Reading for Pleasure

A passport to everywhere

Kenny Pieper, Phil Beadle

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781781352670
• eBook ISBN: 9781781352700
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Reading for Pleasure, Kenny Pieper has gathered a range of tried-and-tested strategies to get kids reading, and enjoying it. We hear too often that kids don't read any more: Kenny thinks it should be every teacher's mission to prove this isn't true. In a squeezed curriculum it can be tempting to accept pupils' lack of reading and make excuses that there is not enough time to give to the 'luxury' of personal reading. Teachers do this at our peril. Reading is the essential building block of further literacy development as well as a skill, hobby and habit that we can take with us forever. Kenny Pieper takes the act of reading for granted, as many - but sadly not all - adults do. You're reading this right now. However, this isn't the case for everyone. Kenny teaches kids whose lives are terrifying obstacle courses of reading-related problems. They know they struggle with reading so they try to avoid reading at all costs. They leave school, not merely unaffected by this strange reading thing, but saddled with a great deal of emotional baggage about being an outsider, even more entrenched in a belief that reading is for others more intelligent than them. Then there are the children who can read perfectly well, but chose not to, unconvinced of the importance of reading in their lives. What difference does it make to them? We have to answer that question in school. We have a duty to put an end to illiteracy and aliteracy. Kids need reading role models and, as a teacher, that role model is you. You may be the only adult who that reluctant reader will ever see reading. Teachers are critical in giving all children the gift of being able to read well and to value reading. Topics covered include: the author's personal reading journey, how reading enabled him to become the first person in his family to go to university and convinced him that fostering a love of reading is his moral duty as an educator, illiteracy and aliteracy, reluctant readers, book reviews, prioritising personal reading by devoting ten minutes each lesson to it, habitual reading, the reading environment, interest inventories, technology, e-readers, Accelerated Reader programmes, recommended reading, building a class library, bookmarks, book tweets, book speed-dating, libraries, librarians, literacy and class inequality, parental involvement, podcasting, reading records, reading dialogue journals, the rights of the reader, reading aloud, silent reading and literacy and gender, amongst others. The benefits we can all reap when kids become confident readers who read for pleasure are obvious. Discover strategies which will: get kids talking about books, get them thinking about books, get them reading books, encourage independent reading, develop literacy skills and establish a classroom culture where reading is expected and celebrated. Suitable for primary and secondary teachers, leaders and SENCOs, or just anyone with an interest in or responsibility for getting kids to read.

Chapter 1

BOOKS AND ME

It was contagious! Seventy pages!1

I BLAME ALEX DICKSON

Back when I was a lad, before the Internet and the Twitter and the Facebook, I had nothing but a little silver radio to keep me company. With one tiny white earphone to stick in my ear, I would listen to the local station, Radio Clyde, every night as I drifted off to sleep. It was a different time; don’t judge me. On certain evenings, Alex Dickson would talk to me in the strangest, deepest, most exotic (but still unmistakably Glaswegian) accent about books: strange adult books, detective stories, historical fiction, biographies. I totally and utterly fell in love with them.

The fact that adults could have conversations about such things was a revelation to me. We had books at home when I was growing up – not many: some encyclopedias (my dad is American so we had the curiously extravagant Encyclopedia Americana), the odd novel, piles of Whizzer and Chips and The Broons annuals. It would be unfair to say we were not a reading family: there were books, I had seen them; but on ‘Alex Dickson’s Bookcase’, the host and his guests would talk about them for half an hour. They informed me, not about any one book in particular, but about a whole world of reading. Each week, at 10 o’clock, the sound of Jimmy ‘Schnozzle’ Durante singing ‘(I’ll Never Forget) The Day I Read a Book’ signalled a strange kind of heaven to me: a heaven that would change my life forever. Here was a life of books!

So, from there, how did I go on to become a reader? Certainly not from being forced through some half-baked reading scheme at school. My earliest bookish memories are of visiting the cavernous town centre library in East Kilbride with my pal, Gerry, and staring in awe at the covers of the ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators’ series, debating the merits of the Famous Five over the Secret Seven and, well, just being in a library. Long before the emergence of big windows and airy freedom, before coffee and computers, we would sit on a jaggy green carpet reading for hours. I even recall early on in secondary school skipping school dinners to sit in the library flicking through The Guinness Book of Records, dropping sausage roll crumbs into the pages. Pub quiz colleagues would thank me years later.

