The Book Whisperer (5 page)

In the spring, spotting Kelsey and her mother in the hall after school, I ran over to tell them the great news: “Kelsey passed the Reading TAKS with flying colors!” Kelsey's mom welled up with tears, and Kelsey clutched me, sobbing with relief, “Thank you! Thank you!” I felt a bit emotional myself. How sad that Kelsey needed the validation of that test score to prove she was a good reader. After all, she had read forty-two books that year. Connecting Kelsey to books and adding a cup of heavy reading were the missing ingredients in the rescue recipe. Kelsey has not been in a reading intervention program since, and in eighth grade, she earned a commended scholar rating on the state test. She has never stopped reading.

Because of the demands of standardized testing in the world of No Child Left Behind and the drive to make sure all students reach a minimum level of reading achievement, developing readers take up a disproportionate amount of the resources in a school. While teachers focus their instructional efforts on the students who are at risk of failing state assessments or classes, there is a whole group of readers who are taken for granted. I feel that the vast numbers of readers who move through our classrooms unmotivated and uninterested in reading are as troubling as the developing ones. But in many cases, whether these students read is not a concern as long as they pass the state test every year.

These reluctant or—to identify them more positively—dormant readers are the students who read in order to pass their classes or do well on state tests but who never embrace reading as a worthwhile pursuit outside of school. These students read their assigned books, do their assigned activities, and drop the books when weekends or summers arrive and they don't have to read anymore. Reading is work, not pleasure. Without support for their reading interests and role models who inspire them to read, these students never discover that reading is enjoyable.

The burden of poor reading skills or a disability that impedes their ability to read well is not what prevents dormant readers from being enthusiastic readers. After all, the majority of people who graduate from school are not lagging behind in their reading to the extent that they cannot get along in the world. So why do so many people who can read choose not to do so? I think that dormant readers might become engaged readers if someone showed them that reading
was
engaging.

I believe that all dormant readers have a reader inside themselves, somewhere. They simply need the right conditions in order to let that reader loose—the same conditions that developing readers need: hours and hours of time spent reading, the freedom to make their own reading choices, and a classroom environment that values independent reading. Children love stories, which offer the escape of falling into unknown worlds and vicariously experiencing the lives of the characters. Children's attachment to the story arcs in video games and television programs bears this out.

What students lack are experiences that show them that books have the same magic. They have never been given the chance to discover the worlds that books can contain. Because so many students' reading choices are dictated by their teachers, they never learn how to choose books for themselves. How can they shape a self-identity as a reader if they never get the chance to find out what they like? If you are a student and your entire class is reading one book together (a common practice), what do you do if you don't like that book? How would that uninteresting book color your view of books in general? By denying students the opportunity to choose their own books to read, teachers are giving students a fish year after year but never teaching them to go near the water, much less fish for themselves.

Because dormant readers are good enough readers, able to jump through the reading hoops in the typical classroom, they don't garner much concern from teachers—but they should. Students who don't read, even if they are capable of completing reading tasks at school, run the risk of falling behind students who read more than they do. After all, Mark Twain reminds us, “The man who does not read great books is no better than the man who can't.” At the beginning of the year, I find that dormant readers constitute the largest segment of readers in my classes.

Hope provides an example of what a dormant reader looks like on arrival in one of our classrooms. Despite the fact that Hope succeeded in her schoolwork and excelled on state assessments every year, she did not see herself as a reader and found few books worth reading. I placed book after book in her hands, hoping she would find one that she liked. Hope took my offerings dutifully at first. Some she read, and some she snuck back onto the shelf. Slowly, she began to find books that spoke to her eclectic spirit. She gravitated toward books with bizarre settings and fantastical elements, like
The Giver
, by Lois Lowry, and
Coraline
, by Neil Gaiman. When Hope began to express preferences for certain types of books, I had seeds of information that helped me lead her to more books. I have a penchant for fantasy, science fiction, and traditional literature (legends, myths, and fairy tales). Hope and I connected over our shared love of Greek mythology in particular, so I suggested books to her that I knew she would enjoy reading. The more books I recommended that she liked, the more Hope trusted me to suggest books.

What Hope needed was a chance to browse through lots of books every day and an opportunity to read widely. I remember how reluctant Hope once was when I see her these days, legs slung over a chair in our school lobby, waiting on her ride home, nose buried in a book. She is still a regular visitor to my library, even though she left my class long ago.

