HW

I have always been a reader. My parents love telling me that I learned to read at an “exceptionally young age” and “haven’t stopped since”. I remember in fourth grade making the decision to always read six books at a time, and I did. While this could sometimes make for a confusing reading experience, it was always an enjoyable one. I am a very active, emotional reader. Last week I was reading a book where the main character, a teenage girl, got in a fight with her mom. I went downstairs for dinner later that night, ready to yell at my mom in frustration, only to find that I wasn’t mad my mom, but I had been so caught up in the story I felt like I was the protagonist in that book. Reading is an adventure for me, and although it’s such a cliché, books do take me to other “worlds”. I know this is a sentiment that many people do not share with me, and I feel like that is because of how we read for school.

I realized a few years ago that the English curriculum set forth by most middle and high schools do not accomplish what they should. My English classes have consisted largely of reading books and writing five-paragraph essays about the stories or the characters. English classes should force us to think about more than the main characters or the plot structure; they should help students recognize the complexity of the writing, how the author carefully chose each word and sentence, as well as the point, the purpose, of the story itself.

Whenever I read books for school, I am crazed and stressed. Honestly, this is because I usually leave them for the last minute and then have to rush through the chapters in order to get an A on the reading quiz next period. When I read for myself, on the other hand, I can take my time, read slowly, read every word and get the full meaning of the text. How much can I really get out of a book that I read in a week only to study vocab words, major character relationships, and surface analyses? I would rather read a book over a long period of time, discuss the plot, the story, the characters, but also break apart some particularly important or well-written paragraphs or talk about the historical context of the story and its significance. I want reading for school to be the adventure it is for me when I read for myself. It kills me that there are so many people who hate reading. I believe that if school encouraged more open, freer reading, as well as reading simply for the sake of reading, high schoolers would love books as much as they should.