George: I’m gonna read a book. From beginning to end. In that order.

‘The Summer of George’, Seinfeld2

I take the act of reading for granted. Perhaps you do too. You’ve picked up this book and you’re reading it comfortably enough. During the course of the first chapter you may even begin to read the signs that I’m a strong champion of reading for pleasure. If you were in my classroom, I might ask you to read my lips to make sure you knew exactly where I’m coming from. If you couldn’t, I might have to keep you behind and read you the riot act. You may well be reading between the lines and getting the gist of what I’m saying already. Reading isn’t a problem for you, is it? Do you read me?

At this point, you may be able to read my mind and understand that reading is a serious business. You should know that by now. You’ve read the fine print. The point is that reading as a concept is part of our everyday wardrobe, our language, our existence. You’ve always read; you do it as naturally as breathing or eating.

However, the word ‘reading’ itself doesn’t have the same connotations for everyone. I teach kids for whom the mere mention of reading causes them to shrink like a salted snail. They sneer and smirk and avoid it at all costs; inside they cringe and cry. The ubiquity of the word ‘reading’ in our lives makes it easy for us to assume it’s not actually that big a deal, but what about those who do find it a challenge? Their lives are terrifying obstacle courses of reading related problems. They know they struggle with reading. Everything that happens in their day-to-day existence reminds them of this. They know that not being able to read well differentiates them from most of their peers. It leaves them isolated and lost. And we know it too.

A WORLD OF WONDER

Tom sits cross-legged in the library. He’s not a reader, never has been, and I can see this is difficult for him. It’s not only that he doesn’t like reading or doesn’t like this particular book; he finds reading difficult. It’s difficult because he really wants to please me, his new English teacher, in the first week of his new term in his new school. He wants to like it – he really does – and he concentrates hard so as not to move his lips as he reads. He wants to read ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ by Lemony Snicket because his friend liked the books, and he watched the movie over the summer and quite liked it too. He can’t do it though. He can’t really read, you see.

Tom is probably representative of hundreds (maybe thousands) of kids going through the same thing that week. What have we done to him? He is 11 years old and has lost, or never discovered, the joy of submerging himself in a book. He’s had seven years of school and is sitting and hoping forlornly that it will all click into place for him. Until that happens, he’ll feel excluded from an amazing world: a world his friends inhabit comfortably.

He won’t wander the dark and ancient corridors of Hogwarts; he won’t leave Rivendell side by side with Bilbo Baggins, an imaginary backpack stocked for the journey; he won’t climb through the wardrobe into Narnia or fight alongside a young James Bond. And something about that doesn’t sit right with me. As an English teacher, it breaks my heart to see kids like Tom who, through no real fault of their own (perhaps they are victims of circumstance), have missed out on the opportunity to fall in love with books. I’m not blaming anyone aside from a system that appears to have failed him. For what greater gift can we give children than the ability to read well?

No role model exists at home for them. Every time we ask them to read they may smile and go along with us, but – like the opening scene in WarGames, where Mr Blonde from Reservoir Dogs and Leo from The West Wing have to turn their keys at the same time to launch a nuclear missile3 – the keys ain’t turning. They freeze and nothing happens. No reading inspired bombs go off. And they leave school, not merely unaffected by this strange reading thing, but saddled with a great deal of emotional baggage about being an outsider, even more entrenched in a belief that reading is for others more intelligent than them.

We need to step up and be their reading mentors, getting involved in their lives, or at least be the ones who will properly encourage them to turn the key. It won’t happen by accident; it won’t happen if we just leave them to it.

TRIPS DOWN AMNESIA LANE

You’ll remember the days when all of your friends would gather at school and discuss the progress you’d all made with that difficult Dickens novel you’d agreed to read by the end of the month. The fall-outs and arguments over whether Jane Eyre was a victim or a heroine. Whether Thomas Hardy could ever stand up to Jane Austen. No? Me neither. The problem English teachers have is that we forget that developing a love of reading is a process, not a switch. It takes time. When we assume that children will read simply because we ask them to, when we accept that some of them, well, they just ain’t readers, and give up on them, then we may be embedding a stigma that will stick with them forever. We can chuck piles of cash around on elaborate reading schemes, but unless we get involved in their reading we’re leaving it to chance, and that’s not a chance I’m happy to be any part of.

