Why does reading have to be miserable? What teen girl wants to read Silas Marner? If you don’t have something to get kids engaged, what good does it do other than give kids a distaste for reading?
One of the greatest things for me was to be “forced” to read literature in College. It was required for my degree. I disliked it at first but it grew on me and towards my senior year, I really enjoyed the lit classes.
A colleague of mine often told his classes that his job was not to cater to his students’ current taste but to enhance it through the study of, what those who read extensively have deemed, “great works.”
I used to tell my students that their opinions about books were simply not valid as they had not done enough reading to be able to fairly judge whether a book was “good” or not. Sounds smug, sure...but it’s also accurate (more smugness!)
Part of the attraction of being a secondary teacher is to make your students suffer in revenge for their being young. I actually had a junior high school tell me that once with a straight face. He broke out into laughter when my jaw hit the floor. He was my favorite teacher, an unregenerate old socialist who didn’t proselytize, and that’s a good thing, because he’s a conservative now. :-)