Reading is a Muscle
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin
When I was twelve years old, my family and I left our home in Ohio to embark on a long, circuitous drive across the country to where we would begin a new life in Oregon. For one whole summer, the six of us—four kids, our Mom and Stepdad and our spunky little Pomeranian, Prissy—settled into a Ford Country Squire station wagon pulling a U-Haul trailer, and meandered through the heartland of America, camping and exploring, eating and arguing, dreaming and laughing. That summer changed me forever and while it was, without question, the most exciting and adventurous experience of my young life, it was also incredibly lonely and tedious at times. Hours in the car with my three younger siblings, a vague excitement, tinged with dread, about where we were going and the great unknown of a new school in a new place where we didn’t know a soul was definitely the stuff of tweener nightmares.
Thank God for books.
I read for comfort. I read for entertainment. I read to stave off boredom and to keep from killing my siblings. My appetite for books was insatiable. I devoured my young adult chapter books before we got to the state line and then my Mom would pass me her Agatha Christie mysteries, which we would take turns reading and later talk about. Next came the trashy novels, Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins titles, acquired at a Holiday Inn gift shop in Nebraska. Somewhere in Wyoming, I discovered Zane Gray and suddenly my reading was not only a welcome distraction from my annoying siblings, but also a guidebook to the incredible western journey I was on. Reading enhanced my experience. It helped me to imagine and wonder and to become curious about the many places and things I didn’t know.
The fact is that that was the summer I grew reading muscles. Strong, resilient reading muscles. Even though I wasn’t exactly reading Proust or Tolstoy, I had effectively engaged and exercised my reading muscles, cultivated stamina and with that, a confidence that I could read and understand just about anything and probably most profoundly, a deep belief that I enjoyed reading.
As it turns out, this idea of reading muscles is not entirely abstract. Researchers at Emory University found “measurable” changes to the physical brain, as long as five days after subjects finished reading a compelling novel. According to Gregory Berns, who conducted the study in 2013, reading a good book may cause “heightened connectivity in the brain and neurological changes that persist in a similar way to muscle memory.” In short, a good story can change our brain in a way that resonates with us, even after the reading is over, and it is this muscle memory that makes us want to read again and reminds us of how to do it well when we do. The more we read, the more we want to, and the more we believe we can do it well.
What I’ve noticed lately—and by lately, I mean the last 20 years—is that very few of my high school students say they like to read and even fewer seem to have developed strong reading muscles. Many insist they have never read a whole book in high school, not even the ones that were assigned, and most say that they never read for pleasure. None of this is surprising, of course, when you consider all the other more compelling places teenagers can spend their energy and attention. What this means to me, and just about every other high school English teacher I know, though, is that we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get our students to read. But, how exactly do we help our students to exercise muscles that have lain dormant for so long? If our students were on the track team, and had never run a mile, we wouldn’t just tell them to get out there and run a 10K and then record their times. It seems to me that teaching students to engage and exercise their reading muscles should be similarly incremental and that intangible elements like stamina and confidence should to be cultivated in a positive and supportive manner.
Now, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I have had some modest success in engaging my high school students in reading activities during the past few years, even during a global pandemic. Not only does that make my heart sing, but judging by the end-of-the-year reflections my students write, it makes them feel pretty good too. While I use a myriad of specific classroom activities and techniques to boost student reading engagement, I have found the most critical game changer to be my own evolving approach, which hangs on five pillars of truth:
All class readings reflect my goal of decolonizing and contemporizing the English curriculum and I openly share this intention with my students. I actively seek out contemporary literary titles that are interesting to my students and that reflect the diverse nature of our community. Furthermore, I find that foregrounding the social and cultural context of a book and the inherently subversive nature of disrupting the traditional literary canon can be a very compelling reason for students to want to read a book.
Modeling my love of reading and my passion for language is paramount. I read aloud with my students, wonder aloud with my students, stop to look up things I’m not sure about and invite them to do the same. I sometimes stop at a powerful sentence, just to marvel at the beauty of the language. I cry openly at the sad parts, laugh when it’s funny, and check in with my students frequently. When we are in a book together, it is like we are on a trip and I am vigilant about making sure that we don’t leave anyone behind. Differentiated questioning, volunteer readers, vocabulary checkers and discussion board assignments in which students connect ideas in the book with their own experiences all support the central goal of engaging each and every student.
When students are confident that they understand a book and are engaged in the conversation about the book, they will read independently. As students become more engaged in a book, I give them brief independent reading assignments for homework. Our conversation the next day reveals who did or did not do the reading and I find, almost without exception, that students will do the independent reading if they are engaged in the classroom conversation. As the year goes on and students feel more confident and successful, I increase the length and complexity of the assignments. By the second half of the year, I am able to assign scholarly articles about the texts we are reading and students, by and large, do the work necessary to understand and annotate these college-level articles.
All assessments must reflect my goal of deep, sustained engagement with our texts. Deep engagement with our reading requires student behaviors that are not easily assessed: reflection, curiosity, patience, sustained attention, a commitment to rereading, consideration of multiple possibilities, and a myriad of other intangible elements. Creating assessments that go beyond recall, memorization and superficial analysis is challenging, but necessary work.
Reading is a muscle, which can be engaged, exercised and strengthened over time. Helping students to understand the critical importance of deep reading and to know that they can actually train to become stronger readers is critical. When students are reminded that they have read four or five books over the course of a school year, there is a sense of pride and accomplishment that helps to build the confidence they need to continue on this path. Getting in shape is hard work, but there is no greater motivator than seeing progress. By emphasizing to my students that they are quite literally changing their brains every time they deeply engage with a text, I am teaching them that progress is exponential and that each encounter with a book will be deeper and more meaningful than the last.
Further Reading About Reading
Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers (Penny Kittle)
The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child (Donalyn Miller)
From Striving to Thriving: How to Grow Confident, Capable Readers (Stephanie Harvey and Annie Ward)
Game Changer! Book Access for All Kids (Donalyn Miller and Colby Sharp)
No More Independent Reading Without Support (Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss)
Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It (Kelly Gallagher)
The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers, 2nd ed. (Nancie Atwell and Anne Atwell Merkel)
