“Today, children are being introduced to books and stories one paragraph at a time. They might be reading something as wonderful as Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia, but when you have to stop and answer questions, in detail, often word-for-word, about random paragraphs, there’s no way you can learn to care about the characters or the stories. Marsh writes about a class in which the kids were reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but they were told by the teacher that they would be doing it over the course of months, and probably wouldn’t have time to finish it. What the hell? How can you read any book, and that book in particular, without reading it to the end? And months? It’s a novel, not a sitcom.

No wonder children aren’t growing up to love reading.”

-Teacher Tom, “Do We Want Children To Fall In Love With Reading? If So, We’re Failing.” teachertomsblog.blogspot.com. June 6, 2023.

I read this and thought this is not new at all. I remember being in high school and having an “advanced” reading class. We read four books, one book every nine weeks. They were True Grit by Charles Portis (224 pages), A Separate Peace by John Knowles (208 pages), The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (369 pages), and another I have forgotten. The key selection criteria seemed to be that each movie had to have a two hour movie associated with it, which we then watched in class.

What does capping reading a book with watching a movie provide to students? Is “advanced” reading helping us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the written words versus the written word? Was it designed to reenforce the understanding of people that had trouble reading the book? What pedagogical purpose did it serve? I don’t know.

I do know that I was regularly reading books of that length in a day at that point in my life. When you take 9 weeks to read something that can be read in the day, what are you teaching? It’s not reading. There’s also the issue that everyone was reading the same thing. What purpose does that serve?

The reality is that the course was primarily SAT prep. Computers were used to assess student’s number of words read per minute and comprehension of material presented, back when this was a major innovation. It wasn’t about reading at all, much less the love of reading.

On the other hand, I have a vivid memory of the first book I checked out of my elementary school library, on my own and not part of a class. It was Padraic Collum’s The Children of Odin. In Middle School, I remember checking out The Lord of the Rings out based on the fact the covers of the book had a big red eye and all three books were in black binding. What is this? Can you imagine how discovering the Lord of the Rings, by yourself, while just browsing shelves on the school library? I still remember most of the books from “advanced” reading, but love comes from choosing for yourself.

It makes me think that perhaps there is no love that isn’t chosen. Even if you have a situation where there is no choice, choosing opens up a pathway of love. I may have no choice, but even if I did have a choice, I’d choose you.