MY LIFE WITH BOOKS

I love being around books. I love the way they look on the shelf: their spines lining up in rows, increasing in length throughout my life. I love the idea that I can hold all of The Lord of the Rings or the complete works of Shakespeare in my hand. I love the mess of them as they pile up on my desk. I love seeing other people reading them on the train. I love them second hand in charity shops and brand new through the post. Still do. My wife doesn’t have to look too far if we lose each other in a busy town centre. I’m to be found in the bookshop spending good money on books I may never get round to reading.

The first thing I look for when I’m invited into the homes of others is a bookcase. That’s the true way to judge a person’s character: I check out what they read. If there’s no bookcase then I give you permission to turn around and run; run like the wind and never look back. Save yourself. Don’t be a hero and try to save your friends. Time is of the essence here. You have no place in this person’s world. For a house without a bookcase filled with books is not a house; it is a vacuous den of reality TV and the Xbox. Nothing to see here. At best you’re condemning yourself to a lifetime of brainless dinners in this place, counting your life away discussing the moistness of the chicken. At worst, you could end up marrying this cretin. Don’t think twice.

If there is a bookcase then head straight for it. Pretend to be listening to your host’s light conversational openers, perhaps have a salt and vinegar crisp or a sausage-on-a-stick as your eyes glance sideways at the books on offer. The deal hasn’t been sealed yet. They could still let themselves down. At this point, you’re on your own. If it were me, I’d be looking for some serious literature on that shelf. Not necessarily things I’ve read, but a clear sign that this is not the bookcase of an idiot. The autobiography of a politician? Maybe. The autobiography of Gary ‘set the’ Barlow? Get out of there!

Of course, if I spotted some Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson, P. G. Wodehouse or Orwell, I’d be looking around and wondering where I’ll put my records when I move in. The point is that what we read forms part of the person we become. Like it or not, readers are judgemental. Regardless of how hard we try, adult non-readers are a strange animal, more often than not to be avoided.

KIDS TODAY, EH?

We seem to be too accepting of a society that has stopped reading, or at least stopped seeing reading as being something important. In this book, I want to argue that we too easily take our children’s reluctance to read as something we can do nothing about. We shrug our shoulders, raise our eyebrows and say, ‘Well, what can you do?’ Even if it were true that kids no longer read – and I’m not convinced this is the case – as educators (or those interested in reading for pleasure) surely it’s our duty to do something about it. To rekindle a love of reading for kids, to provide them with a route to improved literacy and an end to what might well be a generational problem of poor reading skills – a cycle which leads to and embeds poverty, lack of opportunity and an ever increasing wealth gap. Reading changes lives; of that I have no doubt. It changed mine.

In a previous life, I was unemployed for over two years during the Thatcher-led eighties. Eventually, I would work on factory floors, in shops, in a hospital; I worked for months on night shifts and twilight shifts, as well as 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. day shifts, barely getting by. What I remember from those days is not the work I did, because it was difficult to differentiate one day from the next. I recall some great friends and some great laughs, but nothing whatsoever about the jobs I did. Mostly I remember what I read.

I read every day. Every lunch break. I spent time in bookshops and libraries. I read reviews. I wasn’t university educated, but I could see this was something important. This was a life. A year of night classes from Monday to Thursday got me to university, and I never really looked back. The first in my family. It was reading that got me there. I could only have been an English teacher. Now I work in a building that has a library. How perfect is that?

THE DAMAGE WE DO

I wanted to write this book to share some of the strategies I’ve used in classes over the years, but also to raise some issues about the manner in which we, as teachers, help...

Table of contents

• Cover
• PRAISE FOR READING FOR PLEASURE
• TITLE PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• FOREWORD BY PHIL BEADLE
• CONTENTS
• Chapter 1: BOOKS AND ME
• Chapter 2: TEN MINUTES
• Chapter 3: THE LIBRARY
• Chapter 4: TAKING IT UP A NOTCH
• Chapter 5: THE E-READER
• Chapter 6: TALKING ABOUT READING
• Chapter 7: WRITING ABOUT READING
• Chapter 8: THE READING HABIT
• Chapter 9: BOYS ’N’ BOOKS
• Chapter 10: EVERY DAY’S A READING DAY
• LAST WORD
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• COPYRIGHT
• ADVERTISEMENT