Read To Read

Back in high school, our band director offered a piece of advice to us. When someone offers you a gig, he said, take it, no matter what it is. Playing leads to more playing. 

The Board of Directors has been bitten by the reading bug. This is not a surprise; we have read to them daily since birth and still today, even though as wild old second graders, they read independently. They are surrounded with books. There are all sorts of conditions attached to getting items like toys or Pokémon cards, but they get books often. I pulled this same trick with my older two children, the idea being to raise them thinking that of course every livable home has food and shelter and books and music in it. 

So it's pretty cool that they will read, unprompted, as a high-ranking leisure activity.  

But, lordy, the stuff they read. Some of it's pretty unobjectionable (if you have kids in this age group, I recommend the Branches imprint of Scholastic ). The Investigators are a fine time (got that pick from my grandchildren). But they've also latched onto Dog Man and golly bob howdy but those are hard to take, from the sort-of-humor to the failure to observe some basic grammar of comics (e.g. a page is a paragraph). But it's aimed at a particular audience, and boy does it hit that mark.

I don't really care about any of that. Because reading leads to more reading. 

Every one of us who is a reader has the stories. I read every Hardy Boys I could find and then I found out that Nancy Drew mysteries were cranked out by the same syndicate. I read adventures and someone handed me The Lord of the Rings and then someone saw I was reading that and handed me Gormenghast. You get older and you find your own ways to find The Next Book. Some don't click (there was this gorgeous copy of Black Beauty but I could never get through it). Some are hard to find, or were, back in the day. You keep looking. Reading leads to more reading. 

I think of all this every time I come across someone arguing that students must read certain things in a certain, like the libraries where students are only allowed to take out books that are properly leveled, or the yahoos who still insist that reading a graphic novel doesn't count. Reading leads to reading. 

I also think of this when I find people (sadly, sometimes teachers) advocating for audiobooks or summaries or excerpts, which are sort-of-reading, but not actual reading. Skimming and scanning for answers to a dumb question on a pointless quiz is not reading. Drilling discrete "skills" that are supposed to be components that can be slapped together like an Ikea bookshelf to form actual "reading"--those are not reading. 

Do we scaffold, hand-hold, help them get over technical bumps in the road, or otherwise support students as they read? Sure. But not-reading and sort-of-reading do not lead to reading. Reading leads to reading. 

Am I speaking from the place of privilege as someone who was raised in a reading house? Sure. But I am also speaking from a place of 39 years of teaching students, many of whom were not "natural" readers (nobody is a natural reader--we naturally learn to speak but nobody naturally learns to read). If you can clear out whatever obstacles are in their path, from trouble decoding to a lack of background knowledge to disinterest to a reluctance born of a history of failure to etc etc etc and get them to read--reading leads to reading.

Reading programs (scientific or not) can wander into the mistaken idea that the purpose of reading instruction is to get students to score well on reading tests. But reading tests are not the path to reading. Reading-- being on the receiving end of ideas, emotions, and information put into the world in written form-- is the one thing that reliably leads to reading. Do what you have to do to facilitate that, to make sure that students can read successfully. But do not forget that the point is not testing, but actual reading.