Working with "Reluctant Readers"
Conventional wisdom within the field holds that developing and nurturing a love of reading in each child is an important part of the youth services librarian's job. We teach children that books can take them anywhere, that reading is a rapturous and trans-formative experience, that the act of reading transmits a certain intangible specialness from the page or screen directly into the reader's mind. We tell them readers are important and special.
As both a librarian and a private citizen, I enjoy sharing my love of reading with children who are already engaged, enthusiastic readers. It's delightful to spend time with others who share my passion for reading. With children who are indifferent towards reading, I think it does no harm to talk about what different types of books have to offer. In my experience, the indifferent reader is often a specialist who hasn't found his\her genre yet.
When librarians talk about reluctant readers, however, we rarely mean the indifferent child. The term "reluctant readers" is usually a euphemism used to describe children who dislike, or hate and despise, reading. Talking to these children about the joys of reading is not going to turn them into readers and is likely to harm them.
I do not speak from my experience as a reluctant reader. I was never a reluctant, or even an indifferent, reader. While the general public tends to equate learning disabilities with dyslexia, there are, in fact, different types of learning disabilities, and not everyone with a learning disability has difficulty decoding text. I, personally, struggle with non-verbal tasks.
Recess is generally a miserable experience for children with my type of learning disability. There are no playground games that a child with deficits in non-verbal areas such as visual-spatial skills and motor coordination can play comfortably and safely and no playground equipment s\he can approach with confidence. The most difficult aspect of recess, however, is the fact that "everyone" knows that recess is "supposed' to be fun.
It is because of this "fun factor" that recess leaves deeper scars on the psyche than, for example, math class. Both math class and recess place grueling demands on the child with deficits in non-verbal skills, but struggles in math class are more easily understood and tolerated by both the child's peers and adults. In fact, the very idea of liking math is viewed with suspicion by many children--geeks like math and no child wants to be a geek. Hating math allies a child with the majority of his\her classmates--and failing a math test may even garner a certain amount of sympathy. Adults may be either brusque or sympathetic when a child complains about a math assignment, but they don't try to convince a child that math homework is fun.
Recess, on the other hand, is viewed by adults as playtime and the child who doesn't like to play is seen as adults as odd--and not odd in the delightfully quirky sense. Often adults also view the child as spoiled and deliberately acting difficult. To other students, the child who struggles with recess is a target. Children may accept and even sympathize with a classmate's academic struggles, but the child who has difficulty playing games is viewed with open disdain and, often, excluded and teased. The other children do not see that their attitude, comments, and actions intensify the distress felt by their struggling classmate--they simply see the oddness of a classmate who doesn't like to play--and children are simply not tolerant of differences.
Struggling with skills long since mastered by peers is frustrating and painful for children. No adult, no matter how caring and concerned, can eliminate this pain and frustration--it's impossible to magically transfer skills to children or to insulate children to the extent that they are unaware of the gaps between themselves and neurotypical peers. We can, however, avoid adding to the distress of children struggling with reading by not insisting that reading is fun and books are wonderful. Looking back on elementary school from the perspective of adulthood, I realize that my attitude towards recess was reasonable and healthy. While it can be fun to challenge oneself to learn skills one expects to eventually be able to master, no one enjoys struggling through activities that are endlessly frustrating. Hating recess was certainly a sane reaction on my part. No adult, no matter how concerned, could have turned me into a child who enjoyed recess, but having my feelings validated would nevertheless have helped. I grew up convinced that I was deviant, insane, bad, in some unexplained, but crucial way and that my isolation was not only miserable, but also deserved. Obviously, this conviction was not caused solely by hating something I was convinced I was "supposed" to enjoy, but the drama surrounding recess was certainly a strong contributing factor. This is why I doubt the wisdom of touting the joys of books to reluctant readers. Their sense of failure is already keen; the misery they feel at school and in libraries, and often at home as well, is real and reasonable. It is we who are unreasonable in our expactations that a child who struggles with, and fails, at reading on a daily basis can and should like books. We can point out the many benefits of reading for content (not pleasure), we can work with the child on further developing his\her skills as a reader, and we can insist on the importance of school assignments and reading practice without also insisting that reading should be a pleasurable experience.
