Teaching reading

I've been a secondary school teacher – mostly high school, with a few years of middle school experience earlier in my career – for more than 25 years.

I know, within a couple of days, which of my students have been life-long readers, and which students have spent way too much time in front of an electronic tube. I also know it's too late to catch up in high school.

My own three children are an interesting case study. My 20-year-old daughter is a college sophomore, and she was a voracious reader from earliest elementary school. My wife and I (more my wife than me) read to our kids every day when they were small, for probably an hour and often longer. When they were really small, we often had to read the same book over and over again (I can still recite "Goodnight Moon" from memory). In elementary school, my daughter quickly became an independent reader who wanted to read for pleasure.

My oldest son's story is similar, although he has a love for history – he was reading David McCullough in the fifth grade. Today, he gobbles up a daily newspaper and, every week, several magazines. A high school junior, he probably reads 75-100 books a year – Jon Krakauer is a recent fave of his, and he's loving Bill Bryson's humor and his older book, "The Mother Tongue: English, and How It Got That Way."

But my youngest, a seventh grader, is very different. He didn't "take off" as a reader the way his older siblings did. He's much more bodily kinesthetic, and he'd rather run around and practice various sports skills than read.

At least he used to. But in the last 12-18 months or so, reading has exploded for him, too. He loves Harry Potter. He's read all the books in the Narnia series. He often can be found, fairly late at night, with a flashlight and a book under the covers. (He doesn't know we're aware of his late-night habits.)

We limited his screen time to a couple of hours a week. We encouraged and helped him find stuff to read that he enjoyed. And I think he's nearly caught up to where his older brother and sister  were at his age.

The point? Kids develop at different rates. We should celebrate their gains and growth and remember that a slow reader today might sizzle tomorrow. And so we should continue to emphasize the things that work (parents reading to young children, making lots of interesting, age-appropriate reading material available to emerging readers, parents modeling a love of reading, etc.) and we should continue to limit things that get in the way (excessive screen time in particular).

My youngest son would love to be a professional baseball player someday. If he makes it that far, he'll also be the unusual athlete with a stack of books on the top shelf of his locker.