Confessions of a Fake Reader

I come from a family of readers. On Sunday mornings, the newspaper was spread all over my parents’ bedroom. My older brother would have the sports page in his hand, my sister gravitated to the entertainment and cooking pages, and my parents would talk back and forth on a wide variety of topics from book reviews to the latest headlines. As the youngest, I would peruse the comics. Then, eventually, I’d wander off to create stories with my dolls and stuffed animals while the rest of the family still had their noses buried in the Sunday paper.

I was a good reader; at least that’s what the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (circa 1970s) indicated. But I was a disinterested reader. I dutifully read what was assigned and wanted to please my teachers, but I really didn’t have the passion for reading like the rest of my family. I pretended, though. I’d take out books from the library and pretend that I read them. But I didn’t. Privately I blamed it on the fact that I had eye therapy and surgery when I was very young to treat strabismus (aka “cross-eyes”). So, I told myself that I couldn’t really be expected to read as much as the rest of them, could I?

In high school, I was the Cliff Notes queen and as a college undergraduate, I read to “get by.” Yet, I loved literature. I loved discussing big ideas and character motivation and precise language and plot subtleties. I loved it so much that I decided to become a high school English teacher. This is when everything changed.

I discovered the absolute joy of being able to select my own texts.

School had taught me that some texts should be read, and those were the ones that were usually assigned. I was taught that the teacher or professor’s interpretation was the only one that mattered. I was also led to believe that I was a “good reader” if I managed to pass the reading check quizzes that they created. This kind of reading in school, we know now, doesn’t do much to create life-long readers. Why? Because this type of reading is not authentic and doesn’t afford opportunities for students to explore texts in a manner that promotes inquiry and analysis. Instead it promotes what I refer to as compliance reading. And that’s what I did as child. I read to get credit but it was never for myself.

Yet we know that strong literacy skills are developed largely when students have ample practice time to read. We also know that students read more when they are given choice and ownership in personal reading. In fact, Wilhelm and Smith (2013) have researched the importance of choice and practice in developing readers and found, “…pleasure is not incidental to reading—it’s essential. Indeed, we found that the young people with whom we worked spoke of their reading pleasure with remarkable sophistication—and their pleasure supported the intense and high-level engagement with texts that schools seek to foster.”

If we know this to be true, and if research overwhelmingly supports it, why haven’t we made the shift? Overwhelming numbers of classrooms that I visit each year still promote a one-book (usually the teacher’s choice) one-class model. If we want to create lifelong readers, we actually need to flip it. Let young readers choose from a variety of quality books so they’ll learn to love reading and develop the literacy skills that they’ll need in their adult lives.

References

Coombs, D. L., & Howard, C. (2017). " What Kind of Reader Are You?" Self-Regulating Middle School Reading Practices. Voices From the Middle, 25(2), 70-76.

Wilhelm, J., & Smith, M. (2013). The Most Important Lesson Schools Can Teach Kids About Reading: It’s Fun. The Atlantic.

Wilhelm, J. D., Smith, M. W., & Fransen, S. (2014). Reading unbound: Why kids need to read what they want-and why we should let them. Scholastic.