The Importance of Tutor Time Reading

The Importance of Tutor Time Reading

It’s very easy as an English teacher to espouse the value and importance of the reading we do during tutor time, but the question remains: why do we value tutor reading so much?

For me, tutor reading is valuable for a number of reasons. It closes a gap in cultural capital; it provides our students with the opportunity to acquire new vocabulary and ultimately, it is a great social equaliser.

The value of our reading programme was highlighted through a recent conversation had by the English faculty. Our year sevens had undertaken an assessment where they had to spend one minute talking about a novel they had read and field questions from the rest of the class. One might argue that the task was too easy - filling a solitary minute with any information about a novel must be ridiculously easy. Right? Just sharing the synopsis should fill this time, let alone offering a meaningful opinion on the narrative. Yet, as one teacher remarked, it was clear that many of the students in her class had never read a novel outside of school. Never.

Let that sink in for a moment.

In a world where Jeff Kinney’s ludicrously popular ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ series is available in Polish for our EAL students to read, we have students that have never read a novel for pleasure outside of school.

Before we even consider the educational impact of that - the cultural references that have been missed or vocabulary that cannot be understood or contextualised - think about the stories they have missed out on: Frodo’s journey to Mordor, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, the inhabitants of Redwall Abbey, the fate of Stanley Yelnats, Katniss’ battles in The Hunger Games and even the wizarding woes of Harry Potter.

That’s why the tutor time reading programme is so important. There’s a whole slew of stories - many with real cultural significance - that our students should encounter that we have the moral duty to introduce our students to, if not for their educational value then for the unadulterated joy of reading them.

As such, our programme for Years 7 and 8 introduces our students to a variety of classic stories in easily digested abridged versions. These abridged classics help to close a gap in the cultural capital that some of our students have. The real challenge comes in Years 9 and 10, when our students are exposed to unabridged classics - many of them pre 20^th Century novels.

To be honest much of the language in these novels is, to be blunt, tough. But that’s no bad thing. Under the new GCSE our students are expected to read and understand unseen extracts of pre-20^th Century writing. Are we doing them any favours if we wait until Year 11 to introduce them to this level of sophistication? It might be selfish, as an English teacher, to think in this way but I can’t help but think that our students deserve the opportunity to encounter the best that has been thought and written. No matter how tough that is.

If we leave the subject gains to one side for one moment, I’d like you to think of the vocabulary and knowledge you have gained from reading. Personally, when I read I make a note of any new vocabulary on the inside front cover of the book (my copy of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin is filled with such notes, and the first half of the book was written for his fourteen year old nephew). Without reading I’d not know that the Shoah (the catastrophe) is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, that a destrier is a medieval warhorse or that xe is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in place of he or she. If I’d allowed the challenge that the vocabulary posed to me stop me from reading then I’d probably know less and my life wouldn’t be as rich. I’d argue that our students need to find the reading challenging in order for them to grow both academically and emotionally.

Finally, I believe that our reading programme is one of the best ways we can level the playing field for our students. Through our tutor reading we can help them encounter the same cultural touchstones, the same ideas and the same vocabulary as students from a wealth of backgrounds and abilities. That’s why our programme is so important.