Pleasure or Pain: Chapter Four Novak and Wilhelm

"How is it that reading and literature have died? We would argue that it is due to a focus on skills and strategies away from the pleasures of reading, from a primary focus on critical reading and analysis instead of first emphasizing the evoking of the secondary worlds available to us from reading. The way we teach reading and literary texts takes us away from the enrapturing and immersive experiences that are prequisite to all other powers that follow from the act of reading. Given that a high expectation of enjoyment is prerequisite to reading, creating this expecatation and fulfilling it must be a first order of business for teachers."
Many of my high school years have been spent reading texts I really didn't enjoy and my beliefs have been that as a  teacher I would not make my students read these texts that I suffered through because I believe that students should read texts they enjoy. I have never really thought these texts could be enjoyed by a majority of students until I started to read "Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom" and realized that even though some texts are hard to get your students engaged most teachers are able to make most texts fun no matter what they are reading. I think for many students the focus on the skills and strategies they are expected to perform while reading a text really takes away from the material they are reading. Having to constantly focus on parts of a text because of the importance really takes away from the enjoyment of the reading experience because the student is focused so hard on finding the answers and taking away something from the text the student doesn't really get a chance to sit back and enjoy the text. Lots of times readers get so caught up in the assignments they have to do with the readings their only focus is to get the answers they need out of the readings then they move on. The problem with this is the readers aren't actually connecting with the material and instead of understanding books on a deeper more personal level the readers take what they need from the book to do their assignments then move on. One way of helping students engage in the material that is mentioned in the Chapter that I believe would work very well would be frontloading material. The example of the books where they posted humorous items on wiki and then rated the humorous items as a class and categorized what type of humour was used seemed to be a great lead up to the section they were discussing about humour in their classroom. I believe there are many ways teachers can frontload texts that will be enjoyable for the students and will help get the ball rolling for the text the teacher will be teaching. I believe frontloading should be done for almost every major book you will do in class and instead of looking into questions that they will be asked focus on help them look at the ideas the texts raises and try to relate it to situations they might be facing or have faced in their lives. I believe if the students can connect to the literature they will enjoy it much more then if they feel no connection to the literature. After reading this Chapter I have really begun to realize that there alot of texts that students can find enjoyment in and we as teachers can use front loading and other strategies to help are students develop a deeper understanding for the texts that we teach.