When I was in primary school, my favorite place was the library, I was the kid who got shouted at for trying to bring home sixty books at a time because I just couldn't decide which world I wanted to experience that week. I remember spending my weekends glued to a book, hungering for experiencing lives other than my own. Up until middle school, reading was a passion (酷爱) of mine.
Something changed after I entered senior high school though. All of a sudden, reading was a task that I could not avoid fast enough. The books that I read in school bored me, or even if I enjoyed the books themselves, the difficult homework we completed based on those books made me hate reading as a whole.
It actually wasn't until recently that I rediscovered my love for reading. How you may ask? Audiobooks（有声书）. Last summer, I spent every morning taking long walks while listening to them, and I would find myself lost in the stories for hours. And now I'm rediscovering my passion for reading. I feel that pull again. That desire.
My love story with reading may have had a happy ending, but not everyone is as lucky as me. What went wrong?
What will happen is that students lose their love for reading because of the way many schools try to encourage children to read. For example, when a child is told to read for twenty minutes every night, they will read for the required amount of time and then check the task off on their list. In this way, reading has suddenly become a boring task instead of an exciting experience.
Making sure that kids keep their passion for reading will require us to rethink how we teach reading in schools and how we introduce books to children outside of school as well. There needs to be less of a focus on meeting reading requirements and more of a focus on creating an environment in which students are actually excited to read.
