Inside the Classroom: Reading by Mr. Franzak

There’s only one activity that consistently gets near total buy-in from my students every week. It isn’t writing journal entries, though many of them enjoy the opportunity to show off their wit in front of their peers. Believe it or not, it isn’t our grammar lessons either. Each week, the only activity where the whole class is mostly silent and laser focused on one activity for a prolonged period of time is when we do our thirty minutes of nightly reading in class. 

There’s only one activity that consistently gets near total buy-in from my students every week. It isn’t writing journal entries, though many of them enjoy the opportunity to show off their wit in front of their peers. Believe it or not, it isn’t our grammar lessons either. Each week, the only activity where the whole class is mostly silent and laser focused on one activity for a prolonged period of time is when we do our thirty minutes of nightly reading in class.

Surprisingly, this is the only activity where, even after I’ve announced the start of break several times, students are still glued to their seats. They’re so engrossed in their reading that they don’t even hear me. The majority of the time, when there is talking, it’s a student leaning over to share some happy discovery in a book with a peer. Sometimes, it’s just them audibly giggling at something in their book. As far as disruptions go, that one is a favorite of mine.

The secret? I encourage them to choose their own reading material, and there’s no judgement about what they select to read.

If they want to read comics, I fully support that. There are arguments to be made for the legitimacy of comics as literature. There are definitely fewer words on a comic book page than that of a prose novel, but comics are also the only medium where the reader has such a high degree of agency when it comes to the pacing. While all storytelling mediums involve some degree of dialogue between the author and the reader, comics are the only ones where the creators can use layout to suggest the amount of time spent examining the images, but the reader ultimately makes the decision. I’ve seen boys read comics at a blistering pace because they barely glance at the art and I’ve seen them spend minutes closely examining a series of panels.

Because of the visual component, comics present unique ways for creators to convey unspoken and subtle characterization and tone, and they can create really immersive reading experiences. There are other arguments to be made for comics as legitimate forms of literature, but I haven’t made the most compelling one yet: students like them, and for some students, that’s the difference between picking up a book instead of a phone or controller.

There are any number of reasons that students might struggle to commit to a regular reading habit, but the most impactful one is that they haven’t established it as a habit. To be clear, I don’t see anything wrong with reading comics, and my end goal isn’t for students to move past them. My goal is for students to explore many genres and discover reading material that they get something out of so that they’ll keep coming back for more.

The genrefied sections of the Seven Hills library reflect this; manga and comics are the first two sections, followed by the realistic fiction and humor sections. In there, they can find Gordon Korman books and the perennial favorite series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. If they like either of those options, they’ll find similar books shelved nearby. Around the corner, there’s the sports, horror, and mystery sections, which all face the adventure section. This keeps series like Spy School shelved near the Alex Rider books. Toward the back, students can find the sections that tend to be attractive options for the voracious readers that are willing to dig for a book: the fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction books. Again, shelving similar titles near each other (instead of by author) helps students to use the books that they’ve enjoyed to find new options. In this way, the comics section is a gateway to the rest of the library collection. We have a lot of comics, and they tend to make up between fifty five and sixty percent of our annual checkouts, but they are finite, and when students understand that reading can bring them joy, they’re more willing to peruse the rest of the shelves for more options.

This is why I’ve always suggested other books in other genres in addition to a student’s comic selections, not instead of them. It’s the “Yes, and,” style of promoting reading.

In any thought exercise about students and reading habits, I think it’s important to think about what the goals are. Obviously there are a number of benefits to reading: students improve their vocabularies, develop greater abilities to focus, and improve their analytical and critical thinking skills. These will undoubtedly help them as they continue their academic careers.

At least equally important, though, is the way reading can expose them to ideas and experiences that they would not encounter otherwise. Reading works by authors from around the world, of different genders, living through different time periods, with radically different experiences, provides them with the opportunity to develop a greater sense of empathy.

Additionally, even in those works by authors whose lives differ from their own, students can learn important lessons about themselves. In one of my favorite science fiction series, there’s a character who is a woman, born on a space station in the asteroid belt, with a physiology that wouldn’t even allow her to live in Earth’s gravity. She’s an engineer, and she fixes and flies spaceships. She’s also a parent. Her life is about as different from mine as possible. There’s a moment, five books into the series, where she explains something about her personal ideology to her son. The specifics aren’t important and would obfuscate my point, but when I first read that scene, the words and sentiment she explained were instantly recognizable to me. They were exactly how I felt, but I had never realized it and could not, until then, put it into words.

I’ll admit that the series is co-written by two white males, but I think my point still stands. Reading that scene in that series helped me to better understand myself, and it’s just one example of many reflections of myself that I’ve found, some of them a surprise even to me, in the books and comics that I’ve read. These discoveries have helped me to better understand myself, and if I could ensure an understanding of just one thing for my students, it would be of themselves as people. Knowing yourself feels so foundational and significant for functioning in the world, and I know that reading has been and continues to be key in the development of my understanding of myself.

