It’s very important that you note the quotation marks around my column title. That’s an actual quote I heard from a student recently. Actually, I heard the same quote from two different students a day apart.
Hearing that makes me sad. I love reading so much and can’t imagine life without looking at words. I can escape to wherever I want, whether it’s New Zealand (the setting of a new book I just started) or Middle Earth (as I listen to the Lord of the Rings trilogy on audiobook) or Asgard in the latest Thor comic book. The problems of the world around me melt away as I flip the pages of a book!
I’m not naive enough to think that all kids will like to read. But it doesn’t stop me from making a goal to find at least one book each year for every kid in my classroom that they will enjoy. That might be The Outsiders, a book that every 7th grader reads for me, or one I help the student pick out for a quarterly book.
And I’ve had a lot of successes! There was a student who told me if every book was like the baseball one I suggested for him, he would really like reading. There was the kid who discovered a love for all things World War II-related after we talked about Anne Frank and the Nazis. There was the girl who finished the book I loaned her over the weekend and couldn’t wait to get her hands on the sequel on Monday.
But it’s those ones who get away that nag at me. The first student who told me the line above was a 7th grader. He’s a good student and writes very well, which usually shows a good aptitude for reading; you become a good writer in part because you’ve been exposed to good writing.
The second student was a junior. I was visiting with a group of kids, talking about some good books, and she uttered that line to me. I knew it wasn’t her favorite thing to do when she was in my class, but she followed it up by admitting she had never actually finished ANY book for me over two years.
I’m no dummy. There are ways to fake having read a book and get some work done for the teacher. Plenty of kids do that every year. Others just never do the work. But I won’t give up. Even if the failure rate is 2-1 or 3-1, I’ll take every success I can get. In an era of screens, it’s hard to get some people to sit still long enough to ingest good literature, or even average literature.
On Read Across America Day, I read some Dr. Seuss to each of my classes. I had kids who had never heard of “The Lorax” or “Yertle the Turtle” and I was sad again. Those stories were such important parts of my youth, and I was fortunate to have a mother who read to us all the time, something Michelle and I did with our own kids.
That’s where a love of reading begins. I might have been tired when I got home from school and coaching and whatever else, but reading to the kids was a priority. Still, we know that’s not the case in every household, but I know we have an elementary staff that works hard to show students how enjoyable reading can be.
Where does it all go wrong? One possibility is when kids look at reading as work. I try to be cautious when assigning work with reading. It’s important to get some skills in place, but I don’t need 25 questions for a ten-page short story to do that. Summarize the story for me or tell me an example of foreshadowing or describe the conflict.
And then there are the dreaded MCA reading tests. (Come on, if you’ve read my column for any number of years, you had to know the annual rant against standardized testing was coming, right?) These are work. My students have 55 questions to answer about a variety of stories and poems. That’s work. Plus, they complain the stories aren’t interesting at all.
When something becomes work, it’s hard to enjoy. Let’s stop making reading a lot of work. I use a site called ReadWorks that has students read stories and answer questions. I don’t really like the idea of all those multiple-choice questions, but as long as there are standardized tests, I have to provide the kids opportunities to practice what those will be like.
I’m afraid the laser-sharp focus on testing and trying to hit reading as hard as possible in school is part of the problem. I know we’ll never reach 100% to enjoy reading, but the number is treacherously low right now, probably around 50%. Maybe.
I told the first student who told me how much he hated reading that he had inspired a column idea. But I guess he probably won’t read it because, well, it’s reading, something he hates.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is exuviate, which means to shed or cast off, as in, “The student who hated reading couldn’t wait for the novel unit to be over so he could exuviate the book.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!