I didn't always love books. In fact, I didn't read much at all in middle school. I also didn't read too many of the assigned books in high school. Don't get me wrong, I love to read, but assigned reading was what always bit me in the ass. I think coasting through literature is one of the biggest epidemics in schools today.

Usually it occurs when students don't understand a text. I remember having a class called Literary Criticism. It is EXACTLY as horrible as it sounds. We had a book called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. It was paired with a textbook-ish explanation of criticism and philosophy. Philosophy in itself is vaguely confusing and pair it with large words and complex literature and you have Slacker Soup.

We were supposed to read a few chapters of Joyce's book a week and then they were explained in class. That was the theory. I don't remember much from that class. I remember reading the chapters, giving up halfway through, then coming to class. I remember sitting near the front and I would scribble half a page of notes because I couldn't comprehend what he was trying to explain. I left the class with more questions than I started with. The explanations of the reading only led to more and more confusion. I was vaguely aware of the topic and about half the year I was eating Slacker Soup every day in that class.

I stopped doing the readings because I didn't understand them anyways. I doodled in my notebook and played on my computer and because I was always typing, the professor would continue to drone about Freud and Plato and Joyce. We had two essays and three quizzes that semester. I did okay on the quizzes, but it was the papers I excelled at. I'm not sure how to this day. I did a paper on Nietzsche and I think it had something to do with literature?

Sigmund Freud

I remember that Freud was saying that we constantly repressed the Id, or the child in ourselves ("I want"), and sometimes that emerged and upset society. I think I would have loved to have seen Freud against a feminist.

Regardless, you can see I didn't learn much in that class. Here's the magical part, I passed that class with a B. I'm not sure how that happened because I barely knew the names of these dinosaurs let alone their rambling theories of the human consciousness.

That happens a lot in school. I still have the amazing ability to not read and contribute to the conversation based off of context. Some teachers try to combat this in classrooms by creating impossibly specific tests and activities as if to punish the non-reader. As a teacher I want to do the opposite. I want to encourage kids to read with texts that they find interesting. I want to discuss what they're passionate about, because Slacker Soup does nothing for kids in the long run.

Content storage cannot emerge from difficulty and punishment.

Tony Stark does SCIENCE. Bruce Banner does SCIENCE. I... I do not do SCIENCE. I do ohgodwhatisthismybrainhurtsSTAHP. This is what I did tonight during my Chemistry test.

I want to clarify. I do not follow the stereotype of English majors who hate math. I do not hate math or science. I was actually pretty good at math in high school. By a miracle of unknown origins, I managed to walk into my university with 9 credits of math and haven't taken a math class since high school. I recently decided that I wanted a little bit of a challenge in my life and
decided to use my last required science credit for General Chemistry I.

This was a mistake.

I recently sat in a lecture hall with a hundred other college students as we were told to leave bags, jackets, wallets, cell phones, and even the covers to our calculators along the walls of the lecture room. For 30 questions we were given two hours. There were instructions in bold about cheating. We had to alternate pink tests and yellow tests down the rows. We were only allowed the clothing we were wearing with no visible papers in pockets, a pencil, and one of two very specific calculators. When I finished I had to turn in a cover letter with a signature on it saying I hadn't cheated as well as my scantron. They had to check both my cover letter and my scantron against my college ID.

I'm fairly certain I signed away my soul.

You see, despite the fact that I may have given my soul to my chemistry professor, I don't hate chemistry. If I get a C or a D, I will still not hate chemistry.

I have this belief that hatred cannot occur with a specific intellectual subject until you've tried your hardest to understand and to make yourself better at it.

Did I study as much as I should have? No. Will I do all the homework when it is assigned instead of the day before its due? Yes. Have I really tried to understand? No. Have I gone to get help for the concepts that stumped me? No.

I have not tried my hardest to master chemistry despite what I'd promised myself when I'd signed up for the class. While I've done all of the assigned homework, I have not done the extra practice problems, and that bit me it the ass today.

