How to Raise a Kid Who’s Disgustingly Literate: Tips From a 4th Grade Teacher
The hallway outside my 4th grade classroom still smells like crayons and spilled apple juice last Friday when Lila, Mia’s mom, pulled me aside before rushing out to car line. Rain streaked the cinder block windows, and a group of boys chased each other past yelling about Pokemon, so she leaned in quiet, like she was admitting something embarrassing. “Mia’s reading scores are through the roof, and everyone keeps asking me what program I put her in, what special thing I did,” she said. “But the truth is, I just let her read whatever she wants. Am I missing something?” I laughed and told her I’d first heard the phrase “disgustingly literate” at a teacher happy hour back in the fall, from a retired school librarian who’d been in the business 40 years. She used it to describe kids like Mia: kids who read anywhere, any time, any thing, so much that it makes stressed-out parents and teachers a little jealous, like they’re doing something unfair to make it look easy.
I had a kid like that two years ago, named Javi. Javi was the kid who’d read the back of the ketchup bottle at lunch, the instruction manual for his new scooter, the church bulletin the office gave him when he finished his work early. He’d hide comic books in his math workbook, and I’d catch him leaning over a beat-up copy of Spider-Man when he was supposed to be solving long division. His dad came to parent-teacher conferences that fall, wringing his hands, and said he thought he was messing up. Javi only wanted to read comic books and old car magazines he dug out of the free bin at Goodwill, he told me. He’d tried to get him to read the Newbery Medal winner everyone was raving about that year, and Javi quit after 10 pages. Was he supposed to force him? Was all that “fluff reading” actually hurting his skills?
I told him what I tell almost every parent who asks me that question: any reading is good reading. The whole point of literacy isn’t to check a box that your kid has read a certain list of books. It’s to teach them that reading is something they want to do, that text can give them something they can’t get anywhere else. I suggested one small change first: stop telling him comics and magazines aren’t “real reading.” Instead of pushing the Newbery book, just keep filling the house with whatever text he’s curious about, and leave it at that. Javi’s dad took the advice. He stopped setting out chapter books Javi didn’t ask for, started bringing home more old car magazines from the auto shop where he worked, and let Javi order a $10 a month comic subscription from Amazon instead of a more expensive reading tutoring program.
The second thing I almost always suggest is leaving text all over the house, not just tucked away on a fancy bookshelf in the kid’s room. At my house, I keep free grocery store circulars on the kitchen table, old travel guides by the couch, and a stack of free library discard books by the toilet. My 10 year old has read more weird facts from discarded almanacs I left in the bathroom than he’s ever gotten from assigned summer reading. Last year, I caught him reading the ingredients list on a bottle of laundry detergent while he waited for me to tie his shoes before school. That’s literacy. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or fancy, or approved by a book committee.
Third, stop quizzing them every time they finish a reading session. I see this all the time. A kid reads for 20 minutes, and the first thing a parent says is “So what was that about? What did you learn?” I get the impulse, but think about it: if you just finished a fun beach novel on vacation, would you want your partner to hit you with a pop quiz the second you closed the cover? I’ve started telling parents to just say one simple thing: “What’s the coolest thing you’ve read lately?” If they want to talk about it, they will. If they don’t, they can just say “nothing much” and go back to what they were doing, no pressure. I never make my students do formal book reports anymore. If they finish a book, they can just put it back and pick another one. That’s it.
Six months after that first conference, Javi came to me with a tattered nonfiction book about Dale Earnhardt that he’d checked out from the library. He’d picked it up, he said, because one of his car magazines mentioned it, and he wanted to learn more. By the end of the year, he was reading young adult mystery novels about a group of teens who restore old muscle cars, and his reading test score was two grade levels above where he’d started the year. I went to his little sister’s birthday party last spring, and he was sitting on the porch swing reading a beat-up copy of The Outsiders he’d pulled out of his grandma’s giveaway box. He told me he liked it because all the greasers fixed up old cars, so it felt like something he got.
I told Lila, Mia’s mom, that’s the whole trick of becoming disgustingly literate. It’s not about expensive tutoring, or 20 minutes of mandatory reading every night that turns into a fight, or forcing your kid to read books they don’t care about just because they’re “good for them.” It’s about getting out of the way enough that kids can find the text that matters to them. Last night, she texted me a blurry photo from her phone: Mia is sitting in the bleachers at her older brother’s baseball game, leaning against the concrete wall, reading the entire 30-page game program cover to cover while she waits for the first pitch. The caption says “Is this what you meant?”
I texted back “That’s exactly it.” I still catch myself overthinking it with my own kid, some days. Last week, he spent three nights poring over Minecraft cheat sheets he printed out from the internet, and I caught myself thinking I should get him to read that adventure book I bought him for his birthday. Then I remembered Javi reading the back of a ketchup bottle, and Mia reading the baseball program, and that librarian laughing over her beer at happy hour saying “Disgustingly literate just means they get it. Reading is for them, not for us.” Some days he’d rather watch YouTube than read anything, and some weeks the only text he touches is cheat codes. That doesn’t mean it’s not working. It just means literacy is growing on its own schedule, not ours.
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