By: Christopher WrightMany children are raised with a book being read to them as they get ready for bed. Many of those children become fascinated by those books and want to read more. Many of those children will find a love for books and read many throughout their childhood. Unfortunately, many of those children will begin to hate reading and books as a whole due to one thing, the over-analyzation of literature throughout middle school and beyond. It often begins in the sixth grade (at least it did for me) when kids are assigned a reading log that encourages them to read a certain amount every night/week. While this sounds like a good practice, which it is, the accompanying questions are what begins the path of disinterest. We are asked to summarize what we read and make a connection to something outside of the book. The connection part is, at least for me, one of the most annoying questions to answer. You have to connect a fictional (or non-fictional) scenario within the book to something that happened in your life or in another piece of literature. This can be challenging for some students as their lives may not have had any similar experiences or they simply aren’t able to analyze the text well enough to make a connection to their personal lives.
These types of questions only persist as the years go on, with the introduction of literature circles being one of the most prominent examples. In literature circles, students are required to fill out the aforementioned questions as well as come up with different talking points and ideas to fill a set amount of time. Students are then graded based on how long they can carry their discussion about the book in question. Having to look into the text and find different quotes just for the sake of “making conversation” winds up teaching them that quantity is better than quality (because they are only finding quotes to fill up space) and that they only have to skim through the assigned reading for a good grade. Because of these practices, students often don’t fully read the book and lose interest in a book that they may have actually enjoyed if they were simply recording the number of pages they read each night. On top of these literature circles, we have essays and entire units dedicated to the over-analyzation of famous plays, books and poems. We delve so deeply into one offhand line about the color of a door that it takes almost two days to get through all of the different meanings that the color of the door supposedly has. And while sometimes in-depth analyzation is a great thing to do, the sheer amount of it that we do in our six or more English classes is enough to make any avid reader think twice about opening up another book. The disinterest in reading has gotten to the point where teachers are assigning independent reading to high schoolers, despite the fact that high schoolers should be moving onto more advanced curriculums, as a graded assignment in order to get kids to read at all. Reading for pleasure is beginning to fade in our school system, and the school system’s to blame.
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Elena Caputo
Hi! My name is Elena, and I'm a senior at Wilson and one of the Editors of the Editorial section. If you have any questions or ideas or if you want to write, email me at [email protected]! Olivia MonosHello! My name is Olivia and I'm a junior this year, and one of the editors of the Editorial section! I'm really excited to write for the Paw Print again this year!
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