One of my more astute friends noted that there are potentially skewed statistics here, and I have to admit that the teacher who focuses on rhetoric felt a little sheepish. I hope that these statistics are skewed, because if these are completely accurate, I have my work cut out for me.
For me the posting brings up two issues.
The first issue is the overall importance of reading. From the time I learned how to read in Kindergarten, I have been a reader. I have always loved reading. I married a reader who can rip through a book at least twice as fast as his English teacher wife. And I am doing everything I can to turn my kids into readers. My son and daughter love books. They love being read to, they sleep with beds full of books, my daughter will page through a book until she falls asleep and can't wait to learn to read on her own, and my son's bedtime mantra has become "one more book." I have spent my career looking for every and any way to get my high school students to read more and to do their assigned reading willingly. Reading expands horizons, challenges thought, increases vocabulary, and makes for a more intelligent and informed populace.
But the second issue really has to do with the interpretation of what constitutes reading. It is an issue that came up when I was taking a grad class on reading in composition classes. It was a class that opened my eyes and prepared me for teaching AP Language in ways that I didn't even know I needed to be prepared. During the class we read an article with survey statistics put out by the NEA that lamented the number of novels that people read as they grow further into adulthood. This led to a lengthy discussion with my classmates on what this meant for us as middle school, high school, and college teachers of literature and composition students. And one of the primary questions became "Is that really a bad thing?" Did the survey findings determine that people weren't reading at all, or did it just determine that they weren't reading books, novels, literature?
In the end we decided that people were reading, a lot, even if they weren't reading a lot of fiction. So maybe the English teacher shouldn't be shocked by the statistics in that post. Maybe it's time to find hope for the future of reading in other places. People are reading. They read articles online, articles in magazines, blog posts, tweets, and yes, they are reading books. Hardcover, paperback, and e-books. Maybe if we teachers just encouraged our students to read anything, to step out of their comfort zone and challenged them to read about things that interest them, maybe then we would be able to get them to open up to the new texts we put in front of them.
This is one of my campaigns this year: to get my students to read and to expand their definition (and mine) of what it means to be readers. Wish me luck!
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