Should Children Read Up?
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| Would you let your 2nd grader read this book? |
Roseanne Parry wrote this article for the Horn Book's online blog today. Here she poses the same question, only as a mother, not as a teacher. I found her point of view, and the change in her thinking, very interesting. She explains how her mother always encourage her to "read up" When Parry had her own children she wanted to follow in the same tradition.
Parry goes on to explain how Harry Potter waltzed it's way into their household, how she fully embraced the desire for everyone, her eight, eleven, fourteen, and sixteen year olds, to read the book. Soon, however, Parry realizes some unforeseen downsides to letting her youngest children read up. One notion I found interesting was that because it took her youngest so long to read the first six books, an entire school year, she missed out on all of the other books that other 2nd graders were reading. Is that type of sacrifice worth it?
I found the article very intriguing and more of a practical way of explaining why kids shouldn't always be encouraged to "read up." It has nothing to do with reading levels, grade level, or tests. It simply has to do with making sure kids are really, truly, enjoying the books they read. Check it out!
This is a question I have asked myself SO MANY times over the years -- in my life as a children's bookseller, and in my overlapping on-going life as a parent. As a so-called 'precocious reader' myself, I distinctly remember my mother yanking a copy of JAWS out of my eight year-old hands (I had found it on the shelves of a summer rental, and had already read the first chapter which involved grown-ups doing 'things' on the beach and then skinny-dipping and being eaten by a shark). I think I went on to read WATERSHIP DOWN not too long after that -- I guess a grown-up book about fluffy bunnies was deemed okay. But what did I miss out on reading that book so young? Certainly the fact that the book is one ginormous political metaphor. That book might have actually SPOKEN TO ME had a waited to read it until high school. So I suppose what I think is that while kids are certainly ABLE TO read complicated books written for older audiences, and while I don't think there is anything WRONG or EVIL about letting them do so, I firmly believe that they miss out on a much much richer and deeper reading experience when they are not somewhere near the age of the book's protagonist. I believe that lovely, enthusiastic, book-loving (and movie-loving) parents inadvertently do their kids a great disservice when they let them read certain books too soon -- or if they don't at least read those books TOGETHER so that those aspects that may go right over their head are not lost. By book 3 of the Harry Potter (or as I prefer to call them, The Hermione Granger Chronicles), Harry is FOURTEEN and the plots tackle the concepts of bigotry, xenophobia, and genocide. There are great opportunities for deep discussions and life lessons that would be lost on (and perhaps even inappropriate to get into with) a younger reader. My greatest worry as a lover of stories however, is that when kids read books intended for a more life-experienced audience, they cross that book off their lists and rarely-if-ever revisit it. And they will never that book as the author intended it. They half-lived it. Which sucks. Imagine reading CATCHER IN THE RYE when you're ten. Would it mean anything to you? Or would you just be thrilled with and distracted by the cursing? You would grow up thinking, "yeah, I read that book about the kid with the dead brother and the F word. It was okay. Not much happened."
ReplyDeleteI hear ya! My biggest conflict as a teacher is when a "reluctant" reader catches the bug and wants to read something that is popular. Finally! They have found a book to love! I feel like my role is to let them go for it and then steer them in the direction of a better fit for them, that they will get more out of while reading. I remember reading Walden when I was way too young because I wanted to be seen as a "mature reader." I did just what you described, checked it off my list, held my head high...and haven't returned to it. Thanks for the thoughts!!
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