A Reddit thread posted this week hit 7,000 upvotes with a familiar frustration: the literary classics assigned in school destroyed any desire to read for fun. The Great Gatsby. Fahrenheit 451. Pride and Prejudice.
The post went viral. But the most important thing wasn’t the original take.
It was the teachers who showed up in the comments.
“I teach grade school (elementary) and those are NOT books we use for younger students. For literary fiction our kids read things like Esperanza Rising, Holes, Charlotte’s Web, Hatchet, Number the Stars, Bud, Not Buddy, etc. I’ve read Fish In a Tree, Loser, How Tía Lola Came to Stay, The Last Cuentista, and other novels with my students to introduce them to more complex texts (that contain features of literature such as figurative language, references to historical events, etc) while still giving them engaging and thought provoking texts. “ Her comment hit 1,500 upvotes.
She wasn’t pushing back, but naming something educators already understand: elementary teachers aren’t assigning Fitzgerald. They’re building the ladder. The engaging, age-appropriate literary fiction they choose is what gives students the skills, the stamina, and the love of reading they’ll need when harder texts come later.
The original post was really about high school. But the teacher’s response reminded everyone that the foundation gets laid much earlier.
Kids Don’t Hate Reading. They Hate Having No Connection to It.
The thread filled up with adults tracing their reading identity back to a single title, a single grade, a single educator who made it matter.
This is something educators see every day, and research backs it up. A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Education found that reading motivation among adolescents is at an all-time low and that relevance and student autonomy are among the most powerful levers for reversing it. When students see themselves in what they read or it reflects their world, engagement follows.
The viral Reddit post wasn’t really about Gatsby being bad. It was about never being given a reason to care.
The Right Book Is Only Half of It
Not every great reading memory started as a great reading experience. Sometimes it just takes the right person to get a student to the last page.
One commenter read Frankenstein in 8th grade, expecting the monster movie, and got a disappointing novel instead. He would have quit entirely if someone hadn’t kept him going. It’s now one of his favorite stories, and it opened a door to Dracula and more classics. Another described a teacher whose dramatic, chapter-by-chapter read-aloud of Hatchet created a lifelong love of books that stayed with them for decades.
But some teachers take it even further.
There’s the 4th grade teacher who didn’t just assign classic, but built the whole experience around it. She said, “Just read an abridged version of Call of the Wild with my fourth graders and they LOVED it. I had them rate it at the end, almost all said 10/10 even though it was sad. I made a slideshow to provide background knowledge as well as review Benchmark discussion questions. It was a ton of fun. Then we watched the movie and had ice cream for the last day of school.” That’s what it looks like when an educator sets students up to succeed with a hard book.
A School Library Connection action research study found that after author visits, students were measurably more motivated to read, borrow books, and identify as readers. Not because the books changed, but because a meaningful connection was made.
Building a Culture of Reading
The Reddit thread wasn’t a verdict on required reading. It was proof of what happens when students are handed books they don’t see the relevance of, have no choice in picking, and don’t have someone to make them truly care.
Building a Culture of Reading is the opposite. It is a school-wide commitment to the right books, real connections to the people who write them, and an environment where every student looks forward to reading every single day.
The educators in the thread are already doing this work. And when it happens, students feel it.
“These moments have become magical. We feel like we are sitting down for a cozy chat to learn what makes these creators create, and we come away inspired to read more and to create more ourselves.’”
Fran Woodruff, School Librarian and BookBreak User, Edgewood Elementary School
At BookBreak, we cultivate the Culture of Reading by bringing live virtual author visits to K-12 classrooms every month, giving every student access to meaningful connections that turn a book into a positive memory.
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