What I am about to confess is embarrassing. I spent the entire day, well nine straight hours of it, reading. How is this embarrassing you might ask? In fact, on the surface it seems so erudite. Please imagine away that I was captivated by War and Peace or Moby Dick. In actuality, I was reading yet another Sookie Stackhouse novel. If you don't know what I'm referencing, turn on HBO on Sunday nights. You will get an hour's worth of brain candy (perhaps brain crack-candy): True Blood. Vampires, werewolves, fairies, and a telepath. The TV show is no longer enough to satisfy my obsession, so I started reading the books (not sure that they even warrant being called novels) that the series is based on. Charlaine Harris' books boast such insightful titles as Dead Until Dark, Dead as a Doornail, and today's entertainment Definitely Dead. Now as an English teacher, I'm sure you're starting to see how this confession must stay within the confines of my blog. When my husband returned from a day in what I like to call the real world (you know...where people sit in front of computers in their cubicles doing "important" stuff), he was less than impressed that I hadn't managed to even brush my teeth until 5:30 (PM...just in case you were confused!). My first reaction was shame. How could I waste so much time? I'm not really big, however, on feeling guilty about my procrastination tendencies. So my second reaction was, quite clearly, justification.
In order to justify my binge-reading, I decided that reading is good for my brain. I actually spent nine hours running a mental marathon. Yes. This made me feel much better. Until I admitted deep within my subconscious that it was more like a nine hour mental stroll. Or was it? Is all reading good for my brain? I definitely employed my proficient reader skills: prediction, visualization, vocabulary development (Sookie uses a word-of-the-day calendar). When I googled brain development and reading, I couldn't find any sites that clearly specified WHAT I needed to be reading. Most of them instructed me to "read, read, read." In fact, the Franklin Institute cited a study where participants were able to increase pinky strength by 35% by simply imagining that they were exercising their fingers. I was imagining all sorts of things as I read...my brain must be getting stronger.
Which finally brings me to my classroom, that is, if anyone is still reading. Please understand. I am not going to dump Othello for Sookie any time soon. However, I do want more information on the effect of all forms of reading on my students. Let's be honest, even in an honors class, many students simply do not read. If it is long, old, and complicated, most students won't give it a chance. So I start to wonder if it is actually a disservice to my students to mix in some easier reads. Books that might not find their way into the literary cannon, but actually find their way into students' hands. Does reading The Hunger Games provide an equal amount of cognitive stimulation to, say, Lord of the Flies? It does if the students actually bother to read it :) If you want to point me towards more data, please do.
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