This week, I’ve been reading Donalyn Miller’s Reading in the Wild for the first time. I am sort of at a loss when it comes to teaching tips, as I intend to become a lawyer, but I can relate to some of the problems that Miller talks about from when I was in school. Not only is this book a great resource for people who will be entering the profession of teaching someday in the near future, it could be helpful for people with family members of certain ages. This is how I have been approaching this text. I am looking at these strategies as being helpful when my young cousins are reading, and I get a chance to spend time with them.

Personally, I am a wholeheartedly decisive reader, which can be a terrible thing sometimes. I tend to decide on whether or not I will continue reading something in the first few pages, which in itself isn’t altogether bad; however, I also tend to do this with texts I am assigned at school. If I don’t like the style of writing, or if the topic should be interesting, but a specific text isn’t living up to that, I put it down. This has been a disadvantage to me academically, because as someone who grew up choosing every single book she cracked open, I learned this habit from a very young age. Textbooks tend to fall a little outside of this category, because I know that there is material I won’t learn anywhere else, but I also learned that if I paid attention in class and took good notes, in most cases I wouldn’t have to spend my valuable reading time on textbooks.

Reading in the Wild is teaching me that I, as a self-identified reader from the minute I could read the word cat, am not alone in these tendencies, and that there are all kinds of readers in the real world outside of the classroom. I decided from page one, in the introduction, that I would be interested in this book, regardless of whether or not it is required reading. From the minute I read about Miller’s husband’s inability to go anywhere without a book, or her daughters voracity when it came to consuming and creating texts of all kinds, I was hooked. This woman understood me. She lived with the embodiments of my reading style, and she had ideas about how to help others appreciate reading as much as I always have.

In Chapter 1, Miller discusses some of the main principles of reading, from reading time in school, reading for pleasure, and what she calls “fake readers”. I feel like some people believe that a child, or a grown person, can only be one kind of reader. Miller’s book doesn’t divide into black and white categories necessarily, but is dedicated to the grey area that is people who don’t read because they haven’t found something to enjoy, or people who read a lot but don’t absorb or enjoy what they are reading. There aren’t two categories, reader or not, that each person is set into their whole life. I have been objectively placed in many of the categories discussed in the book. In elementary school, I was so far ahead of my peers on reading level that I set my own curriculum. My mother and teacher worked together to allow me to choose whatever books I wanted to read as long as they were above a specific reading level. I quickly discovered Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as one of my favorite books. I was labeled a reader. In middle school, I had much less flexibility, and I flipped aimlessly through required reading, while hiding my own book under by desk or behind a text book. I was labeled as what Miller would call a “fake reader”. In high school, each year I had a different experience, but I almost failed my sophomore Honors English class because the teacher was so strict about the readings we had to do, and didn’t allow us to use our “Reading Period” to read outside books.

What I take from my own experience, and from the first chapter of Miller’s book is that anyone can be what is traditionally considered a reader in some way if they only make time to read, and find texts that interest them, no matter the content. I think that this is important to instill in our children, and into our academic system, as early as possible. With a more accepting and well-rounded curriculum regarding reading, I think that there is a chance to avoid the stigma of not being well read in classic texts, or not being invested in the one required reading assigned; there is also a way to avoid people like me feeling disenfranchised and abandoned by their school system when their thirst for new content is swept aside in favor of strict guidelines and the banning of outside texts.

Hi All!!! Following the reading of four different versions of what we know as the Cinderella tale, I have composed a riddle for my classmates. Read these clues carefully, and let me know which story you think I’ve chosen. (I’ll give you a hint: It doesn’t have singing/sewing mice in it… Oh, wait! That’s Disney’s version.)

This story has no pecking order, nor any tweets,

This story has a father who likely bought sweets,

He loved his daughter until he said adieu,

Not many dresses, but one new,

Gifted from step-mother to you.

 

PS: I really dig the progression we are seeing in male characters today as well….

