LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

The Demise of the SAT?

Today's New York Times reports that a growing number of colleges are allowing students to apply without admissions exams:

August 31, 2006
Students’ Paths to Small Colleges Can Bypass SAT
By TAMAR LEWIN

It is still far too early to sound the death knell, but for many small liberal arts colleges, the SAT may have outlived its usefulness.

Since Bowdoin and Bates dropped their testing requirements decades ago, more than a fourth of U.S. News & World Report’s Top 100 liberal arts colleges have made admissions exams optional, and new ones are joining the list at a quickening pace.
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Admissions officers said eliminating the testing requirement had increased both the size and diversity of their applicant pools, and bolstered their reputation as places personal enough to consider each applicant individually.

At the same time, the revamped, longer SAT, the drop in average scores announced Tuesday and recent problems with scoring have created growing disenchantment. College officials also say that tests — whether the SAT, or in the Midwest, the ACT — are not the best predictors of performance.
More here (registration required).

It's interesting that in this era of big tests, those that aren't being forced to use them may be starting to question how well they show what students know and can do. 

 

Letters about Literature Contest

Once again this year The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress and the Target Corporation are sponsoring the "Letters about Literature Contest."   To enter the competition, "readers [in grades 4 through 12] write a personal letter to an author, living or dead, from any genre-- fiction or nonfiction, contemporary or classic, explaining how that author's work changed the student's way of thinking about the world or themselves."  You can find more information about the contest, rules, and a teacher's guide here.  Submission deadline is December 8, 2006.  (If you check the 2006 state winners you'll see that New Mexico had no winner for grades 9-12 last year.  Looks like an opening for a high school writer from our state.)

Hooked on Comic Books

Comic book legend Stan Lee discusses comic books and young readers in the most recent edition of Edutopia (which is rapidly becoming one of the better general interest publications about education): 

Since the earliest days, comics have been on the very bottom of our cultural totem pole. So many parents and teachers have believed erroneously that if a youngster reads illustrated stories, he or she won't be able to cope with books that consist only of words.

Those people claim that comics stifle the reader's imagination because the reader can actually see the characters and the scenes instead of having to imagine them. I've always contended that that is a total fallacy. If that were true, then no one should attend one of Shakespeare's plays, because that would stifle the audience's imagination; the plays should only be read. It is obvious how nonsensical that theory is.

During the years I was at Marvel Comics, I received hundreds and hundreds of letters from parents and teachers. They all said basically the same thing: "I despaired of ever making a reader out of little Johnny. I just couldn't get him to open a book. He was getting failing grades in English, in grammar and composition, and then, one day, he began to read comic books, and he really got hooked on them. In a short time, he became an avid comic book reader. Now, it is hard for me to understand, but his grades in English and composition have improved tremendously. He's even started reading other things."

Read the rest here.

Penguins in China

Penguin has announced that it will begin publishing its familiar line of classics in China.  From The Guardian:

Penguin takes its 'black classics' into China

Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Wednesday August 30, 2006

It has taken more than 70 years, but Penguin has finally arrived in China. The British publisher announced yesterday that classics such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick would be translated into Mandarin and sold under its logo in the world's fastest growing book market.

The first 10 novels will go on sale in November under a licensing deal with a local partner that could eventually see the UK firm marketing Chinese literature and the works of Marx and Engels to a population of 1.3 billion people.

Morehere.