This week, a class had me thinking about my early reading experiences and handling "readicide" with our students. Bear with me. This is a topic that I am passionate about and that I have thought about A LOT.
Books have always been an important part of my life, and I cannot remember a time that I could not read. (Literally, I do not remember not being able to read. My mom says I began reading at around age three. I blame/thank Sesame Street.) My reading memories include:
- My mother was a schoolteacher when I was small, and I loved reading the books from her sixth grade classroom, especially the Ramona books.
- I also loved going to the public library in the summers and checking out as many books as my mom would let me – usually as many as I could fit in my little book bag or carry out myself. I loved George & Martha books and Ezra Jack Keats as a small child, then grew into Nancy Drew and Lisa and Lottie (the book upon which the movie The Parent Trap is based) and eventually Lois Duncan and Agatha Christie in my teens. When I got older, I loved going there after school with my sisters and eating a snack in the sunlit atrium before doing homework and reading inside.
- My parents actually punished me by putting me on reading restriction. You read that right. My punishment was that I could not read. I wandered around the house like a lost person.
- In first grade, I was thrilled to discover that I could check out one fiction title, one nonfiction title, and one magazine at each visit to the elementary school library, so I left every library visit with exactly that. At the time, I didn’t understand why my fellow first graders in my class were not also reading chapter books, but it was there that I found my “home run book” (Fryer, 2006) – The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I have read at least eleventy million times.
- When I changed schools, my new school had a tiny library, but I found new favorites – A Spell is Cast by Eleanor Cameron was one I remember checking out over and over and over. The librarian didn’t do much in the way of book displays or reader’s advisory, but I spent a lot of time in that library.
- I loved book fairs and Weekly Reader book flyers. I still have bookmarks I purchased as well as one of my first purchases with my own money, Poppy and the Lost Cat.
- We also had a small but decent family collection of books at home. My mom’s tastes have always trended more toward Danielle Steele and John Grisham and I don’t recall my daddy reading anything other than the newspaper, Field & Stream magazine, and (rarely) the Firefox books, but we had these collections that I loved:
- My grandparents came back from a family visit one time with a dishwasher-sized box filled with original Bobbsey Twins books and Cherry Ames (a nurse who goes on adventures!!) novels as well as other books from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
- Over time, I built my own collection of books and loved getting magazines like Highlights and National Geographic World. For me, a great birthday or Christmas was one when I got stacks of books!! After my sisters were born, I turned one of my closets into a mini library for them and checked out books to them.
- At my grandparents’ house, I loved reading my aunt’s books. She was only 10 years older than me, and her books The Velvet Room and Circus Girl Without a Name were magical to me.
One thing that really stands out to me was that no one – NO ONE – ever told me what to read or what not to read. I read what I wanted, period. I cannot remember a single time that an adult – my parents, other family, my teachers, my librarians – told me that a book was inappropriate or questioned anything I took to the circulation desk to check out. In fact, I don’t recall anyone really paying much attention to what I read so much as to the fact that I was a huge reader. As a result, I read EVERYTHING, including stuff that some people I encounter through social media would totally clutch their pearls about a young impressionable girl reading.
I pulled a copy of 
Audrey Rose by Frank de Felitta from the shelf in our den because I was fascinated by the creepy cover. I found a brand-new copy of My Sweet Audrina by V. C. Andrews in the floorboard of my older cousin’s car when I was visiting my aunt (so I had to have been about nine or ten) and started reading it then hunted it down at the library back home to finish because I couldn’t quit thinking about it. (I read quite a bit of V. C. Andrews – totally entertaining but complete garbage literarily speaking – in my tweens and early teens, in fact.) Here are both books on Goodreads for your visualizing pleasure!
I read the Mad Magazine issues that another set of older cousins got. I got hold of a banned book list in high school and read as many of those as I could get my hands on (from Catcher in the Rye to Watership Down). People certainly gave me reading suggestions, but no one ever told me “you can’t read that.”
The other thing that stands out for me is that while I read at school and used the school library, what I read for school doesn’t really stand out. I did do my senior term paper on Jane Eyre, which I adored, but I wasn’t assigned the book and picked it because I loved it. I certainly read what I was assigned, including books on summer reading lists, but none of that reading turned me into a reader.
So… what does all this bode for AR and Reading Counts? Not much good (for vendors of those programs at least)! I think that kids should read what they want and that, by and large, adults should butt out beyond encouraging kids to read and suggesting the occasional book based upon either a direct request from the kid or a clear, experience-based knowledge of what the kid likes to read. And I certainly do not think that adults should limit kids to reading what’s on their reading level or even what they consider content appropriate for the child’s emotional level. I do agree with Donalyn Miller (Reading Rockets, 2015) that the library should provide reading material on a range of reading levels and that keeping students’ emotional level in mind for book selection when building a collection for a school library is important, but I do not think that a book’s “emotional level” matters in terms of regulating what individual students read. The kids will be fine.
I am in a school district that encourages the use of AR, though with less emphasis in recent years than in past years. How do I handle that? I agree with the AASL that putting AR labels on spines is violative of student confidentiality (and, potentially, a FERPA violation) (American Library Association, 2011). As a compromise – because I do understand how leveling books can be a useful tool for teachers in guiding instruction – I will note a book’s AR level and/or Lexile level inside the book.
In my library, students are free to peruse books as they like, and I encourage them to focus on interest first then reading level only if they must. Pernille Ripp notes, “The librarian ends up in a hard situation because they see kids who want to check out books that are above or below their perceived level[.] … Are they then supposed to go behind the teacher’s back in allowing the students to check that book out?” (Parrott, 2017, para. 22). To Pernille, I say, resoundingly, “YES. ABSOLUTELY.” If a student does not find a book that meets the requirements for the project and that interests them, then they leave with two books – one for each goal.
But I don’t really go behind teachers’ backs. I am up front with my teachers that this is my practice, and, in keeping with the AASL’s (2020) guidance, I have also trained teachers on the importance of interest reading. I explain why an AR level is a single data point in time provided by a STAR test on a single day that should not dictate student’s reading for weeks, months, or years. I talk about the research that shows students grow as readers when they can explore what interests them, even if that means reading books “below their level,” and when they read across a variety of genres, in multiple formats, in books both short and long.
And, finally, I do not incentivize reading with anything beyond more reading. I agree with Alfie Kohn (2018) that “[w]hat rewards do, and what they do with devastating effectiveness, is to smother people’s enthusiasm for activities they might otherwise enjoy” (p. 74).
References
American Association of School Librarians. (2020, January 25). The school librarian’s role in reading. www.ala.org/aasl/advocacy/resources/statements
American Library Association. (2011, July 18). Position statement on labeling books with reading levels. http://www.ala.org/aasl/advocacy/resources/statements/labeling
Fryer, W. (Host). (2006, September 1). Podcast80: Encouraging reading by Stephen Krashen [Audio podcast episode]. In Moving at the speed of creativity. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/WesleyA.FryerPodcast80EncouragingReadingbyStephenKrashen
Kohn, A. (2018). Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes: Twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Parrott, K. (2017, August 28). Thinking outside the bin: Why labeling books by reading level disempowers young readers. School Library Journal. https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=thinking-outside-the-bin-why-labeling-books-by-reading-level-disempowers-young-readers
Reading Rockets. (2015). A video interview with Donalyn Miller [Video]. https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/experts/donalyn-miller
One of the Good Ones by Maika Moulite
