Let me apologize first, as I'm going to rant. A lot.

While trying to decide what I was going to blog about today, my favorite former student sent me the link to this article: Why Teachers Love Depressing Books. After reading the article about Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up, I'm now irritated as hell.

At first I was ready to be on the author's side. One excerpt of the book notes, "We can't ever say we don't like the books," Alex tells his mother, because, according to his teacher, "if you're not liking the books, you're not reading them closely enough." While I think there are teachers out there who want to foster the love of reading in kids, to me it seems like it's just not happening. I think (and I'll probably get flamed to death for writing this) that schools kill the joy of reading for kids. A perfect example of this is the Accelerated Reader program. More and more I see kids being told what books they can and cannot read (by their teachers) because the books they want to read are below their AR level. While I understand the need to evaluate a child's reading ability, I also think too much emphasis is placed on comprehension. I've seen some of the AR tests, and they can be incredibly nit picky. I can't fault a child for not remembering some teeny tiny detail from a book I know I wouldn't remember either. The end result is we have kids who equate reading with misery and subsequently do not want to read. Argh!

But that's not was has me irritated. Later the article states, "She (the author of the book) sees the memoirlike problem novels as symptoms of "the drastic fall from grace that the imagination has suffered in popular understanding" and her generation's insistence on "making our children wake from the dream of their childhoods." Adults, she suspects, secretly resent the sheltered, enchanted world children inhabit and under the pretext of preparing them for life's inevitable difficulties, want to rub their noses in traumas they may never actually experience and often aren't yet able to comprehend."

I admit it. I resent children and want to shatter their worlds by exposing them to realistic fiction. I've been known to stand outside preschools and distribute copies of Speak and Martyn Pig to all the little children. It wasn't enough to tell them that there was no such thing as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Oh no. I'm not happy unless I'm making a child cry about how messed up the world can be. It's just my jealous nature. Damn you Barbara Feinberg, you've found me out!

Puh-leese. Did it ever occur to the Ms. Feinberg that these kinds of novels can be a help and not a hindrance to the students who read them? We are talking about middle school students here, not second graders. At that age, what "sheltered, enchanted world" are we waking them from exactly? I work next door to a middle school, and I see these kids everyday. Those kids left their "enchanted world" long ago, and I'm not about to blame the books they've read for that. On the other hand, I've seen how realistic fiction (including problem novels) can open a dialogue between these kids and the adults around them about some very serious problems. Also, kids as they grow are continuously learning about themselves and the world around them. What better way to expose kids to worlds that they are not familiar with than through books?

Some (many) may disagree with me. But at least I feel a better getting that off my chest.

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