Thanks for the link Katherine!

Reading as a leisure activity is not near as important as the ability to understand what you doread. At an early age, there is no reason that a kid shouldn’t read a great deal. Once they demonstrate the ability to think about what they have read, and explain it to someone else, I think it becomes less important just “to do.”

Well, obviously, one has to be able to read to get anywhere and that’s why I’m fighting the battle with my daughter that she HAS to read her AR stuff for school, one for her to get a decent grade, but, in life she will have to read stuff through college, work, etc.

I’m not against reading. I started reading at 4 years old and was sent to the next grade for reading because I was exceptional at it. I was a bigtime reader for many years until life got in the way.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it’s also like the old story about pop rocks and Coca-cola. Compelling, but not based in research. While we do a lot of things in our school system that are based on a system of incarceration, predicting the number of beds we’ll need based on literacy in elementary school is not one of them.

That’s not to say I disagree with the conclusion. We don’t read enough, either for pleasure or, quite frankly, anything else anymore. That’s why I like the blogosphere so much… there’s the potential for thoughtful writing and reading that’s not influenced by column size or advertising or the assumption that our attention span is less than 14 seconds.