Motivating students to turn the page on reading

Threats and quizzes won’t motivate students to invest in reading, but showing them how it contributes to a meaningful  life just might make it click.

I have an embarrassing confession: I’m a middle school English teacher, but when I was in middle school, I didn’t read a single assigned book. Not one.

I read only a few of the assigned books in high school, and in college, I actually majored in English without doing much of the reading. I still got high grades because I took careful notes in class and wrote papers that artfully parroted back what the teacher had said.