You Gotta BE the Book...

When I told Guinea Pig #3 about the principles of Jeffrey Wilhelm's opus, You Gotta BE the Book, she was quite enthusiastic.

I had a lot of ideas. My first thought was that she could enact this week's Torah portion (this week happens to be one of the Greatest Hits, the presentation of the Ten Commandments...). When that failed to inspire her, I suggested that she might want to act out the story of Vasilisa, the type of good strong heroine who warms modern mothers' hearts. No, not her thing. Really, I would have been fine with Hermione.

But no, if GP#3 was gonna BE the Book, she was gonna be... a princess. This is her idea of what a princess looks like. (It's actually her enactment of a specific princess, a Desert Princess, from a particular page of the well-beloved book. Having not yet had the Copyright Law class session yet, I had my doubts about scanning the illustration in and loading it onto the blog. Nor would I have had the faintest idea of how to do so, even if I could.)

Anyway. Drama, to lure reluctant readers in. Read-alouds with exaggerated voices, to make the characters come alive. Physical enactment of the stories, to get kids to internalize the core of the narratives. Costumes!

Well. How great is that? What kind of crank-o-head could possibly find fault, with that?

And yet. The gestalt of the thing -- a bright, motivated teacher going to great lengths to find a way to reach his most reluctant readers and, in large measure, succeeding in sparking their enthusiasm through the use of drama -- is, obviously, terrific. The devil is in the details.

It is really, really great to get reluctant readers to understand that There Be Treasure Here, in literature. It is really great, to use drama to get them inside characters' motivations and to enable them to fill in the unstated parts and to form images of the characters and the worlds and the actions inside their heads. It is really great, to motivate them to go on to the library and pick out books to read on their own, outside of class.

Wonderful, all of it. But not to be confused with actually teaching them to read, with the long slow slog of teaching that sizable segment of every school population to whom reading comes hard, how to decode. How to develop fluency. How to tackle multisyllable and weird-looking words. How to develop automaticity, which really is a precondition to the enjoyment of reading. Honest.

That young readers be motivated is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Reading is a skill, with specific subskills that need to be mastered by all, and directly taught to those who need it. The marvelous activities with which Wilhelm engaged his reluctant readers help set the context in which kids will be willing to put in the long hard effort to gain that mastery. Particularly the kids with learning disabilities, who have to put in many more hours of greater effort. As educators, we have to do all that we can to help them understand that all that work is worth it.

Because, of course, it is. Truly, there be treasure here.

Then they (and we) still, alas, have got to do the work.