Affective Dimensions of Reading

In every picture my Dad posts of me on facebook, I am reading (like the one above). At first I thought he was just doing it as a joke, but then I realized that I probably was just always reading when he was around. When I made this comment to him, all he said was, "You think?"

All right. I get it.

I've always read too much. A lot of people will tell me that you can never read too much, but I bet you that I could change their minds. You see, I read when I should be doing other things. Like when I was younger, I would read instead of going out to play with friends. My mom would always tell me to "get off the couch, put down the book, and go outside," but I couldn't help myself--I just preferred to be reading. I was insatiable.

 Besides missed social expectations, my reading can often annoy others; for example, I will have reading material on the table in front of me whenever I play a board game with friends or family. Since I constantly feel the need to multitask, I almost go crazy at the thought of waiting for other people to take their turn without doing anything myself. My friends and family have learned to just ignore it. But my reading addiction goes further than that: I will read everywhere--shampoo bottles in the shower, Oprah magazines on the toilet, poetry anthologies over sandwiches. I realize that this is all probably a little weird, even obsessive. I realize that I might be shortchanging my opportunities to have real-life interactions with people.

But I still can't seem to stop.

Luckily, growing up I had a lot of friends who already liked to read (or who could be easily persuaded). To this day I will ask my friends what they are reading pretty much every time I see them, and if they say that they're not reading anything, I will proceed to come by their house the next day with an armful of "useful recommendations" for them to get on ASAP. It's like I've become the literacy Nazi: read now or be punished by my soapbox rants on how lamentable it is that few Americans actually read a single book within any given year.

Despite my own nitpicking at others' lack of reading habits, my own current reading habits are not quite as impressive as I would like them to be, although I will flaunt the fact that I subscribe to no fewer than ten magazines and newspapers (it used to be about 14, but I got the other 4 for a majorly good deal that ended in August, and I'm too cheap to renew my subscription for full price). I set a goal at the beginning of this year that I called "The 50 Book Challenge" (check out my progress on my other blog, if you wish), but in between getting married and working full-time hours in addition to being a full-time student, I have not exactly progressed much in that particular new year's resolution. Every day though, you'll find me reading something, whether it's a magazine article or a textbook section. So I'm not being entirely hypocritical. (I guess.)

I am a little worried about how all this will affect me as a teacher: I just pray that my students won't hate me because I'm so passionate about reading that it's scary. More importantly, I hope that my students won't hate reading because I'm so passionate about it that it's scary. I also am hoping to draw on my tutoring experiences to be able to better empathize with and understand those students who grew up not loving reading. I think that a lot of the reason that students don't love reading is because they have gotten little or no choice in the matter in "school reading." I am a big advocate for giving students choices as to which books to read, so I'll be doing a lot of that in my future classroom. I'm also currently working on my own "classroom library" by buying books secondhand from library and yard sales; I'm hoping that seeing all the young adult books scattered around the room will encourage students whose first love isn't reading--oftentimes, those kinds of students have never  had too much experience reading books that were written specifically for people their age.

All in all though, I know that teaching will be a huge learning process for me; I know that I will maybe have to modify my expectations or accept the fact that maybe some people will never learn to love reading (although I don't have to accept that fact until I find someone I can't convince). I'm excited for the challenge.