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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. I'm sure for many of you, some of your fondest childhood memories are of going to the library or just curling up with a good book, however, that might be changing. Right before the pandemic, a survey by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, what's known as the NAEP, found that the number of kids and young teens who read for fun every day had dropped by more than 10% since 1984. Now, for the parents and educators out there, have you noticed this trend? How do your kids feel about reading? What are some strategies that you've tried to encourage them to read for fun? Maybe we have some kids on spring break, not just teachers. Do you have plans to read this week? Give us a call at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer, anything about reading for pleasure and children. With us for this is Katherine Marsh, an Edgar Award-winning author of novels for young readers, most recently, The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine, and a former managing editor of The New Republic. Recently, she wrote an article in The Atlantic about what she thinks is at the root of this drop in reading for fun. Katherine, welcome to WNYC. Thank you for joining us.

Katherine Marsh: Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: How did they define reading for fun in surveying kids?

Katherine Marsh: Well, I think reading for fun is just purely doing it outside of the context of school and out of the required reading for school. That has definitely been dropping. There are several reasons that people often mention that seem like the most obvious, for example, screens. The average kid now has a smartphone at 11. Obviously, also the pandemic has had an impact as well. However, my article really goes into how we teach reading at school and the changes in the education system. I do think that that is one of the major factors in this that often goes overlooked, and specifically, the amount of testing that we're doing and the assessments. So much of the way we teach reading right now is teaching analysis of passages as opposed to reading whole books and really talking about story.

Brian Lehrer: Teaching critical reading skills is having a side effect of less reading for fun, is that what you're saying?

Katherine Marsh: Yes, specifically when we're doing so much high-stakes testing, we're doing a lot of assessments. To do those assessments, teachers are under pressure to do what are known as formative assessments, which are really tests to get you ready to take the test. For a lot of kids, reading has become drudgery. It's become synonymous with test taking. So much of what's happening as well is that there's a focus on passage analysis. Kids are given a passage and they're supposed to analyze it for the test, but they're not reading the whole book as much. The joy of reading, that basic joy that I think for many of us who became writers, that was really formative for us in terms of just learning to enjoy the story, read a narrative, follow where it's going, the emotional relational connectional part of reading gets lost sometimes when it becomes so focused on testing and passage analysis.

Brian Lehrer: To make this concrete for our listeners, you use an example in your article of how a teacher might use an Amelia Bedelia book now versus in the past. Can you talk that through for us a little bit?

Katherine Marsh: Absolutely. The common core standards are one of the changes in education policy, which are basically all they are is benchmarks. They're benchmarks that are often then tested by various tests such as Park test and others. In those, one of the requirements is to learn the difference between figurative and literary language. One way to do that would be to have kids read an Amelia Bedelia book and you see how she uses language and you laugh at it and you realize that there are ways to use language that are both figurative and literal. However, the way that a lot of the instruction material gets written to align with common core, in one case, I use this example of someone who wrote that you should first talk about the terms abstractly, and this is to third graders, so eight-year-old kids, and then have them read a single passage from the book and then answer questions. That is a lot less joyful, in my opinion, especially as a storyteller. You're not getting the whole story of who Amelia Bedelia is, you're not following it to the end. You're just reading a simple passage and introducing the term that way.

Brian Lehrer: I guess some of the people who design the curricula these days and so forth might say the standards, the assessments are designed to make sure the kids are able to read, and so you don't want to drop them in the name of having kids enjoy reading more if they're not being taught how to read.

Katherine Marsh: Right. See, the issue is that we need benchmarks and we need standards. The issue is more that there's constant testing and that the testing for the kids becomes synonymous with reading. That is I think one of the problems, is that, obviously, we need to have benchmarks, but teachers themselves need more autonomy. That was something I kept hearing from a lot of the people I spoke with in the education community is that different kids need different approaches, different kids need different books, and you can't do that if you're trying to do this in lockstep. We need to give teachers more freedom to teach different books, teach reading the way they feel is best for that particular learner. I still think we can meet the standards and also do more reading of whole books and encouraging that and less testing, and the constant testing I think does take away the joy of storytelling for kids.

Brian Lehrer: Suzanne in Maplewood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Hi. Good morning. I'm a 42-year veteran teacher. I've taught pre-K all the way through college. I'm currently, after 25 years in the public school system, I'm teaching in a private high school. I teach 10th and 11th graders. I'm astounded at the inability for kids to have context. I totally agree with the point that the way that we test our kids are in these tiny little boxes, so they learn to think in these tiny little boxes. I think if we go back to the beginning, I don't think we teach reading in a systematic and explicit way, and children don't develop the really fine-tuned skills needed for reading. If you advance the children, we ask them to do these things that really hinder them because we give them just a little passage, so it's little ideas, it's little thoughts. We don't go to bigger ideas and bigger thoughts, and so therefore, it's not fun to sit down with a book because it's a tumultuous task for them. I agree, we do need benchmarks, but I also think what we have to teach are we've got to give kids foundational knowledge. They have to have core knowledge about the world so that they can make these kinds of connections so when they sit down and read a book, they can actually find themselves in that situation, say pre-Civil War, Antebellum South, they understand it. In addition to that, I also think that, with children, you do have to look at them individually. As a teacher, I know what makes each kid tick.

If I know that this set of boys, that they're only into informational text, then I'm going to get them doing that because that's going to ignite the joy and love of reading. If I see girls that just love murder mysteries, well, then we're going to find murder mysteries for them. In high school where I am, we certainly have core texts that need to be taught, but every year, I'm saying, okay, you got to choose a book that you want to read, it's your choice, and then I have them do a podcast about their book or they present so that you can start to get them to believe in reading as a recreational skill.

