Andrew+R’s+2018+OpEd+Article



I used to be the biggest reader when I was younger. I would read books every night before going to bed, over and over again to the point where I practically had them memorized. I, and I'm sure many others, would still love to read as we did before if school didn't ruin the fun for us. As school got harder it required more time to be put in, which of course was time taken directly away from the things students actually wanted to do. For me, reading was one of those things I would have done on my own time. No one was forcing me to do it, I just did it because I enjoyed it. But that's when middle school came around, and that included the Accelerated Reading program. This program was so awful, especially for someone like me who reads extremely slowly and is out of luck when it comes to remembering anything if they aren't interested in what they're reading. The concept behind it was that you would have to read a certain (and gradually increasing) amount of books every quarter and you would only receive points for reading it if you did well on a test about the book afterwards. It sounds good on paper but trust me it sucked. Even to the people who could read quickly and were good test takers, it was generally agreed upon that the system itself was bad. And because it was only middle school, I definitely had enough free time to read on my own and at my own pace, but the new system ruined it for me. It certainly wasn't making people who didn't read start to enjoy it all of a sudden, and rather made it less desirable for all of us. People have hobbies because they enjoy them, not because school makes people have them. But now we're here in high school anyways and we have the American Pageant to read just in case the AR program wasn't enough to put me on a reading hiatus. I'm sure I'll eventually get back to putting some free time towards reading but it'll be a while. And please stop telling me do so much stuff, school.