Teachers have to work harder to get teenagers to read

Fewer youngsters spend leisure time curling up with a good book.

By JENNIFER GISH Albany Times Union

"What is a 'wrathful gaze'?"

Karin Callahan sits on the desk beside the boy who just finished reading several pages of "To Kill a Mockingbird" to the rest of the sophomores in her Schenectady, N.Y., high school English class.

While Callahan looks for a definition, a book sits pitched like a tent on one student's desk. Another girl tears strips of paper so she can pass notes. A boy in the corner stares intently ahead at nothing.

Today, she asks questions about Harper Lee's classic. But often, Callahan asks herself another question, one repeated by anyone who believes in that Ray Bradbury quote hanging on Callahan's wall: "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

How do you - with all the things competing for their time - inspire teenagers to unlock a world that can only be found in books?

This past summer, the National Center for Educational Statistics released a troubling finding. The percentage of 17-year-olds who said they never or hardly ever read for fun grew from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

At the same time, the percentage of 17-year-olds who read every day dropped from 31 percent to 22 percent.

"It's about drawing them in," Callahan said. "That's the most important thing because if they're not reading, there's nothing."

The English classes at Schenectady High and the teen lounge at the Guilderland (N.Y.) Public Library have become battlegrounds for literacy.

They'd rather not blame it on competition with video games. Many times, Callahan said, students don't read because they're simply too busy with activities after school.

And, the teacher said, schools are partly to blame. The emphasis on standardized testing has sucked some of the joy out of reading and pushed it out of students' schedules because homework consumes a lot of their time.

"There's a lot of pressure on just about every teen to fit the status quo, go with the mainstream," said Trevor Oakley, teen services librarian at the Guilderland library.

Guilderland library has developed a vast collection of anime and graphic novels. It's not high literature, but it brings kids into the library and exposes them to new ideas, Oakley said.

It's important, say Oakley and Callahan, to find those books that will capture kids. One good book can lead to a lifetime habit of reading.

For Callahan, that book was "The Scarlet Letter." The Nathaniel Hawthorne novel so shaped her love of literature that she decided to teach it.

The students hated it.

So she learned over time to find the books that would hook them. For the first batch of freshmen students, it was Louis Sachar's book "Holes," which tells the story of an innocent boy's time in a juvenile detention camp.

Callahan didn't have enough copies for the kids to take home. Callahan found them sneaking copies under their desks to read during vocabulary lessons.

Some students read "A Child Called 'It'," a best-seller by Dave Pelzer that details his life of abuse by his mother. Kids who have struggled tend to relate to it.

Jessica Cydylo, one of Callahan's sophomore students, didn't start reading until she picked up the first book in the "Gossip Girl" series as part of the school's reading list.

Now, she's on the fourth book in the series and likes to go to the bookstore as much as the local mall.

All it took was one book.

Source:http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/life/atoz/article_767831.php