In order for students to get all the way to that point though, they have to develop reading stamina and habits, and they won’t keep reaching for books if they don’t enjoy them on some level. Helping them find new and different books of all types that they enjoy is my favorite part of the job, and it starts with meeting them where they are. There’s plenty of time for them to read the classics and learn something that someone else wants them to learn, but in the meantime, who knows what they’ll learn from reading the books they pick for themselves? They might learn something about someone else or even themselves, but if nothing else, they should learn to keep reading.

The secret? I encourage them to choose their own reading material, and there’s no judgement about what they select to read.

If they want to read comics, I fully support that. There are arguments to be made for the legitimacy of comics as literature. There are definitely fewer words on a comic book page than that of a prose novel, but comics are also the only medium where the reader has such a high degree of agency when it comes to the pacing. While all storytelling mediums involve some degree of dialogue between the author and the reader, comics are the only ones where the creators can use layout to suggest the amount of time spent examining the images, but the reader ultimately makes the decision. I’ve seen boys read comics at a blistering pace because they barely glance at the art and I’ve seen them spend minutes closely examining a series of panels. 

Because of the visual component, comics present unique ways for creators to convey unspoken and subtle characterization and tone, and they can create really immersive reading experiences. There are other arguments to be made for comics as legitimate forms of literature, but I haven’t made the most compelling one yet: students like them, and for some students, that’s the difference between picking up a book instead of a phone or controller.

There are any number of reasons that students might struggle to commit to a regular reading habit, but the most impactful one is that they haven’t established it as a habit. To be clear, I don’t see anything wrong with reading comics, and my end goal isn’t for students to move past them. My goal is for students to explore many genres and discover reading material that they get something out of so that they’ll keep coming back for more. 

The genrefied sections of the Seven Hills library reflect this; manga and comics are the first two sections, followed by the realistic fiction and humor sections. In there, they can find Gordon Korman books and the perennial favorite series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. If they like either of those options, they’ll find similar books shelved nearby. Around the corner, there’s the sports, horror, and mystery sections, which all face the adventure section. This keeps series like Spy School shelved near the Alex Rider books. Toward the back, students can find the sections that tend to be attractive options for the voracious readers that are willing to dig for a book: the fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction books. Again, shelving similar titles near each other (instead of by author) helps students to use the books that they’ve enjoyed to find new options. In this way, the comics section is a gateway to the rest of the library collection. We have a lot of comics, and they tend to make up between fifty five and sixty percent of our annual checkouts, but they are finite, and when students understand that reading can bring them joy, they’re more willing to peruse the rest of the shelves for more options. 

This is why I’ve always suggested other books in other genres in addition to a student’s comic selections, not instead of them. It’s the “Yes, and,” style of promoting reading. 

In any thought exercise about students and reading habits, I think it’s important to think about what the goals are. Obviously there are a number of benefits to reading: students improve their vocabularies, develop greater abilities to focus, and improve their analytical and critical thinking skills. These will undoubtedly help them as they continue their academic careers. 

At least equally important, though, is the way reading can expose them to ideas and experiences that they would not encounter otherwise. Reading works by authors from around the world, of different genders, living through different time periods, with radically different experiences, provides them with the opportunity to develop a greater sense of empathy. 

Additionally, even in those works by authors whose lives differ from their own, students can learn important lessons about themselves. In one of my favorite science fiction series, there’s a character who is a woman, born on a space station in the asteroid belt, with a physiology that wouldn’t even allow her to live in Earth’s gravity. She’s an engineer, and she fixes and flies spaceships. She’s also a parent. Her life is about as different from mine as possible. There’s a moment, five books into the series, where she explains something about her personal ideology to her son. The specifics aren’t important and would obfuscate my point, but when I first read that scene, the words and sentiment she explained were instantly recognizable to me. They were exactly how I felt, but I had never realized it and could not, until then, put it into words.

I’ll admit that the series is co-written by two white males, but I think my point still stands. Reading that scene in that series helped me to better understand myself, and it’s just one example of many reflections of myself that I’ve found, some of them a surprise even to me, in the books and comics that I’ve read. These discoveries have helped me to better understand myself, and if I could ensure an understanding of just one thing for my students, it would be of themselves as people. Knowing yourself feels so foundational and significant for functioning in the world, and I know that reading has been and continues to be key in the development of my understanding of myself. 

In order for students to get all the way to that point though, they have to develop reading stamina and habits, and they won’t keep reaching for books if they don’t enjoy them on some level. Helping them find new and different books of all types that they enjoy is my favorite part of the job, and it starts with meeting them where they are. There’s plenty of time for them to read the classics and learn something that someone else wants them to learn, but in the meantime, who knows what they’ll learn from reading the books they pick for themselves? They might learn something about someone else or even themselves, but if nothing else, they should learn to keep reading.