I originally posted this on the Teacher’s Tackle Box blog.

Dana Goldstein’s Daily Beast article has an interesting take on how a greater emphasis on studying nonfiction might positively affect students’ reading and writing skills, as well as later job prospects.

I tend to agree with this line of thought. The vast majority of literature studied at any grade level is fiction, which requires a very different set of dissection tools than nonfiction does, and isn’t necessarily useful to students who plan to study and work in areas of science or business. Even though I started out as an English geek, I ended up being an IT geek — meaning that my professional livelihood depended upon my ability to absorb, process, and apply significant quantities of technical information. Alright, I’m still an English geek, but an amateur one — it’s never really paid my bills.

From the article:

“People don’t really understand the nature of reading. They feel that reading is a skill, that it’s transferable, so once you’re a good reader, you can read anything that’s put in front of you,” says Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who focuses on K-12 education. “But that’s only true for decoding—what you learn until grade three or four. After that, when you see good readers versus poor readers, what you’re looking at is mostly differences in the knowledge that kids bring to the reading. It’s easy to read something when you already know something about the topic. And if you don’t know about the topic, it’s utterly opaque to you.”