Underground readers are gifted readers, but they see the reading they are asked to do in school as completely disconnected from the reading they prefer to do on their own. Underground readers just want to read and for the teacher to get out of the way and let them. I was this type of reader in high school. While my teacher spent six weeks dragging the class through Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter
, a book I finished in a week, I whiled away the time by creeping myself out with Stephen King's
Salem's Lot
and mind-traveling to Polynesia through James Michener's
Hawaii
. In accordance with the unwritten contract between my teacher and me, she overlooked my obvious boredom with her class and I kept my mouth shut and my head down, reading from my own book, which I kept hidden inside my desk. I took sly pride in the fact that I earned an A+ on the final for
Huckleberry Finn
when I had not even finished the last third of the book. The teacher belabored the plot and her interpretation of it for so long that I knew what she would ask us on the test without even reading the book.

While teachers scurry to support students who are still developing their reading skills and wonder what they can do to motivate the dormant readers who do not like to read, underground readers are a subset whose needs go unaddressed. These children are the ones who come into our classes as avid readers. The opportunity to graze through stacks of books, picking those that look interesting to them and getting the time to read for hours in school is the dream of every underground reader, but underground readers have had to accept that this freedom is not going to happen in most of the classrooms they sit in year after year. These students have such advanced reading abilities and sophisticated tastes that few teachers design instruction around their needs, preferring instead to develop a curriculum that supports most of the other students, who are reading at or below grade level.

Some underground readers are the bright and shining stars of the reading classroom, the ones who other students know are readers, who reinforce for teachers that some of their instruction must be working because these students do so well on the teacher's assessments. Of course, these students would have done well on these assessments from day one. Or underground readers might be students like Randy, who, by most measures of school success, failed my class. (I was still stifled by other people's expectations for my teaching back then.) Randy was always lugging around some massive tome with a dragon on the cover. I knew he was a reader, but Randy could not have cared less about completing any assignments; he just wanted to read. Because his grades were so low, my school's guidelines required that I put Randy in my after-school tutoring group, even though we both knew he did not need it. While his mother, my teaching partners, and I held innumerable conferences that year, discussing what we were going to do with Randy, he sat in the hall, reading happily.

Predictably, because he read constantly, Randy scored in the 95th percentile on the state reading test and was promoted to seventh grade. I am confident that he is still out there somewhere, reading a four-hundred-page book and checked out mentally from his reading class. I let Randy down. Is there one of us who is not haunted by the memory of a child we failed? I wish I could be his teacher again so I could show him that I get it now. I would let him read those dragon books all year and never try to force him to conform to my transitory reading goals for him. I would look for ways to use the books he does read to meet my instructional goals, like I do now.

Randy read every day, committed to his own vision of what reading meant to him and unwilling to compromise with external forces like teachers that infringed on his core reading values. This should have been enough for me. Randy is what a real reader looks like, and my efforts to force him to conform to my short-term goals for his reading when he was already on the path to a lifelong identity as a reader were futile. Underground readers who do or don't comply with the teacher's concept of what reading is should not have to wait for lunchtime, summer break, or graduation for their reading life to begin.

I only have to look at my classroom now to see how far this change of attitude has taken me. Once I accepted that my primary aim was to instill the life habits of readers in all of my students, habits that students like Randy already had, my teaching finally aligned with my life view of what reading should look like for readers. This vision extends beyond students sitting in reading class and encompasses the reading identities students already possess when walking into my classroom. One such underground reader, Alex, educated himself for years by being a covert classroom reader. Free to read whatever he wanted, Alex declared our class “reading heaven.” He persisted reading books propped inside his desk all year, even though he didn't have to. I teased him, declaring that since I had invented this trick thirty years ago, he owed me royalties every time he did it.

The fact is that scores of the children who enter our classrooms are students who like to read or once did, before years of traditional reading instruction focused on comprehension worksheets, book reports, and whole-class novel units made the experience of reading boring and painful. Michelle's reading reflection entry reveals her beliefs about reading prior to my class:

That I expect my students to read forty books a year is not the chief concern for many students. They usually want to know what activities I will ask them to do with the books they are reading, because worksheets, vocabulary tests, and book reports have always been the goal for every book they have ever read in school; never has it been for their pleasure or engagement. They have a tough time believing that I have not tied their books to a lot of teacher strings, so they quiz me, looking for the catch:

They don't have much confidence in me. If I am not going to quiz them on every book and monitor their every reading move, how will I control reading for them? School, for them, is about performing to the teacher's expectations and doing the work that the teacher requires.

Our students have no background in how a class can be different. They begin each school year filled with hope that this year will be more interesting and engaging than the last, and yet, the drudgery that surrounds reading continues, year in, year out. It takes time for students to get to know me and trust me and then to believe that they have as much reading freedom as I claim they do. When faced with the wall of books in my classroom, Corbin didn't feel anticipation; he felt dread:

What I did not know when I started teaching was that no matter how dynamic and well planned my instruction was, if my classroom was not a motivational environment for readers, my instruction was doomed to fail. Based on decades of classroom observations on the conditions that foster learning, Australian researcher Brian Cambourne identifies the following factors that contribute to successful learning: