Sitting on the hot, windy beach or in my comfy bed, I love to read a good book. I would definitely consider myself a reader. I can remember reading children’s books when I was a child and enjoyed telling my family about them. As I grew older I did not read as much, but I still read for enjoyment as much as I can now. I enjoy reading because it takes me to a different place and I feel like a different person. When I read a book I feel like I get involved with the characters’ lives. I can talk about the characters like I have known them my whole life. I will always love the feeling of losing myself in novels and being in a different place. I started reading for enjoyment with children’s books, but right around the start of middle school reading became a task. I did not enjoy most of the books we read in school or any of the work the teachers gave us. We had vocabulary words that I never remembered after the quiz and questions at the end of every story. I never got fulfillment of reading in school when all we did was answer questions and never discuss or do anything else with the stories.
When I was a young adolescent reader, I had a wide variety of books that I enjoyed. My favorite author when I was in seventh grade was Laurie Halse Anderson. I did a book report on her book, Yellow Fever, and fell in love with her writing. I read all of her young adult books. I also enjoyed a collection by Beverly Lewis called Holly’s Heart. Other specific favorite novels were Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly and Because of Winn-Dixie (before it was made into a movie)! My favorite author then became and still is Nicholas Sparks. I am a sucker for love and romance novels. I have always loved reading stories about animals as well. I can read science fiction and non-fiction books, but they have never been genres that I was specifically drawn to.
In middle school, I did not always respond well to the literature we read. I never liked the literature anthologies we would receive every year for our Language Arts/Literature class. When I was that age, I did not like studying Shakespeare. Also novels such as The Scarlet Letter, Animal Farm, and mythological stories were not anything I would read for enjoyment. I became more of a reluctant reader while I was in school because I did not enjoy everything that we had to read. When I was at home, I was a motivated reader because I loved to get lost in a book that I enjoyed and always had my mother to talk to about my reading. Even if my mother had not read the novels that I was reading she would listen to me talk about them for hours and ask me questions to get me thinking even more about what I had read.
I hope to inspire my own students to value their reading by giving them as much freedom as I can to let them read what they would enjoy. For literature we will have to read as a class, I plan on not just having vocabulary, questions, and a quiz or test. I will integrate everything we read into the class and have the students do projects and activities. As I learn more about teaching literature to adolescents, I hope to become more knowledgeable about how to inspire all of my students. I definitely see literacy as something that extends beyond the traditional reading practices. I can relate to students who want to get more out of literature than what might be taught with traditional practices. I will try to be as involved with my students’ reading and get to know each of them as individual readers.
It's a bit sad--though oftentimes the case--that a child's initial love of reading is somehow annihilated when he/she enters the secondary classroom. Why is this? What should we be doing as secondary teachers to foster and nurture our students' love of reading?
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