The need to create lifelong readers...

Dear sentient internet space being,

The topic of this week is on creating lifelong readers. I myself am not a typical avid, enthusiastic reading English teacher. In fact, I quite rarely do any real reading of books. It's unfortunate, because as a child, I read all the time. I have great memories of reading as a kid. My mother would read to me before bed time. I would read exciting stories on the bus. I would read at home. My mom commented to me how much I used to read.

Until she said that comment, I never really considered how much I wasn't reading anymore.

Consider this quote:
"Adolescents are quick to judge things in school as related or unrelated to their lives. Often things associated with school literacy are not seen as relevant by adolescents. As a consequence, teens are more likely to reject school tasks and reading along with them. Our youths need to see literacy as personally relevant and having substance for their lives" (Kasten and Wilfong 657).

I've studied literature for high school teachers of English in quite a bit of depth, and my class then was very critical of the type of stuff we were reading. Everything we read in the "classical canon" was written by dead white men. Now I don't mean to dismiss them for their merit. I certainly appreciate reading them and am glad I did, but only years later in hindsight.

Does that mean it was successful? Well, I certainly did have realized the value of it, but I am no longer a frequent bookworm. Is it possible that in being forced to read these texts in middle school and high school I lost my interest in picking up a book?

The arguments in favor of the classic canon of books read in school say that the books are important for establishing a national "American" culture, and "for people to be able to engage in important common cultural conversations (Hirsch, 1988)."

There was a study conducted by Ivey and Johnston that gave students flexibility on what they wanted to read, rather than just have collective, whole group reading assignments. The study had them intensively engage with the reading they selected. Studies found that even though students were reading different books most students eventually read books their peers had read, even when there were only 2 or 3 copies of a book. Students just not reading the books at the same time. They did, however, engage in those important common cultural conversations over the books they read (272).

^^I'm really intrigued by this idea. Imagine that a classmate is reading a book and you hear just how good or bad it is from a personal account. The ability to tell you how excited it made you might drive other students to read that same book just to be able to catch up with their peers. Imagine the options that are available to you when you hear about seven or eight different books being read by your peers, and what it means to have a kind of knowledge that others in the class may not yet have. This is a unit lesson that I really want to try implementing my own classroom.

There is an important need to not kill the love of reading in our students.
Now, READ!