a certain lexile range. Hers was high enough that everything in the school library was disqualified, and she was panicking because she couldn't find anything. That led to me researching just what 'lexile' means and how it's determined* and then getting mad enough to spit nails.
Fortunately, the school backed down. The things that the public library's reference staff dug up that were in the right lexile were all things that were likely to make her hate reading. It reminded me of 7th grade reading class which required us to read books with a certain number of new-to-us words that we could look up, define, and then use in sentences. I ended up going to Shakespeare for that and then discovering that the dictionaries I had access to (around 1980) didn't contain half of the words I wanted to look up.
*Because a string of 40 words taken from some random place in a given book will always yield exactly the same results, right? There's nothing wrong with a system that consistently rates different, unabridged editions of the same text at wildly different numbers or that puts one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books at a higher difficulty than either the King James Bible or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, right?
I know that it's better than zero guidelines for teachers for steering kids on school assignments when they don't have time to help each child individually, but when I looked at the system, it came across as being as arbitrary as limiting kids by the physical weight of the book or by the color of the binding. It's been years, and I'm still pissed off about it.
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Date: 2018-02-19 09:18 pm (UTC)Fortunately, the school backed down. The things that the public library's reference staff dug up that were in the right lexile were all things that were likely to make her hate reading. It reminded me of 7th grade reading class which required us to read books with a certain number of new-to-us words that we could look up, define, and then use in sentences. I ended up going to Shakespeare for that and then discovering that the dictionaries I had access to (around 1980) didn't contain half of the words I wanted to look up.
*Because a string of 40 words taken from some random place in a given book will always yield exactly the same results, right? There's nothing wrong with a system that consistently rates different, unabridged editions of the same text at wildly different numbers or that puts one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books at a higher difficulty than either the King James Bible or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, right?
I know that it's better than zero guidelines for teachers for steering kids on school assignments when they don't have time to help each child individually, but when I looked at the system, it came across as being as arbitrary as limiting kids by the physical weight of the book or by the color of the binding. It's been years, and I'm still pissed off about it.