The real tragedy is not that Megan Graham’s children equate reading with a “punishment that runs afoul of the Geneva Conventions,” (Herald, July 14). Rather, it is that you don’t get to say to your children at the dinner table, “Please put that book away while we eat.” It is not that the schools failed to give students required summer reading lists. The real tragedy is that the district hasn’t been forced (by student demand) to keep all their superbly well-stocked libraries open every day all summer so that throngs of students can easily access all the books they are eager to read every day, all the time.
Adults who read regularly do so because they love to read not because they “must read.” The youngest children drop everything at any opportunity to hear a story because they instinctively love stories. First-graders go to school the first day thrilled that now, finally, they will learn how to read for themselves. What happens in between? Why do only 50 percent of fourth-graders like to read and less than 25 percent of 12th-graders like to read? If reading a good book is one of the great joys of life, if the love of story is ingrained in our human nature, how can we think the only way children will read is if we force them to read something we think they should read?
Which do you want? Do you want your children to say 15 years from now, “Well I hated it then, but now I’m glad I was forced to read a set list of books every summer,” or do you want them to say something like, “I need someone with a truck to help me move, but I don’t have much to move since all I care about are my books.” If it is the latter, ask yourself what makes your kids/students want to read more and do more of that and ask yourself what makes your kids/students want to read less and do less of that.
Gaby Chapman
Durango
