KBAR:  Why I Love It But Should Leave It
(at least some of the time)

    KBAR is a wonderful exercise designed to encourage students to read
absorbing books and to truly think about what they are reading.  Many
students leave the 6th grade and have never really read anything interesting.
 Even if they do enjoy reading good books, they probably have not given any deep
thought to what they have read.  KBAR is, at the very least, a good way to
get these students to focus on the real meaning of their books.

    Because of the need to write a KBAR essay each week, I know that I have
gone out of my way to select books that will have fascinating themes,
literary devices, great conflicts, moral dilemmas, and subtle analogies.
These elements may make some of the books I select a bit more difficult and
challenging, but it makes writing the KBAR essay much easier.  For example,
one recently selected book was very entertaining and I enjoyed reading it
very much.  However, it had none of the above-mentioned elements.  As a
result, I could not think of very much to say when I had to write several
KBAR essays about this book.  By contrast, when I read Flowers for Algernon,
there was no limit to the number of things I could write.  The book made me
think about what makes life worth living for and what is really important in
life.  It even made me really understand the saying "Be careful what you wish
for."

    While I am certain that I have gotten a lot of value out of KBAR, I also
believe that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing.  There are
several reasons why I think that there should be a reduction in the amount of
KBAR work for at least some of the students.  Primarily, these reasons all
are related to the idea that "busy work" should not be a major part of any
student’s workload.  Once a student has clearly mastered a particular
activity, having that student repeat the activity week after week changes it
to "busy work," no matter how valuable that activity originally may have
been.  Once that happens, the student begins to resent the activity and any
value to the assignment is dramatically reduced.

  Because there is always value in encouraging students to really evaluate
and analyze what they are reading, I would not propose eliminating KBAR
entirely for any student.  But, in order to prevent KBAR from being resented
by students as annoying "busy work," I would propose the following:  Once a
student has achieved a 100% score or higher on twelve of his or her KBAR
essays, the student will be allowed to participate in KBAR every other week,
rather than every week.
Under my proposal, the student would be rewarded for taking the KBAR work
seriously, putting forth a meaningful effort and doing a great job on their
essays.  At the same time, the student would still be required to read
challenging books and put real thought into the meaning of these books.  In
order to make sure that the student would still get value from these
assignments by reading and discussing challenging books, the teacher might be
required to approve the books selected by the student.  If the student
insists on selecting a mindless book without any interesting themes or other
such elements, then the student will need to return to doing KBAR every week.
 Also, if the student gets less than a 90% score on any of his or her
biweekly KBAR essays, then he or she would also need to return to doing KBAR
on a weekly basis until he or she has achieves a score of at least 100% on
four more KBAR essays.  In this way, the KBAR would not be "busy work," even
for the student who has mastered it.

    I would love to write more about this very important topic, but I need to
go work on my KBAR right now.