You can't hate something because you don't understand it. You can't hate something until you've mastered it. The same thing applies to reading. I hear it constantly from not just kids, but adults too.

"Oh, I hate reading."
"I always fall asleep when I read."
"Reading is so boring."
"It takes me months to read a book."

I always respond with different variations of the same thing: "I'm going to tell you a fact then I'm going to ask you a question. Reading is not programmed into our brains. It is an unnatural thing for our brains to do because we are better equipped at birth for math than we are words. So when you say you hate reading, is it because you aren't good at it yet or because you've mastered it and still discovered a dislike for it?"

Some stay silent. Some only nod in agreement, refusing to answer my question. And some answer. They usually tell me they aren't good at it. Reading is slow going for them and the words don't form pictures in their heads. They often don't understand the vocabulary, or they cannot connect the ideas from passage to passage in their heads.

I recently read the book When Kids Can't Read by Kayleen Beers. There are ways to identify dependent readers and this is often the category that people who say they hate to read fall under.

I genuinely believe that as a teacher or a person, you have to identify the problem and then do everything you can to fix it before you can make such a harsh declaration of hatred.

So no, I don't hate chemistry because I haven't mastered it. I haven't given it my best shot and practiced and practiced at something that I'm not good at.

After you've tried your absolute best and mastered the skill, only then do you have the right to say, "I definitely know the difference between an ionic and covalent bond, and it makes me vomit in my mouth a little bit. I hate chemistry."

I can't read.

This is a phrase I hear frequently in the classrooms I've observed. It is usually mumbled and their ears start to turn bright red, the blush working their way across their face as their classmates stare.

My first experience in a classroom was an 8th grade Read 180 classroom. For those of you that aren't aware of what Read 180 is, it is a program designed to help kids get closer to their grade level of reading through small groups and a computer program. The class can consist of general education students or special education students, though usually it is the latter.

In this class of about 12 there was a student, let's call him Andy, that didn't like me very much. He was a social kid with lots of friends and had plenty of girls to flirt with. When ever he would get on the computer to do the module for the day he would constantly distract his partner. I would inevitably kneel down between the two and look at Andy.

"Can you work on the assignment for the day? You haven't even read the passage."

His ears turned red and it rushed across the back of his neck. "I can't read."

Now if he truly couldn't read he would have been placed in a lower level Intervention class, so I knew that that statement wasn't quite true.

I had no idea what to tell him. I was never sure what to tell him actually, and I'm still formulating a proper response.

Further through the semester he and I got into our share of battles. He, at one point, shouted at me in front of the whole class while the teacher was out of the classroom.

He had yelled, "You're not my teacher!"

We had to have a talk, me, Andy, and the Read 180 teacher. He mumbled an apology. The teacher looked him straight in the face and said, "Don't treat her like you treated me the first few weeks."

I had two more weeks left in the classroom and Andy and I had been getting along surprisingly well. He had finally warmed towards me a little bit. He did what I asked during our small groups most of the time, grudgingly I might add.

On my last day we were joking around with a few of the other boys going over literary elements for their poems. I told them that knowing these things are important.

Andy said something that I'll never forget. "Why? It's not like we are going to finish high school anyways."

We, as teachers, all are taught that education is the pinnacle of society and at the age of 14, they already decided that their future had nothing to do with school. Some of the boys agreed with Andy's statement, others didn't.

I wish I'd had the courage to stow the smile and tell them, "Reading is a learned skill. It is not something that is supposed to occur naturally in your brain. Reading is like any other learned skill, you have to practice. If you chose to goof off and not try and say you hate reading, you will continue to hate it and think yourself more stupid for not knowing.

"You are not stupid. You're just a rookie. If you never practice, you'll never be varsity."

Not saying anything is one of my biggest regrets. My not speaking up probably confirmed exactly what he thought about himself, and that's something that I can never fix.