I recently gave myself a severe pain in the neck by sitting at my computer too long reading the article “The End of Reading is Here” from The Atlantic. It also gave me a pain in my soul. It’s sad for an English teacher to contemplate that years of tech distraction and overly strenuous standardized testing have brought us to a place where some people are declaring us a post literate society.
But today was laptop distribution day in the Media Center (Oh, the irony!) and something very interesting happened.
My students were looking at books, commenting on them, wanting to find series they had started last year. I had brought my own current novel I’m reading, There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak, and a student wanted to see it and read the back. She thought it sounded interesting. One student really wanted to know when he could start to check out books!
We returned to class and didn’t have time to start something new, so I asked what they wanted to talk about. They wanted to know what my favorite books were. And my favorite musicals. I didn’t lead them to this – they wanted to know. And they wanted to tell me about the books they were reading.
In Creative Writing I had posted a slide from last year and had forgotten it said to “Read for 5!” for the start of class. A whole bunch of kids took out books. They had books with them, because that’s what they do – the go around with books and are prepared to read instead of scroll! I hadn’t even intended to read for 5 minutes at the start of class until next week. But I rolled with it. They read, I read! I asked if a few people wanted to talk about what they liked about the writing in their books. They did.
I haven’t unpacked my classroom library yet. Some students are very anxious that I do it soon.
Tonight my wife was reading her “Getting to know you” index cards from her seniors and sharing. One of the things she asked was “What was the last book you read?” Only a couple said nothing. Most of them had read something recently. Project Hail Mary. A JFK biography. Kafka’s The Trial. Dan Brown. Marcus Aurelius. The Hunger Games prequels. I Am Malala. I can’t remember all the titles she shared with me, and she only shared some of what she was reading.
Despite everything the system is doing to destroy love of reading in the name of improving reading scores, the reading continues. None of this interest was forced. None of the reading was assigned. They still want to read, given the chance.
My neck, and my soul, are a little less cramped tonight.