The Heart of the Matter: On Reading and Non-Readers

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading.”

Ray Bradbury

I sit down with a book on my lap, move my eyes across the printed page, and may conjure worlds, learn things, or become emotionally committed to a political position. Thus the printed page entertains, informs and persuades – all without the physical presence of an interlocutor, but certainly with his or her authorial collaboration.

Two things have just happened that remind me of what a magical process reading is. First, two of my classes have completed reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, along with the citizens of my town, Santa Barbara.The book was chosen as a community read. There were lectures, films, dramatic readings and a talk by the octogenarian author, all attended by the general public. My students went to these events as part of the requirement for completing the novel. The second event was a department meeting at which a small tempest blew into the classroom in which we were sitting – the issue being how much annotation should be permitted when students must read and master texts for reading and writing exams. Some were fierce in their contention that students must be encouraged to cover the paper in black ink. The general department guidelines was that students may annotate test articles “intelligently,” which is understood as enough to make sense of the article, but not so much that it becomes hard for the test giver to understand the point of the annotation.

In the first instance, the community read, students were able to understand in a very fundamental way, the point of reading a provocative text. Bradbury proclaimed, in his public talk, his love of books and libraries. Librarians, actors, and writers discussed and interpreted the meaning of the book in public places. Any student could see that there was passion and conviction in the voices of the speakers as they spoke of the role of books and reading in their lives. I cannot immediately measure the impact this experience had on my students, but I can hope it convinced them that there was a point to reading beyond school requirements. My students are labeled “developmental,” which is a euphemism for poor readers. They are students who do not have the habit of reading and, in general, have not gotten much pleasure out of the reading they did do in their school careers to this point. They do not see patterns. They do not anticipate arguments. They have a hard time moving away from their own contexts to others, strange and far away from theirs. They have associated books with an educational system that did not seem to value them because they were not fast learners. Part of my job is to rescue the good name of books and reading, to make the printed page as vital to each student as I can. This I do even as the world around us becomes more and more electrified and digitized; the voluntary reading my students do is that of text messaging on their cell phones. Indeed, it’s easy to see the truth of this in class. If a student’s mind is wandering, chances are he or she is texting a friend. This makes me feel awful because I am not connecting with that student at that time; however, if I think twice about it, text messaging might be the student’s way of reconnecting with a known and valued world, not the one in the classroom, but the one outside full of friends and family.

For these students, whose experience of reading has not been the great discovery it was for me and others like me, we teachers of reading offer skills and strategies so that they might become part of the academic world. These students are college-age students, who, though mature in many ways as parents, providers and workers, are not college-minded students. So we teach paraphrasing, summarizing, annotating, and word learning strategies such as contextualized guessing, word families, prefix, root and suffix analysis, and how to make the most out of a dictionary. We base our courses around ways to learn to read better. But, in truth, do we ourselves use the strategies we teach? I doubt very much that I have ever used SQ3R (survey, question, read, recite, review) or habitually paraphrased texts I was reading, let alone annotated them. We instructors believe that we can undo 18 to 20 years of non-reading habits in one or, at most, two semesters.

We allow alternative demonstrations of understanding such as collages of texts. We recreate and reanimate texts by dramatizing them with students as the actors. We have students journal constantly about their reading and understanding of texts. Whatever is new, we use in hope that it will make the non-reader into a reader.

There is one axiom that I believe firmly: it is that most every good reader was a lap reader. There was some adult, early in the life of the child, who took the time to put that child upon a knee and open a story book with pictures, and read. Read before bedtime. Read with milk and cookies. Read on a rainy day. Without such a deeply formative childhood experience, how does one learn to love to read? I can never give the physical comfort and affection that a lap reader has had to my adult students. I would be dismissed as a teacher for improper behavior. Yet without a visceral connection to the book, it becomes just another utilitarian object, a means to achieve a goal, not the goal itself.

If I did not believe that in time my college age poor readers could become proficient readers of intellectually challenging texts so that they could participate in the academy as full partners in their own learning, if I did not believe they could, then my work as a reading teacher would have little point beyond giving me a means to earn a living.

I work on faith. I believe that positive reading experiences will eventually create good readers. My job is to help the student have such experiences. Sometimes I do. Earlier in this semester, I assigned my class a contemporary novel by Garth Stein entitled The Art of Racing in the Rain, which was narrated by a dog named Enzo, whose great wish and belief was to be reincarnated as a human being. I assigned my students five short research pieces about dogs: where they came from, how they were like/unlike human beings, why they were “man’s best friend,” what words were associated with the word “dog,” and what specific dog was famous in their culture. I invited a colleague to speak in class, a person who is a brittle diabetic and has a medical alert dog. The colleague told her story to my students, and as she spoke, right then, her dog alerted her to her low level of blood sugar. Students were able to see a medical alert dog in action and the benefits that it brought to an individual who had spent her nights wondering if she would wake up in the morning because she had no indicator as she slept of very low blood sugar, and she could easily become comatose. That visit capped a successful reading experience for many of my students.

Then there was Fahrenheit 451, which was for many students comparable to my first experience of reading Shakespeare; the text seemed archaic and unconnected to life, and for my students, Bradbury’s dystopic vision of a future American society was the same. I didn’t feel the same connection with the book that the students had for The Art of Racing in the Rain. I had had some trepidation about using Fahrenheit 451 because it did seem a little dated to me. I guess it seemed very dated to my students. Yet they saw that many people outside the classroom, in the community, thought it was a very valuable literary work, a “classic” of American English literature.

I don’t pretend to know what works for students. They are all so different and bring different issues to their understanding of texts. I guess keeping things contemporary and understandable in terms of their lives is important in choosing texts to read and to teach. As for the skills and strategies we teach them, I am more skeptical than ever about their usefulness. The main thing, it seems to me, is to transfer the love of reading to those who don’t yet have it.

Please check the English for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.