Are You a Wild Reader?
By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president
If you eat the same breakfast cereal every morning, do you also read everything on the back of the same cereal box every morning?
If so, have you wondered why you read it over and over? I mean, you already know what’s on the back of the box because you’ve read it multiple times. You’ve seen it every day for maybe a week or more. And even if you get a new box of cereal, it might have the same stuff on its box as the other cereal’s box. If there’s nothing else to read and nobody to talk to, reading the cereal box panels just seems to be the thing to do.
On the other end of the day, you may get to bed anticipating spending your last waking part of an hour reading the latest mystery thriller, and you realize that you already finished that book and it’s in the car for a trip back to the library or to be loaned to a friend. When that happens, have you been known to pick up whatever is lying around and you read that, even if it’s something you’ve already read?
This phenomenon—reading whatever’s within our reach, seems to be good for our brains. There’s something important in opening your mind to accept whatever print may be within reach.
If this describes you, then you are what Donalyn Miller, known as “The Book Whisperer,” calls a “Wild Reader.” By that Miller means that like millions of other fortunate souls around the world, you are an avid, lifelong, dedicated, joyful, independent reader. Wild Readers always have a book going—or maybe several. “Wildies” will read anything when a chance is presented. They get their mental batteries charged by engaging with print.
If schooling does nothing else but teach kids in a way that nurtures their inner Wild Readers, then we could call schooling a success. Indeed, an education that sets up children to keep reading (and therefore learning) long after the last school bell chimes and with few interruptions on into and through adulthood is an education worth providing. And if all kids are wild about reading, they are more likely to engage with almost everything in the curriculum, but perhaps in their own ways.
In the current education milieu, “What gets measured, gets done.” We measure all kinds of things about kids, but except for a few international exams, we rarely see data or hear about an all-school, all-student assessment that focuses on reading habits, reading independence, and reading joy.
We should unflinchingly ask our teachers, administrators, and legislators to start asking questions about kids’ reading lives on standard tests, especially if it is practically the only data that will focus their attention on getting the development of lifelong avid reading DONE at school. After all, the ongoing nurturing of lifelong readers and learners is the clearest evidence of a quality education system.
The possibilities created by raising each successive generation of self-guided wild readers are worth thinking about—a lot—for yourself, your children, your students, and your world.