Reading For Pleasure or Information

Being an educator I have always been concerned about the lack of reading my students appear to do for pleasure. Today I came across this article in The Washington Post, which added some perspective to what may be going on. While kids today do not seem to immerse themselves in fiction the way my friends or I did at their age, they do spend a lot of time reading for pleasure, though it may be on sports, movie stars, clothes, and such. I suppose it corresponds to magazine reading for the most part, something else that we spent hours at.

They do not read the ‘classics’ as I did, yet many of the gamers have a very good sense of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Medieval Times. How? Games. World of Warcraft, 300, and others seem to be teaching a bit of history. History isn’t the only skill being taught through video games, seems some lives were probably saved along the way to earning points!

While I read scads of books on pet care, these kids search by breed and skills they want to learn or rather teach their dogs. It really is quite efficient, we all know that. Is this all that different than the hours we spent in the library when we were in school? I know that I always met my friends there and more talk than work was often the whole point. Not to mention the hope that the boys we liked would show up with some of their friends. Is that all that different than im’ing while doing homework?

When we read Shakespeare we had to pull out encyclopedias to find out what information we could on Stratford on Avon, the Globe Theatre and Shakespearean times. Today, I can access a video via Streaming video on Shakespeare to give them background, then have the kids use laptops to virtually visit the Globe. They can compare and contrast that theater to those used in ancient Greece and write a theme to describe what was similar and different between the times. They come to realize that the themes of theater really didn’t change much, as they haven’t now.

I suppose the question becomes how to motivate them to do the same for topics not assigned? That is something I spend a great deal of time thinking about. They don’t seem to make the connections as easily as most older people do. Perhaps there is just too much information and it’s too easy to find?