We live in a culture that believes if you struggle with reading then you’re somehow an idiot. And yet, we also live in a culture that doesn’t truly support readers, especially struggling ones. There seems to be this belief among many, even experienced educators, that reading develops naturally over time. It doesn’t.

Currently, I am witnessing how humans learn speech through exposure while raising my 20 month old daughter. It’s truly an incredible thing. But the ability to pick up and learn a language through speech has been structured into our brains for thousands of years. Reading has no innate structure in our brains. We must create the structure ourselves through education, practice, and experience.

Many of the students who enter my English classroom believe to be less intelligent than their peers because reading is difficult for them. This ends up becoming a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because these students become riddled with anxiety, hopelessness, and/or perfectionism, all of which will keep them from engaging in the learning process well enough to learn. And if they don’t engage, they’ll never be able to work through the difficulties.

I see two key issues going on with older students behind in reading, which have nothing to do with a student’s intelligence: 1) They haven’t had enough practice and exposure to reading, and/or 2) they have a learning difference keeping reading from coming to them as quickly as their peers, which again, has nothing to do with intelligence. For students like this, rather than getting the support they need, they are passed along and just keep getting further and further behind.

Even though I now have a Master’s degree in English, I have always struggled with reading. For a long time, I thought I was an idiot and fought really hard to keep others from noticing. And well, all signs pointed to that being true: I was a C student, at best, my teachers were always frustrated with me, and classmates would laugh when I stumbled over words when asked to read a passage aloud. It got to a point where I became petrified with independent work and would fight tooth and nail to get out of it, much to the stress and discomfort of my poor parents.

But I’m a storyteller at heart. My love for stories is what really pushed me to work through the challenges I had with reading. I found books I actually enjoyed, with the help of an amazing school librarian, and pushed myself to finish them. While in my classes where we were assigned books like Crime and Punishment, Catch-22, and Shakespeare, I was actually developing my reading skills with “lesser books” like Harry Potter and the Hunger Games. 

My reading skill continued to develop over the years until I was confident enough to declare a major in English two years into college and then went on to teach the subject and get my Masters in it. 

But enough about me…

What I really want to address is this misguided belief, both in ourselves and others, that struggling to read somehow means we are just inherently dumb or less than in some way. We aren’t. 

The ability to read well is something we have to hone. It’s like learning to ride a bike or do the splits or paint a picture. You need a good teacher, plenty of practice, and an understanding of techniques at work. You wouldn’t make fun of a kid for not knowing how to ride a bike. You wouldn’t expect anyone to be fabulous at painting their first time holding a brush. And you should definitely not challenge someone to do the splits if they’ve never stretched in their life.

The same goes for reading. Why do we just expect everyone to be strong readers? Where does that even come from? While my theory involves something to do with standardized testing, there’s still a lot for me to learn about this subject before I have a definite answer. But what if you or someone you care about is a struggling reader? How do you overcome this, especially if you’re not in school anymore?

Wherever you are in life, whether you have yet to graduate high school or you’re in your Golden Years, my biggest suggestion to you is to not give up on reading. Let yourself read at a slower pace, use dictionary.com and learn words you don’t have a grasp on yet, and find books with topics you are actually interested in. I have never read Moby Dick, and I probably never will because it sounds boring as hell.

Down below, I have linked a fantastic resource called the Adult Literacy League which provides a ton of tools to help support you as reading. I use a lot of these tools on the regular both for my classes and myself. Don’t be afraid to get extra support. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t capable. All it means is that you get to challenge yourself in a new and exciting way.