Opinion

Hey, teachers: let’s make reading fun again

By Will Kaback ’20

Tags opinion

During the second week of Winter Break, I sat down and did something I had not done in months. What was I up to? Reading. For fun. 

For some, such an undertaking would be true rarity akin to lobster tail, international travel or a matching pair of socks. The notion of having enough time to read for pleasure, rather than for an assignment or research? Preposterous. Personally, the last time I remember having enough free time to read for fun consistently was middle school. Even then, amidst a furor of Abraham Lincoln biographical essays and health class doldrums, the act of spending time with a book of choice was becoming elusive.

How did we come to this point, where pleasure reading is like a foreign entity? The days of Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events, Roald Dahl and Cornelia Funke, fantasy and grandeur, have long ago been enshrined in my mind as golden moments of childhood. But why do those have to be times of the past? 

It is a shame that reading for pleasure has become a casualty of age. A 2014 study by Common Sense Media found that 22 percent of 13-year-olds and 27 percent of 17-year-olds “hardly ever” read for fun. 30 years ago, those numbers were 8 and 9 percent, respectively. 

There are many factors to explain this, like the rise in smartphones and uber-realistic video games that take up more and more of everyone’s time, not just kids. But for high-schoolers and college students, the crushing amount of assigned texts relegates everything else to the sideline. We are still reading, just not for fun, and the often tedious or sweeping nature of these books and articles consume not just time, but also motivation to read any more than what is required. 

For teachers in any discipline, reading for pleasure should be a course initiative. The Reading Agency of the United Kingdom found that such pursuits “can result in increased empathy, improved relationships with others, reductions in the symptoms of depression and dementia, and improved wellbeing.” We should not only endorse these characteristics for their human benefits, but also because they translate to success in the classroom. The Guardian’s Dan Hurley writes that “reading and intelligence have a relationship so close as to be symbiotic.” 

Some professors at the College have made this realization and incorporated it into their syllabus. Last semester, I had my pick of multiple books, fiction and nonfiction alike, to choose from for a Religious Studies class. I enjoyed the invigorating sense of freedom that came with having the power to choose what I would read. And, believe it or not, I was able to simultaneously enjoy reading the book and connect it to the course content.

Such measures are great, but I would go even further. Why not, once or twice a month, have the only homework assignment be to pick up a book of choice and spend an hour diving in? Sure, there’s no way to guarantee that a student would follow through on this undertaking, but I’d say this possibility shouldn’t outweigh the gains that stand to be made. Even if only a few students followed through, the enrichment they would attain is well worth giving everyone else a night off from homework. I tend to believe, however, that it wouldn’t just be a few students, and a new crop of excited readers could be cultivated.

Everyone would appreciate a break from scholarly articles and primary documents every now and then. Reading is well ingrained in the College’s culture, but only a certain type. Let’s broaden our range and make a concerted effort to bring back reading for pleasure. The benefits are clear and the drawbacks minimal. This directive is levied equally against students and faculty, but it has to start with the latter.  Reading is fun and boundless and deserves to be enjoyed in all forms. Let’s stop thinking of reading for pleasure as a thing of our younger years and instead make it a lifelong pursuit. 

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