Brian Lehrer: Suzanne, thank you. Thank you for a wonderful story and description. Let's go to Debbie in Branchville who says she's a children's book author. Debbie, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Debbie: Hi, Brian. I've called in before. I'm the author of Is Your Mama a Llama?, which has now been in print for 34 years. I've had a lot of experience as a visiting author going to schools and getting children involved in reading. I don't just write very juvenile books, but at the same time, I've been a copywriter, a playwright, you name it, I've probably written it. My point was, is that rather than trying to villainize children's fascination with movies and screen is to use it as a tool because if you can bring up a popular children's show or a movie that's very popular, then you can link it to the book that originated the idea from which that movie was made, and you would get their natural curiosity involved, but first and foremost, one of the things you learn as a children's picture book author especially is when you read aloud to children and you do it with animation, it's really great for them. As they get older and learn to read themselves, I would encourage adults and children to keep reading aloud, even if they're reading [unintelligible 00:10:17] novel, read it aloud to give children the experience of hearing reading and the intonation of dialogue and the description of themes and really doing it in an animated way so it's entertaining for both the adult reader and the child, and then have the child read some of those passages back to you. I think that sense of accomplishment and the thrill of reading itself really encourages children to pursue it on their own.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie, thank you so much. My kids [crosstalk]--

Katherine Marsh: Brian, can I interrupt there?

Brian Lehrer: My kids loved Is Your Mama a Llama? Thank you very much.

Debbie: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: It's actually on my shelf. Katherine, what do you want to say to your fellow children's book author?

Katherine Marsh: Well, we love that book as well in our household. I just wanted to add to that because I think that's a very important point, is the last book I wrote The Lost Year is about a boy during the pandemic who just plays Zelda on his Nintendo Switch all the time because it's a narrative game, and a lot of things that kids do on screens, some of them are very narrative, whether it's watching a show streaming something, even some TikToks can be very narrative, and video games. That, for him, he goes from that to being sucked into actually a story that his great-grandmother tells him. He realizes that there's a lot of elements of what he enjoys, that joy of mystery and detective work and emotional investment and storytelling, in that actual oral history that he shares with his grandma. That is very important, is I think we treat sometimes like there are fun things that kids do and not fun things, and reading is not a fun thing, and that there are also books that are fun and usually they're considered like they're graphic novels, and that other books are not fun. It's interesting because a lot of older librarians, I think they resist that definition of some books as fun and some books as not fun, and the best teachers will take something that may not on the face of it seemed fun and make it fun by bringing out all of that context of the world, of bringing out the emotion, and bringing out the connectional parts of a story. I think we really have to do that.

The other thing I just wanted to say as is that I totally agree about the read aloud. That is something that several educators I spoke with say has been jeopardized by all this focus on testing is that there's not as much time for kids to do, say, free reading in class or for them to do read alouds because there's so much pressure to get them ready for tests and assessments. I think it's really important for both parents, even of older kids, to do these kinds of activities like reading a book as a family together. That's really, when I write middle grade, I'm hoping that people will read with their kids and discuss some of the issues in my books, for example, with this one about Ukrainian history, as a family. I think that that also generates a love of reading.

Brian Lehrer: It's a wonderful idea. Sharon in Harlem, a reading teacher. You're on WNYC. Hello.

Sharon: Yes. Hi, Brian. Lovely topic, right up my alley. Yes. I'm a reading teacher, and one of the things I taught our kids, especially around this testing time, was that this is not real reading, this is reading for a test. It listened to anxiety because there were some kids who loved to read, they had books that they really loved, and we encouraged that. I also let them know, look, this is for the test. This is not real reading, and when I taught it as a genre, like you teach short stories and poetry, then the kids understand, and it was a different thinking that kids had to do when they processed for the test. We did use short passages, but I let them know that was only part of the day and my time with my kids. When we had test prep, I defined it that let the kids understand, look, this is stuff to get you ready just for the test. You got to do this because they want to know how well you read. I have to actually say one of my biggest advocates were my parents. I let them know, listen, they're reading for this test, please let them just do the practice stuff with you, but then find the fun books that they wanted-- Kids like jokes, they like to hear that. Also, I used to do with the kids have them read the dialogue out loud and change the voices so they really got a chance to understand what the story was all about. There were many entries, points of entry for them to make sense of the reading, but that was what I [inaudible 00:14:52] [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: That's great stuff, Sharon. I love that, Katherine, do you? Identifying to the kids, okay, this is reading for the test, and at other times, this is reading for fun.

Katherine Marsh: Yes, I think that's a really good thing to do. At the same time, I feel like because there's so many assessments for kids and that there is anxiety about that, that does create an association between reading and something less pleasant. We're in a crisis moment here, and I really think we need to bring back this focus on the joy of story and on just reading a lot of books. One of the things I kept hearing is that a lot of middle schoolers are only reading for school. They're only being assigned about three or four books a year, and then reading them very slowly and focusing on passages, and really, that type of analytical reading I feel developmentally, kids are more ready for in high school, and I think they should be reading widely more books and more different types of books and just having the pleasure of the story and focusing on that a little bit more.

Brian Lehrer: Katherine Marsh's own most recent book for young readers is The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine. You want to take 15 seconds and plug your own book? You get to do that after talking through the issue with us.

Katherine Marsh: Sure. Yes, well, as I said, it's a book that gives a lot of wonderful context for what's going on right now in Ukraine and the history of Ukraine and Russia, but it's also a detective story. I like to be very clear about the fact that it's a way for kids to go on a race between them and the protagonist to try to figure out a family secret that's been hidden for 90 years. That is the story of The Lost Year.

Brian Lehrer: Katherine Marsh, thank you so much.

Katherine Marsh: Thank you for having me.

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