I dream of readers

I don't know why I do this to myself. On the first day of a literature class I call roll and ask each student to respond by answering a simple question: "What's the most interesting thing you read over break?" I tell them it doesn't have to be a book--could be an article, a blog post, a tweet, whatever. Nevertheless, on Monday nearly half of my American Lit students said they hadn't read anything over break.

Is that the saddest thing you've ever heard?

Well, no, not really. The news about 13 siblings tortured by their parents in California is a lot sadder, and when I think about historical horrors like slavery, the Holocaust, or the Black Death, the decline in reading among college students pales by comparison.

Nevertheless, every time I hear a student admit to not reading at all, it feels like another nail in the coffin of the English department, another stab in the heart of the literary enterprise, another reminder that the world in which I grew up is fading into the ether.

But maybe I ought to see it as a challenge. Unless they're English majors, I'll see these students in one class and never again, so I have exactly one semester to persuade them that reading matters. If a student has read nothing for the past month but gets motivated to read the four poems we'll discuss in class today, I've already increased that student's time spent reading, and I'll increase it even more when we move to longer works. If I can engage them in reading interesting texts for the next 15 weeks, maybe reading will become more of a habit than a hated chore.

Am I dreaming? Maybe, but if I didn't succumb to pipe dreams once in a while, it would be really hard to keep on teaching.