Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/114027
Is at Growing up, Michelle Albaugh spent lazy afternoons on her couch, nose buried in a book. But that's not the case with many of her students today. BY SHERRY POSNICK-GOODWIN PHOTOS BY SCOTT BUSCHMAN "T eens don't do that much anymore," says the Sowers Middle School teacher. "Not long ago, kids could read The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and now they struggle with it. Some can't read anything of great length and struggle to read a 10-page short story. Students toil reading anything that's a novel if it isn't popular literature like Twilight. It's frustrating." While young children enjoy reading, enthusiasm frequently fades as they get older, say teachers worried about the trend. Reading becomes work, and reading for pleasure takes a back seat. Because older students don't like reading as much, they don't read as well, Albaugh observes. Older youths are reading less in their free time than a generation ago, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts. The report said: • Teens read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years. • Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of nonreaders doubled over a 20-year period. • Those ages 15-24 spend two hours a day on TV, and only seven minutes of daily leisure time reading. Kelly Gallagher, an English teacher at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, worries about a decline in reading he's seen in students over the past decade. "It's not a California issue, it's a national issue," says the author of Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. "Teachers everywhere share the concern that kids aren't reading enough." Michelle Albaugh Blame NCLB and mandated testing Luis Torres, a student at Cajon High School, discusses The Great Gatsby with classmates, focusing on themes of materialism, corruption and power. "I enjoy reading now, but honestly, I didn't enjoy it much before this class," admits Torres. "Kids in general aren't that interested in reading. We want to watch TV and play video games, for the most part." Jane Lofton March 2013 www.cta.org 11