The Need for Speed.

In elementary and secondary schools, promptness of reading has always been emphasized by the educators. When students take reading tests, such as the MEAP, they are timed and unallowed to give themselves time to make meaningful connections in what they read.Many teachers attempt to test childrens fluency at reading by using charts which show how many words per minute the student is able to read. This is contradicting to what many people believe reading to be all about. Many teachers attempt to test childrens fluency at reading by using charts which show how many words per minute the student is able to read.

In Quest for Speed, Books Are Lost on Children

By Valerie Strauss

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2006; Page A10

Your fourth-grader is galloping through Lois Lowry's utopian novel "The Giver," and you marvel at her reading speed.

Stop marveling. Most likely she has little idea what the book actually means.

In many classrooms around the country, teachers are emphasizing, and periodically testing, students' reading fluency, the current buzzword in reading instruction. The problem is that speed isn't the only element to fluency, educators said. Key elements are also accuracy and expressiveness.

"The food was delectable" is different from "the food was detestable," and Shakespeare should not sound like a chemistry textbook.

It is a complicated process teaching students to recognize enough words and read at a consistent rate so they can spend their time concentrating on meaning rather than decoding, educators said. And when tackling a book such as "The Giver," one that deals with a boy's discovery that his utopian world comes at the expense of the stifling of intellectual and emotional freedom, meaning is critical.

"Fluent readers are readers who know how to dig into a book and pull out just what they are looking for -- whether it is information, a part with strong language, a part with good character development, or just a chance to read for fun," said Susan Marantz, a longtime teacher now at a suburban school in Columbus, Ohio.

As a result, some kids are motivated to read only to beat a test clock, he and other researchers said.

"Are kids responding well to fluency exercises?" asked Kylene Beers, a senior reading researcher at Yale University's School Development Program and chairwoman of the National Adolescent Literacy Coalition.

"The more important question to ask is: Are teachers focusing on all three parts of fluency?" Beers, vice president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, wrote in an e-mail. "When fluency is only about building automaticity (and therefore speed), then some [teachers] do mistakenly believe that the point of reading is fast decoding. That's no more the best measure of a skilled reader than fast driving is the best measure of skilled driver."

"They read so fast, with no punctuation and no expression, that we'd go back and ask comprehension questions and they weren't very successful answering them. They hadn't understood what they read," he said.

"It all comes down to the teacher," he said. "It's people, not programs."

This is just another way of ‘standardizing’ the experience many young people have in education. Instead of focusing on content and connections, students are told that the faster the better. Sometimes faster is better, when doing a math problem, spelling a word, or when needing to complete a test. Reading is reduced to a inferior level of objectivity.

This is also a direct way that teachers can form their pupils' reading skills. Not interrupting the student during their reading, pausing in between readings to help students understand the material, and helping them make personal connections to their own lives and worlds around them.