Week 5: Fostering Reading Culture
"But have you tried making your lessons fun?" This is one of the all-time top-five worst things you can say to a teacher. It also happens to be the first, and often only advice that non-teachers (including administrators) give to frustrated teachers. Well, I have found the reading-skills equivalent, thanks to Annie Holmquist from the Foundation for Economic Education website, who unironically writes: " Maybe if we let them read for pleasure once in a while they wouldn't hate doing it .” (Holmquist) Holmquist is a researcher, not a teacher (nor a parent). But she still thinks that she has an important and overlooked opinion about whether teachers are doing their work correctly. She admittedly bases this blog article on a single interaction with a parent who believes his kid’s teachers are “killing his child’s interest in reading.” (Holmquist) So, let’s pretend that teachers don’t know their own work, and that this armchair expert is correct: that teachers are ...