Critical Response: "How Teachers Make Chilren Hate Reading"

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate October 2001

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Critical Response Paper #1 I remember sitting in disgust as I was reading A Separate Piece, by John Knowles in my 10th grade English class. I never understood why I had to read such uninteresting books. My mind would wonder onto a different subject and then I couldn't remember what I had just read. It was always like that when I started a book that the rules said a student "had"� to read. I thought school was supposed to be interesting. The essay "How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading"� by John Holt explains it all perfectly.

Looking up words in the dictionary that I didn't know from a book was even more uninteresting to me. I would have to stop in the middle of a sentence to look up a word, and then when I came back to the reading I would be even more lost then before. Why couldn't the rules be just a little more convenient? For instance, if you get to a page with lots of unknown words, then look them up for your own behalf for better understanding of the book.

Sometimes I still understand what I am reading with just a few words that I don't know. I most of the time can just figure out what they mean without stopping to look them up.

I remember when one time my English teacher read Loves Music, Loves to Dance, a Mary Higgins Clark book, out loud to the class. After that book, I always wondered why that kind of author couldn't be part of the literary canon. I really enjoyed the week that my teacher read us that book, because I actually enjoyed going to English. When my teacher finished the book I continued to read Mary Higgins Clark's books. She is now...