I’m sure we’ve all experienced reading something for school. Do you think that being forced to read for school ruins the book? I don’t think that was always the case with me. I was one of the people that was happy to read. Normally the teachers would let us choose what we read in school most of the time. There were some cases where the teachers would pick but I ended up liking the books we read. For example, there was one year we read “The House of Dies Drear” by Virginia Hamilton, which I ended up liking. The following year, I found out that there was a sequel called “The Mystery of Drear House” and I ended up reading that book as well. Well, last year I ended up getting I got the e-book version of both books put on my Kindle Fire and read them. They were still good books the second time around. One year, I remember doing a book report on the book we were reading and the teacher offered us bonus points if we dressed up as one of the characters from the book. Well, I was reading “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White and I dressed up as Fern. I even brought a stuffed pig with me to serve as Wilbur. My favorite part is one year in grade school the teacher let us bring out sleeping bags and out favorite book to school. This was on the last day of school (or very near the end of of the school year). The teacher was rewarding us for being good and I remember getting to have fun on that day. I also remember a teacher letting us trade books with our friends and we’d read get to read what everyone else brought.
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I think it can affect. It depends on the way the class is introduced to reading. I think it is more difficult to discover the joy of reading for the very first tie with something you felt forced to do. In my case, I learned since I was a kid and loved fairy tales and magical creatures, so by the time I was at school, like you, I pretty much was fine with school books and I enjoyed most of them. However, I am sure a decision in my classroom really ruined an excellent book for many of my classmates.
My high school wanted to brute force getting in a good place in some contest by forcing everyone to participate in something that was supposed to be optional. They really suck out the fun of it. They would quiz un on the author’s details and dates and stuff for the book to make sure you were up to date to this measure on how much progress you should have and it wasn’t lenient at all. Some teacher didn’t show up and got a free hour? Bad luck, someone else would come with a box of spare books and make sure we’d spend it reading that book the hour and a half of that empty slot. It was printed in 8 volumes and the language was really outdated, since it was mocking medieval times, so imagine forcing students to read a thick book, in the Spanish equivalent of old English, being forced to memorize details and being squeezed of every opportunity to do anything else for fun during several weeks on a row. It is not hard to imagine that a lot of my classmates really hated the experience and didn’t want to pick up a book ever again.
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I hate it when someone takes something you enjoy and sucks the fun out of it. I never ran into that problem when I was in school but I guess I just got lucky. Maybe I just got all the right teachers or maybe I got out of school before that became something that was mandatory in school. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with that.
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Forced reading is bad I think, if you force yourself to read you might end up not enjoying it and then you’ll have to pause reading for a while due to that (personal opinion/experience). For me, I hated to be forced to read, because most of the books we read in school were terrible (mostly Serbian literature, that is not so enjoyable for me and especially wasn’t when I was bullied due to being of mix nationalities and a minority).
What you should always do is encourage the kids to read, but never force. I am currently a basketball coach whos gonna switch to being an English Teacher, and I hope that I will be able to make my pupils read and grow through it, read and enjoy what they read.
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I think I got lucky. Whenever we were forced to read, the teachers I had normally let us choose to what we read. The few times we would read something together as a class, the books had been interesting enough to me that I didn’t dread the experience. I don’t think reading should be something that is forced because then kids will end up hating the experience.
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Yeah, being able to chose is always better than you must read this!
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