Just Read.

In a typical high school English classroom, about one-third of the students are genuinely excited about reading. As for the rest, the only the only power keeping them in their seats is the government. Okay, so maybe I am exaggerating, but this semester when I worked at Centennial High School in Burleson, the phrases "I hate reading" or more commonly, "I suck at reading" flowed freely throughout the classroom. This is discouraging to hear, but I believe there is something we can do. While working one-on-one with a student, I started conversing about his reading habits. Once again, the dreaded phrase "I hate reading" came up, and when I asked why, he looked stunned. It occurred to me that this belief had never been questioned. He replied with "I just do. I've never been good at it." I learned from later observation that he was diagnosed with dyslexia in elementary school, but he did not let this hold him back. He explained how at home, he loves to read on his iPad. His artistic skills are highly advanced (to the point where in the middle of a lesson he would just start drawing in three dimensions with shading and exquisite detail, just with a ball point pen mind you.) He talked about the graphics that iPad uses for books and how this makes reading exciting for him. Now I am all for print books and generally prefer them to ebooks. But when a freshman student reading at an elementary level states that reading on an iPad is exciting, in my book (no pun intended) that is a win. I need to do whatever I can to excite students about reading. Whether that's an iPad, an eReader, comic book, reading is reading. For the remainder of our lessons, I let him bring his iPad, and we read Romeo and Juliet and found links to video clips, pictures, and translations to modern English. Overall, the fact that I allowed him to use an iPad in class boosted his confidence as a reader and made his experience with the text interactive and visually stimulating.