If you really want to raise bookworms, let them read

CHICAGO — Parents are constantly told that reading to their children will instill vital communication skills and that modeling engaged reading will set their kids on a course to becoming bookworms. Not always. It doesn’t matter how much you adore books, how many hours you spend enjoying the 998th read-aloud of “Go, Dog. Go!” or how many tomes fill your bookshelves as a testament to your insatiable reading addiction — your kids could still turn out like mine did.

Both my sons hate reading. Hate it. With a passion. Actually, it turns out they hated it — past tense. The other day, I asked my younger son, who is now a freshman in community college, if he was enjoying his English class. His answer was unprecedented: “I really enjoyed reading ‘In Cold Blood.’”

I couldn’t have been more surprised. Especially since, earlier in the semester, he had commented that the first chapter of Truman Capote’s novel was dry and dense. What changed? His professor told him to read the story. Period. No required highlighting, underlining or asterisking. No flurry of Post-it notes. No enforced and graded summaries of every chapter. No months upon months of protracted discussion, with a group of relative strangers, about how the story or a particular character makes you “feel.” Just read the story. See what you think. This is how it was done when I was a student, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Don’t misunderstand: My Catholic school teachers ruled with an iron fist, and we dissected strategic text selections and diagrammed sentences like junior medical examiners. We learned the mechanics of grammar and spelling by force of sheer repetition, and we did it “out of context,” as the reading specialists might tut-tut today.

But for all of our slicing and dicing of written language, we never beat a book to death. And I can’t remember a single elementary school classmate who complained about reading books.

This came to mind the other day when the National Council of Teachers of English released a position statement on the topic of independent reading — a term they changed from “leisure reading.”

“Research supports that independent reading has the most significant impact on student success in reading, but unfortunately it is a practice that is often replaced with other programs and interventions,” the statement said.

Quoting reading researchers, the statement went on to note that independent reading should be prioritized as essential in the development of strong readers and global citizens. Far from being mere “entertainment,” independent reading must be elevated in classrooms.

“All reading communities should contain protected time for the sake of reading,” the statement said. “Independent reading practices emphasize the process of making meaning through reading, not an end product.” This is, if you can believe it, revolutionary. For years, “language arts” classes have been emphasizing analysis and discussion as the only valid activities for students to prove they’ve gotten something out of reading.

Based on what I’ve seen in schools and experienced with my own sons (the older one also began to enjoy reading as soon as he left the education system), the joy gets wrung right out of the act of reading when students don’t have ample time to get excited about books they read for themselves — instead of for evaluative purposes.

And no one gets hammered with reading-for-performance like young, struggling and reluctant readers who are pulled out of regular classes for even more intense reading instruction. As a resource teacher, I saw what a drag it was for some of these children, even though they would have otherwise loved to have extra time to just read books that interested them.

What, you might ask, has this educational standard yielded? Well, the most recent release of the Nation’s Report Card came out earlier this month. It showed that students’ reading scores are getting worse, and the lowest performing students are doing worst of all.

There’s no official causal link here. And no one would argue that interventions aren’t necessary for some students. Or that reading and comprehension skills should not be explicitly taught, practiced and tested — technical skills will always need to be drilled into students so that they can eventually develop their reading acumen.

But it’s like a breath of fresh air to see reading for pleasure prioritized as an academic right — a right many of us old-timers took for granted.

When children are respected as readers with their own likes, dislikes and reading tempos, they actually get into and enjoy stories — and isn’t that the whole point?