“Hey! That’s not work-related reading!” – a certain husband to his wife, when he found her doing logic puzzles instead of reading her book for book club or writing her book review column for this week’s newspaper.
When I was in middle school, the “gifted and talented” students were allowed, for one year only, to go to “enrichment” classes during the seventh grade’s normally-scheduled “reading” coursework. I was one of those lucky students who thought we were getting away with murder. For one period a day, I escaped those horrid “reading” textbooks – usually containing stories about some simpering kid who was more of a goody-two shoes than I was – and the dry as dirt worksheets that accompanied each assignment. I read enough exciting stuff on my own, so my teachers had miraculously agreed to let me go take “mini-courses” (one for each nine week period) in subjects such as logic, communications, creative writing, and psychology (and didn’t I feel like a big shot, with titles like that?).
It was only years later that I began to understand that I didn’t escape “reading” assignments in seventh grade, and certainly not with those mini-courses. If hard-pressed, I would have acknowledged that all my classes in the Wellsboro school system – even Ms. MacNaight’s gym classes in ninth grade, where, much to my chagrin, she gave us written tests on the rules of field hockey – required some ability to read. I just never realized how much literacy affects us until I sought my French teacher certification at Mansfield University.
In order to graduate from Mansfield University with a degree in education, every future teacher must take a class in teaching reading. Certainly, one would expect elementary school teachers to invest a great deal of time in their students’ acquisition of reading proficiency, but what about secondary teachers? Why should a high school teacher in the chemistry classroom, or the wood shop, or the culinary arts department, spend much time assessing how well their students comprehend what they read? Nevertheless, I found myself in a class entitled, “Reading in the Content Area”, sitting by people hoping to teach everything from algebra and geometry to foreign language to home economics. As someone who has always enjoyed reading as a hobby, pastime, and source of entertainment, I had never truly thought about how difficult school would be for a student who couldn’t read the instructions on a test, the homework questions for chemistry problems, or the definitions of vocabulary terms on the dreaded worksheets.
Why is it, then, that we are still so hung up on getting our school children to read books – and almost exclusively FICTION novels – for reading programs such as “AR” (Accelerated Reading) and Scholastics’ “Reading Counts”? Why shouldn’t we give equal rewards to kids who like to read articles in Car and Driver, or Fly Fisherman, magazines? What’s wrong with letting reluctant readers show their reading prowess with gourmet cookbooks, ultralight construction manuals, or logic puzzle problems?
To look at this another way, I recently had a grandmother come to the bookstore, looking for suggestions of “puzzle books” for her young granddaughter. She and her granddaughter had enjoyed doing some of grandma’s easier crossword puzzles, word searches, and “what’s different between these pictures?” logic problems from a book the grandmother owned, but the child was only able to do these because the grandmother read the words and/or explained the directions. Grandma wanted a book of these kinds of puzzles that the child could do by herself. Literacy levels, however, do come into play, even in picture puzzles, or with number-oriented puzzles, like Sudoku, so this was not an easy task.
How, then, should we encourage children to read, especially children who would prefer to play in the mud or build a Boxwood Derby car rather than curl up with Harry Potter? I propose we expand our definitions of “reading” and “literacy”, to encourage people of all ages and across all interest levels into our schools, libraries and bookstores. So, whether your favorite hobby is photography, gunsmithing, knitting, or fantasy football, before you dismiss “reading” from the list, check out all the great information that is waiting for you in the written word.
Hobo loves to curl up and read with his humans. He wanted to encourage kids to read, so he wrote a fun, easy to read story about his adventures as a stray kitten in Hobo Finds A Home – perhaps you’ve heard of it? Lately, Hobo has been reading up on military history, ballistics, quilting, Christian romance, marketing, wood carving, and werewolves. Check out his other book reviews at his blog, http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com.
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