Hello people of the internet! My name is Lillian Butzow, however I prefer to be called Lily. I am currently a senior at Chico State University studying English. In addition, I have accepted a seat at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, the capitol of our great state of California. For many years, since my Gifted and Talented Education program covered criminal procedure and forensics in the fifth grade, I have maintained an interest in law. When I reached middle school and high school, I excelled in my English classes, and grew to love literature. From this point on, I was conflicted. I no longer had continuing education in law, forensics, or any other form of the criminal justice system. I was exposed every day to new literature, new ways to read and to learn from what I was reading. I began to let law fall by the wayside. During high school, I was finally allowed into English classes that challenged me; I was presented with new genres and authors of which I could never have dreamed. From that point on, I started to consider the fact that English, and most probably education, were my future. When I graduated high school, I had a plan for myself. I didn’t quite know what I was going to do after undergraduate education, but I was attending an institution where I could chase my dream; I was going to study Shakespeare in the home town of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. As any reader may be able to figure out, that did not end up working the way that I planned. After only one quarter, I ended up in a situation that saw me moving home. I attended my local community college, and after graduating, I came to Chico State. At my transfer student orientation, I met a wonderful professor who told me about the English Education major available here. So, when I began my career here at Chico State I was on track to becoming an English teacher. Somewhere along the way, I realized that as much as I love literature, my heart wasn’t into teaching for the right reasons. I decided somewhere during the spring semester last year that I was going to return to my other passion. In a span of a few months, I took the LSAT, scouted schools, and while living in Italy on study abroad, I applied to, and was accepted by multiple law schools.  This is who I am. A core part of both of these passions is the integral aspect of reading.

Now, reading in school, whether in law, English, history, or any other subject is slightly different than when you pick up a book that you’ve been waiting to have delivered, or that book that you bought at the bookstore that you’ve been waiting to crack open. Circumstances surrounding your reading are important, but not as important as how you, the person who will be absorbing the material, approach the text. As a person who does or does not identify as a “reader”, you have a definition of what that means. I personally identify as a reader. What that means, to me is someone who not only has the ability to read, which is literacy, but someone who enjoys reading and truly tries to understand what they are reading, regardless of why they are reading it. Personally, I read in similar ways academically and for pleasure, with some key differences. One of the main similarities is that when I begin reading something, regardless of reason, I tend to forget that anything else exists. I tackle every text voraciously, sometimes forgetting to eat, in an attempt to finish said text in one sitting. The largest key difference for me is that when I am reading for academic purposes, while I am attempting to enjoy and learn from what I am reading, I tend not to be able to finish an entire book in one day. Often my reading academically and my reading outside of school intersect in some ways. As an English major, and a lover of classic novels, many of my classes have seen me re-reading books that I have loved for years. In addition, I read scholarly articles that relate to either topics in these beloved novels, or even relate directly to them. Unfortunately, the nature of being a student is that there will inevitably be texts that do not interest you, do not relate to texts you have experience with, or are simply too dense to understand easily. Luckily, there are scholars who understand this problem, and they attempt to explain the dichotomy of academic versus recreational reading.

Bronwyn T. Williams is one such scholar. In Williams’ piece entitled “‘A puzzle to the rest of us’: Who is a ‘reader’ anyway?”, the notion of a reader, and especially a good reader, is discussed. I think that the most important point in Williams’ article is the discussion of perception in younger generation. It is said in the article that children perceive the label of “reader” as a negative thing, and “good reader” as a positive thing. Many of the comments regarding being a reader are about being alone and not interacting with people. A common misconception is that reading can only be a solitary practice. The largest take-away I got from this article is that we as a culture, and those of us who plan on becoming teachers especially, need to teach younger generations to regard reading, no matter the purpose, as a positive and rewarding experience. Without this change in perception and learning practices regarding reading, our culture faces a severe decline in the number of people who identify openly as readers, and fewer still who will actively be willing to read outside of academic or occupational situations. This would lead to not only a disappointing statistic for those of us interested and invested in education, but also a horrible outlook for the future of our country and our world.