As both a librarian and a private citizen, I enjoy sharing my love of reading with children who are already engaged, enthusiastic readers. It's delightful to spend time with others who share my passion for reading. With children who are indifferent towards reading, I think it does no harm to talk about what different types of books have to offer. In my experience, the indifferent reader is often a specialist who hasn't found his\her genre yet.
When librarians talk about reluctant readers, however, we rarely mean the indifferent child. The term "reluctant readers" is usually a euphemism used to describe children who dislike, or hate and despise, reading. Talking to these children about the joys of reading is not going to turn them into readers and is likely to harm them.
I do not speak from my experience as a reluctant reader. I was never a reluctant, or even an indifferent, reader. While the general public tends to equate learning disabilities with dyslexia, there are, in fact, different types of learning disabilities, and not everyone with a learning disability has difficulty decoding text. I, personally, struggle with non-verbal tasks.
Recess is generally a miserable experience for children with my type of learning disability. There are no playground games that a child with deficits in non-verbal areas such as visual-spatial skills and motor coordination can play comfortably and safely and no playground equipment s\he can approach with confidence. The most difficult aspect of recess, however, is the fact that "everyone" knows that recess is "supposed' to be fun.
It is because of this "fun factor" that recess leaves deeper scars on the psyche than, for example, math class. Both math class and recess place grueling demands on the child with deficits in non-verbal skills, but struggles in math class are more easily understood and tolerated by both the child's peers and adults. In fact, the very idea of liking math is viewed with suspicion by many children--geeks like math and no child wants to be a geek. Hating math allies a child with the majority of his\her classmates--and failing a math test may even garner a certain amount of sympathy. Adults may be either brusque or sympathetic when a child complains about a math assignment, but they don't try to convince a child that math homework is fun.
Recess, on the other hand, is viewed by adults as playtime and the child who doesn't like to play is seen as adults as odd--and not odd in the delightfully quirky sense. Often adults also view the child as spoiled and deliberately acting difficult. To other students, the child who struggles with recess is a target. Children may accept and even sympathize with a classmate's academic struggles, but the child who has difficulty playing games is viewed with open disdain and, often, excluded and teased. The other children do not see that their attitude, comments, and actions intensify the distress felt by their struggling classmate--they simply see the oddness of a classmate who doesn't like to play--and children are simply not tolerant of differences.
Struggling with skills long since mastered by peers is frustrating and painful for children. No adult, no matter how caring and concerned, can eliminate this pain and frustration--it's impossible to magically transfer skills to children or to insulate children to the extent that they are unaware of the gaps between themselves and neurotypical peers. We can, however, avoid adding to the distress of children struggling with reading by not insisting that reading is fun and books are wonderful. Looking back on elementary school from the perspective of adulthood, I realize that my attitude towards recess was reasonable and healthy. While it can be fun to challenge oneself to learn skills one expects to eventually be able to master, no one enjoys struggling through activities that are endlessly frustrating. Hating recess was certainly a sane reaction on my part. No adult, no matter how concerned, could have turned me into a child who enjoyed recess, but having my feelings validated would nevertheless have helped. I grew up convinced that I was deviant, insane, bad, in some unexplained, but crucial way and that my isolation was not only miserable, but also deserved. Obviously, this conviction was not caused solely by hating something I was convinced I was "supposed" to enjoy, but the drama surrounding recess was certainly a strong contributing factor. This is why I doubt the wisdom of touting the joys of books to reluctant readers. Their sense of failure is already keen; the misery they feel at school and in libraries, and often at home as well, is real and reasonable. It is we who are unreasonable in our expactations that a child who struggles with, and fails, at reading on a daily basis can and should like books. We can point out the many benefits of reading for content (not pleasure), we can work with the child on further developing his\her skills as a reader, and we can insist on the importance of school assignments and reading practice without also insisting that reading should be a pleasurable experience.