the reading dilemma

I will admit that after watching my adolescent family members play video games and repeatedly tell me reading is stupid, I too, believed that kids are not reading like they used to. Throughout this class, I have been more open minded to the idea of reading, and what that actually looked like. My younger cousin says he doesn’t read but what he means is that he doesn’t read books/novels. He does read cheats and gaming instructions online, though. He also reads about nerd gun modifications on the web (I didn’t even know nerd gun mod sites existed, and most of them are run by jr. high boys! Kind of cool.) Anyway, I am realizing that for him reading novels is not cool, or girlie, but reading other things is perfectly fine. Either way, I am just happy to see that kids are reading, it just looks different from the old school way of opening up a book.

As someone who writes stories, it concerns me a little, but in the big scheme of things, I am just glad the younger generation is continuing to read and if anything, they read more because there are so many options these days. In Moje’s article children talk about their favorite thing to read whether its books or magazines or articles, and it helps me see how varied the reading preferences are.

In Moje’s piece it becomes clear that as a future educator, I must be aware of all reading material and genres. Somehow the students need to learn literacy practices, yet forcing the practices I like won’t be effective for them all. This article made me realize something, I was usually the teacher’s pet because I have always liked the things teachers like (Surprise, I am becoming a teacher!). But really, I was always interested in reading classics, and novels plus I wrote for fun at home, and found ideas like theme and meaning in a book to be fun. These are the things teachers like to do, so they give them to their students. But what about the other 25 kids in the class that weren’t the teachers favorites? It wasn’t because they weren’t smart. Many of them were much more intelligent and capable than I. What made me stand out is that coincidentally I have always had the same interests as my white, middle aged, female English teachers. The ones that didn’t show interest in their ideas looked like slackers or lazy students, but at home they were avid readers and writers with original thoughts.

The questioning done in the article isn’t necessarily something that gives me a solution to this problem, but it makes me really think about how to tackle it when I am the teacher.