Wilhelm Chapter 2

"Most teachers must not read, or they'd not how to teach reading and not ruin it for us," is a quote from page 34 of this text which I think does a very good job of relating how most students feel about reading for a class. For the most part, students hate reading because the teachers try to stuff literature down their throats that the students have absolutely no interest in. I understand that giving the students a wide base of literature "classics" will allow them the opportunity to discover something that interests them, but by forcing each and every student to read the exact same texts for every single class will only isolate certain students (the ones who are labeled "poor readers") and will no doubt bore the majority of your classroom to tears. I feel very strongly about the importance of choice in regards to student reading for the classroom. If the reason for reading is to find meaning within the text, then shouldn't we allow the students to also discover their own texts? Think about the satisfaction that a student could have if they were allowed to first find something that interested them, and then rather than being graded on whether or not they could answer multiple choice questions about the story they had read, they were graded on a subjective essay describing their interactions with and discoveries derived from that text? It just seems to me that students are much more apt to become self-regulated readers in their lives after school if they learn to love reading while they are in school, and what better way to promote that kind of attitude than by allowing them to read literature that directly relates to them and their lives?