What Happens When Teachers Don’t Read In Front Of Students: The Unseen Lesson Kids Learn
Last October, I was chaperoning silent reading at my older son’s 7th grade middle school, tucking a stray chair under a desk and stepping around a stack of crumpled snack bags when Milo, my son’s desk neighbor, leaned over and whispered around the spine of his Percy Jackson graphic novel: “She never reads during DEAR. Says she has too much work.” I followed his glance to the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. Sure enough, she was leaning back in her chair, sorting stacks of quizzes and answering parent emails, her laptop glowing bright enough to see from the back row.
I’d been in that classroom three times that semester as a reading volunteer, so I’d noticed the pattern before. When I sat down for parent-teacher conferences a week later, I brought it up casually, not as a complaint, just an observation. She laughed and shook her head, said “I know the policy says teachers are supposed to model reading, but come on. I have 127 argumentative essays to grade this week, and a field trip to plan. I can’t justify wasting 40 minutes a week sitting and reading a novel when all this work is sitting here waiting for me.”
I left that conference thinking about my own 5th grade teacher, Ms. Henderson, who ran a drop-everything-and-read period every Friday. She’d drag a wobbly wooden stool to the front of the room, pull out a beat-up mass-market paperback romance, and read right along with us. I remember watching her dog-ear a page, snort-laugh at a line, chew on the end of her pencil when something tense happened. Before that, I’d only ever seen grownups read textbooks, recipe cards, or the morning newspaper. It never occurred to me that grown ups read for fun, that it wasn’t just something kids had to do for homework. That memory stuck with me way more than any book report I ever wrote in middle school.
The problem isn’t that teachers who don’t read are bad people, or that they’re bad at their jobs. The wrong lesson isn’t even intentional. It’s just that when the person telling you reading is important, that it’s a valuable use of your time, never does it themselves when they have a spare minute, kids absorb a clear message: reading is kid stuff. It’s a chore you outgrow once you have real, important grown-up work to do. If even the person who makes you do it doesn’t have time for it, why would any kid think it’s something worth making time for themselves?
This isn’t just a teacher problem, either. I’ve caught myself doing the exact same thing as a parent. I tell my kids to go read for 20 minutes before bed, then I sit on the couch scrolling Instagram for 20 minutes. I tell them reading is more fun than screen time, but they never see me pick up a book when I have five minutes to wait for dinner to cook. I didn’t even notice I was sending that message until that day with Milo.
The good news is you don’t have to rearrange your whole schedule to fix this. You don’t have to be a person who finishes a book a week, or carve out hours of work time to sit and read if you’re a teacher swamped with grading. Small, visible moments are enough. For teachers, that can mean keeping your current book open on your desk instead of your laptop when you’re waiting for kids to line up or quiet down after recess. It can mean mentioning offhand what you’re reading for fun when you assign independent reading—say “I just started this new true crime book over the weekend, I can’t wait to get back to it after school today.” If you have a 40-minute DEAR period, read the first 10 minutes with the kids, then grade the next 30. That 10 minutes is enough to show you’re doing it too.
For parents, it’s the same small shifts. Keep your current book open on the coffee table instead of leaving your phone face up when you’re waiting for soccer practice to end or dinner to bake. Instead of scrolling while your kid reads before bed, read a few pages of your own book next to them. Even if you only get five pages in a night, that’s enough for your kid to see the habit in action.
Last month, I was in my 9-year-old daughter’s elementary classroom for a volunteer day, and her teacher sat on the reading rug with a middle grade fantasy, reading out loud to the class. She stopped mid-sentence to wipe a tear because the main character’s old dog had to go live on a farm. All the kids went quiet, leaning in, and after class half of them lined up to borrow the book when she was done. My daughter came home that day and asked me to order it for her, even though she’d said just a week before that she “hated chapter books.”
I still volunteer at the middle school every Wednesday. Most weeks, the 7th grade teacher still spends most of DEAR time grading. But a couple weeks ago, she’d finished all her urgent emails before reading period started, and she pulled out a paperback memoir about hiking the Appalachian Trail and read the last 10 minutes with the class. A couple kids who’d hiked with their families over the summer asked her about it after, and they talked for five minutes about trail snacks and bad weather.
Nothing big changed. She still has a million things to do. I still catch myself scrolling instead of reading in front of my kids some nights. I still forget to mention what I’m reading when I tell them to pick up a book. It’s not a perfect fix, and it doesn’t solve all the problems with overloaded teachers or kids who say they hate reading. But it’s the small stuff that sticks, isn’t it? The lessons we teach by what we do, not just what we say.
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