Keeping the Reader Alive

I'm doing some reading on struggling readers in preparation for one of the summer classes I start teaching on July 8th, so I'm finally getting around to reading Anne Reeve's wonderful book, Adolesents Talk About Reading: Exploring Resistance to and Engagement with Text. I love what she says about Sting, one of the adolescents profiled in the book, (and inherently, Sting's English teachers):

Some people's commitment to reading is robust enough to withstand years of boredom with institutionally required texts, but others, such as Sting, who seem to derive almost no nourishment whatsoever from English class, need access to what they can absorb....The school risks suppressing Sting's reading and writing energies completely when it tries to redirect them toward academic goals that make no sense to him. (p. 68)

We need to understand that for a student such as Sting, one of our goals should be to keep the reader in him alive through adolescence, even when that goal requires compromising our commitment to teaching school texts. The contribution we can make to Sting's future lies not in the particular texts we admire and promote but in protecting the reader within him. (p. 69)

I love this idea of "keeping the reader alive" and "protecting the reader within" the adolescents we teach. This is where young adult literature is so important, as well as paying attention to what adolescents' out-of-school reading interests are. It means letting go of the Shakespeare if you have to (although there are lots of good YA spins on Shakespeare [check out Alan Gratz's Something Wicked and Something Rotten, Caroline B. Cooney's Enter Three Witches, Sharon Draper's Romiette and Julio] and even grapic novel versions of Shakespeare's plays [I love Gareth Hind's gorgeous versions of Beowulf and King Lear], so you may not have to let him go entirely if you can engage resistant readers through different kinds/levels/choices of texts).

As English teachers, we must always remember there are readers inside of the kids we teach (I like how Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer calls resistant readers "dormant" or "underground" readers). We're doing a pretty good job of killing off those readers--or the idea that reading can be pleasurable--through standardized testing and test remediation for students who score low on these tests. Kelly Gallagher calls it "readicide," the systematic killing of the love of reading. It's happening, right now, in every public school in this country. As English and language arts teachers, we've got to do our part to show adolescents there are other, more personal, more meaningful reasons/purposes/values for reading than to pass a test, go to college, or be considered "literate" at the next cocktail party. We need to bring--with apologies to Justin Timberlake--"sexy back" to reading. And by that I mean bring back the idea in schools that reading can be pleasurable, leisurely, and fun.