I am teaching junior level comp this semester at the University where I work and am finishing my PhD.  Because I like to be really busy, I am also spending two days a week each week observing 4 teachers and an noting how they teaching thinking, etc for my dissertation.  Two of the teachers I am observing are reading teachers and two are writing teachers.  How teachers teaching thinking is something that I am very interested in and something I don’t think schools do a good enough job of.  I believe that too often school is what the adults want and not what the students need.

Way back over 10 years ago, I wrote a senior thesis investigating how school kills the desire and love of reading in kids.  I read hundreds of literacy autobiographies written by teachers about their early love of reading and often how school killed that love for them.  This is something that has stayed with me and as a teacher, I tried to remember this as I didn’t want to kill my students love for reading, I wanted to ignite it.  Did I always succeed?  No.  Did I fall into the trap of this is good literature and you should read it?  Yes–most notably with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Did my students like it?  Not so much.  Did I make it interesting?  I tried.  Did I learn from it?  Yes.  Did my students learn from it?  Absolutely.

I love reading and have always been a reader–but that is nothing that school did for me.  I was the kid who was always reading a book hidden behind my textbook or in my lap (or sometimes passing notes–because so often school was boring).  I don’t remember anything I read in school–except Lord of the Flies.  I don’t remember it because of what we did in class with the book–but because the characters stuck with me.  I connected with them in may ways.  I was lucky that I already had a love for reading when I was in school, because I do know that school didn’t do anything to instill in me a love for reading.

What is point, you wonder?  Well, back to the Junior composition classes I am teaching.  The students turned in their first reading responses to me and the theme was consistent in many of them–“school made them hate reading.”  It makes me sad.  One student wrote that he hated the reading because it was often without point and purpose and seemed pointless to just write about a character and that it would have been much more interesting if he was able to write about what he thought and that if he had to write about what he thought he would have had incentive to do the reading but when he was just asked basic info–there was no incentive to do the reading.  Others wrote of their desire to read being killed by reading books that they didn’t enjoy and or books that they could not connect to.  They wanted to read books that were interesting to them.  They wanted to read–but they hated what they were asked to read.

I am of the belief that reading is reading and that any reading is good.  As a teacher, I believe that we can teach students how to think with nearly any piece of writing–they don’t have to be canonical texts.  The one thing that stands out to me regarding this is that the students don’t have a voice.  That the teachers are at the center.  The content is at the center and students are also the passive participants in their own education.

On the flip side, I am doing my doctoral research at a school and the students are clearly at the center in many ways–especially in terms of reading.  Teachers (especially English Language Arts) clearly want to instill/foster a love for reading in the students.  I applaud that.  But then I find myself questioning where the thinking is?  Reading for enjoyment is great and something we should encourage, but we need to also be teaching our students to think as well.  I think that is the problem in our educational system.  There needs to be a balance.  Student-centered does not mean free-choice.  It means that the students are the ones doing the thinking and creating the meaning.

School should be a place that gives students what they need and to encourage students to solve problems and be actively engaged in their own learning.  How do we get there?