1. High stakes testing in math means we have to practice like we play. Problems may have some stories connected with them, but they are not hooks into further reading.
2. There are few titles students have access to in their own homes. We do not fund or use the library in any traditional sense; students cannot get anything they will read online if they cannot afford to be online.
3. Stem topics may appeal to some students, but CSI sparked a huge interest in forensic medicine with “realistic” fiction in a video format. Why cannot we do that with reading? Simple. Take a look at man’s history, before stem became necessary for our maintenance of civilization. The ancient Greeks, noted for their math prowess, got way more recreation from their plays than their math.

I could go on for a time, but you get the idea. It is not natural for people to think in math modes and read. These people tend more to build than to read.

Now I would like to change the topic and speak as a father. I have a daughter whose reading appetite is as voracious as anyone could imagine. We had to get her into swimming just so she would get out of the book and be healthy. She does find non-fiction interesting. Where did that come from?

The first source was The Magic Treehouse. She learned more hard history from Mary Pope Osbourne than she has from her historian father(I refer to myself. I was a history student before being a math student). Why? Simple enough. Kids are about stories. Historical fiction is always a conduit to hard history, even into adulthood.

So we move to the larger question of how we can induce children to move in the direction of reading about stem topics. Here we should take a look at what is natural. What do primitively societies do in their spare time? Some of the members of these early people’s told stories about their social group or about the gods. Others told stories about the stars, thus our wonderful mythology focused on the constellations. This pointed some toward math due to the tendency of man to think of math as a window into the divine. Others arrived at math through the rise of trading with other cultures.

So what can we take from all this? People arrive at an interest in their world from fiction, especially fiction that has a strong base in reality. What reader of Huck Finn would not be more likely to enjoy, and learn from, Life on the Mississippi.

So what would I suggest? Use fiction at a young age as an inroad into non-fiction. Find ways to place titles in the hands of young students that are high interest. Then, as we move into the middle years of intellectual development, allow for time for students to experience stem development from lab experiences. By this I mean to include making and building, many of the exercises we allow kids to access in the hands on science learning centers so popular in cities these days. Schools should be built around these sorts of experiences. I have often mused that we prevailed over Hitler primarily because our generation that fought that war was raised in a culture where you could so easily see the results of mechanical action and reaction. Basic Trigonometry spewed from every farm implement.

So what do we need to do? Use the fictional to excite the young imagination and the experience to stimulate the growing mind. Remember, however, that the reason I do not have my kids read comes from the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests. The same logic leads school away from the experience and into the mundane. So our first goal should be to replace high-stakes testing with tests that provide information rather than publicity. Only the. Can we move what we do toward the goal of getting students interested enough to read about reality in addition to fiction.