Why My Education Hot Take Is About Letting Kids Read “Easy” Books
I spent ten minutes one Tuesday afternoon trying to get Marcus to open a book. He was nine, sitting across from me at a small library table, his arms crossed over a graphic novel about a ninja clan. I’d brought him a stack of “just right” books—chapter books with short chapters, big fonts, and comprehension questions waiting for me back at my desk.
“Read me one page,” I said. “Just one.”
He looked at me the way only a kid who has been asked to do something pointless can look at you. Then he said, very quietly, “Why would I read this when I could read the good one?”
I didn’t have a good answer. So I let him read the ninja book, and for twenty minutes he didn’t stop. He laughed out loud once. He showed me a panel where the hero had to sneak past a sleeping guard. He read the whole chapter, and the next one, and when our time was up he asked if he could take it home.
That moment became the beginning of my hot take about education: we have turned reading into a skill to master instead of a thing to love, and we are losing kids because of it.
I don’t say this lightly. I worked as a reading tutor for years, and I believed in the system. I leveled students. I tracked their growth. I pulled out the little color-coded stickers that placed them exactly where they were supposed to be. The data was clean and the charts looked good on paper, but the more time I spent with real children, the more I noticed the same uncomfortable pattern. The kids who spent their free time reading—the ones who asked for books at the grocery store—rarely cared about their levels. They read too hard books and too easy books and things that made no sense for their age. They read the same Dog Man volume eleven times. They ignored reading logs at home and then stayed up under the covers with flashlights.
And the kids who were “on level” sometimes couldn’t tell me a single thing they enjoyed reading.
The mismatch was so obvious it felt foolish to keep following the rules. We had built a reading culture that could measure fluency and comprehension with precision, but couldn’t answer the simplest question: did this child like it? And because liking it wasn’t part of the assessment, it never made it into the lesson plan.
Marcus taught me something I should have known all along. When you hand a kid a book they actually want, the hard parts don’t feel hard. The vocabulary is still there—often trickier than what’s in their assigned books. The plot is still complex. There are still characters and conflicts and things to infer. The only difference is motivation, which turns out to be the single greatest reading strategy in existence.
I started changing how I worked with students after that. Not in a huge dramatic way, because there’s no time for that in the middle of the school year. But I stopped trying to fix their choices. If a second grader wanted to read a chapter book that was “too hard,” I let them try it, and instead of jumping in to correct every word, I sat next to them and helped when they looked up. If a fifth grader wanted to read picture books, I didn’t shame them into something “more appropriate.” I just wondered out loud which fact in the book was the most ridiculous, and then we had a conversation about it.
The most surprising thing was the effect on the students who seemed to hate reading the most. Not all of them—I don’t want to pretend this was some miracle cure. Some kids had serious decoding challenges, and letting them choose couldn’t fix that. But a surprising number of them didn’t actually have trouble reading. They had trouble being told what to read. They’d been conditioned to see books as work, and work was the thing they were trying to avoid.
I remember one girl, Elena, who was stuck at an early third-grade level by the end of fifth grade. Every tutoring session was a battle. She’d read haltingly, skip words, guess at endings, and then slam the book shut. I was frustrated. She was frustrated. The whole system was frustrated.
One day I accidentally left a stack of old joke books on the table—the kind with corny riddles and cartoon drawings. She picked one up, flipped through it for a minute, and started reading a joke aloud. Then another. Then she started showing me her favorites. In about ten minutes, she must have read two dozen riddles, each one requiring rhythm, timing, and comprehension. When I asked her what “Why did the chicken cross the road?” meant, she explained the punchline perfectly in her own words.
Her fluency wasn’t the problem. Her willingness was.
So here’s my actual hot take, the one I tell parents when they ask me what they should be doing at home: stop worrying so much about what they read, and start worrying about whether they’re reading at all. Childhood reading is not a race toward Shakespeare. It’s more like an apprenticeship. Kids need to decide that being a reader is something they want to become, and no level system or vocabulary quiz can manufacture that decision.
That means letting them choose things that look too easy. It means allowing your teenager to read a fantasy series full of tropes and clichés. It means accepting that your son’s idea of a good book right now is a poorly written sports biography, and that’s fine. It means reading aloud to kids who are perfectly capable of reading to themselves, because listening to a book with someone is still a reading experience.
It also means being honest about what we’re doing wrong as adults. Reading logs with minute quotas turn an evening ritual into a timer. Quizzes after every book turn pleasure into surveillance. When every book comes with strings attached, kids learn that reading is something to be endured for a grade. Some of them endure it all the way through high school. And then they never pick up a book again.
I still use leveled readers with some students. I still teach phonics and decoding skills, because children actually need direct instruction in how words work. This isn’t a rejection of instruction. It’s a rejection of the idea that the book matters more than the reader. The goal isn’t to get every child to the same reading level by the same deadline. The goal is to grow a human being who can pick up anything—a manual, a menu, a novel—and think, “I’ll figure this out.”
I think about Marcus sometimes. I don’t know if he still reads graphic novels, or if he moved on to something else. I hope someone along the way kept letting him choose. I hope he learned to trust himself as a reader, the way I eventually learned to trust him.
I never did get through the rest of that stack of “just right” books. They’ve been sitting in a closet at my old school, probably gathering dust. Somewhere out there, there’s a kid who doesn’t care. He’s reading a book about ninjas, and it’s exactly the right level for him.
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