Update on the reading program

You may remember the ridiculous reading program I mentioned about a month ago that was implemented at the behest of the clueless principal at my 'normal school'. Well, things got exciting today; the reading program stats are in for the first month.

Out of 120 students at the school, over 50% of them have not read at least 12 books, which was the mandate for the end of the month of November. Naturally, the principal is upset at this development so he has decided all students who have not reached the 12 book target will miss all recesses and will sit in the library or classroom to read the books and do the book related question sheets.

I did some investigative work on the scores of some of the students' question sheets and the scores were terrible. It seems to that some clever kids have figured out that they can just write anything on the sheet as long as they take a book out of the library, they'll get their numbers up. How do I know this? A few of the students who had 'read' the most books had some of the ugliest question sheet scores!

The books in question are from a for-profit organisation that duped sold this 'accelerated English reading exercise' program to the principal along with 4 other area primary schools. Each school paid $40,000 HK for the program. Not a small sum for such useless program that lasted 3 weeks (in effect, wasting 3 weeks of regular English classes).

So my take on this situation is the principal knows he's been duped, doesn't want to lose face and is pushing ahead with the program. I told him face to face that the majority of the students can't read even the most basic English words and the program was a failure. He looked at me with an evil eye and shrugged sheepishly. Whatever. I'm not responsible for this mess but I do have to try to clean it up. I've started teaching my students basic phonics skills and will try to dumb down the lessons. However, it's always difficult to teach kids who aren't enthusiastic about learning what you're teaching. But that's another story for another day.