On Fri, 8 Dec 1995, Roger Graves wrote: I > think they actually had a raffle of somekind--kids got tickets by having > their parents/family read with them, one ticket for each night. . . Anyway, my advice would be for initiatives that > grounded reading in social contexts that were rewarding, in reading that > gave the student fun/interest/excitement, and in writing that helped them > explain their world (from poetry to handbooks about how the school gets > run). ______________________________________________________________________ Given the state of education funding and the growth of corporate/school "partnerships," we should be careful with the idea of "rewarding" readers. I think that there is a fundamental difference between the two types of rewards Roger refers to. The first, which I think has been done by some schools in conjunction with Pizza Hut, rewards students with a "pay-off" (and simultaneously acts as a mechanism to get the whole family in to dine with the rewardee at full cost). Here reading is a productive means to a material end, basically a form of cheap labour for the company. The subtext of this lesson is to cast reading in a utilitarian light, to enhance brand-name awareness and attract life-long customers, and to to get some cheap publicity and goodwill for the participating company. The second, which is congruent with the educational practice that I think we are all striving for, hinges on seeing reading as a rewarding activity per se, in all of its intellectual, emotional, social, cultural, etc. senses. As a parent of a two-year-old, my suggestion is to introduce books as early as at all possible. Pre-literacy - the active knowledge that words and books have meanings and provide pleasures and "rewards" - is an important first stage towards enhancing literacy in elementary schools. Of course, the inter-generational passing down of literacy skills and the social and embodied "habitus" of reading is still anchored in social privilege, and I recognize that my comments do not invalidate the practical suggestions of Roger and others, nor do they address the urgency of teaching kids in the here and now. Michael Hoechsmann, OISE