Introduction
Young adolescents today have a multitude of personal problems that confront them daily. These issues can be something as minor as a pimple that appeared overnight, or as major as seeing someone they love killed in front of their eyes. In many cases, dysfunctional family lives or the financial pressures of single parents trying to raise children have resulted in teens moving from place to place, and often from school to school. Hormones rage through their bodies, and they are trying desperately to find a niche to live in where life is a little easier, and a little safer for them. Just like adults, many teens have trouble compartmentalizing the various parts of their lives. They bring their concerns with them to school, and often are unable to focus on their academic life in the face of all the disruption in their physical, emotional, and spiritual lives. For some adolescents, this has been a way of life for them all the years they have been in school. As the years progressed, they fell further and further behind, experiencing less and less success in school. Many of them failed at some early age to acquire all the skills they needed to be good readers. All of these problems have produced a group of adolescents who, because of issues largely beyond their control, are regarded as students who will never be successful, and who will never have the skills to make a good life for themselves. Many times these students are above age level for the grade in which they are enrolled, and because of their disabilities they become behavior problems. In order to maintain discipline in the school, some administrators and teachers try to move the child on to a higher grade. We commonly refer to this as social promotion. But social promotion has its own drawbacks. When a child is grade-adjusted, he misses some of the foundational skills, and is forced to work even harder to be successful. Many adolescents fold under the pressure and just give up. They continue to be stereotyped as lower class, uneducated people who will never be successful.
Many of the students I teach in middle school live just such lives. They are poor readers, poor students, and it is my job to try to find ways in which I can add to their meager bank of reading skills, encourage them to read, and maybe help them become better students. One of the ways I have investigated is using bibliotherapy to help my students cope with the issues in their lives in a positive way. When I first became aware of this process, early in my teaching career, I realized that the only way it would be successful for students would be if they were to become motivated to read. I didn't know how to help my students want to read. Fortunately, through the efforts of educational redesign in Duval County, schools over the past ten years have put maximum emphasis on reading instruction focusing on students who are remedial readers, and trying to raise reading levels in our county. Through working with my students year after year, I have realized that they do like to read. They enjoy reading books about their own personal interests, and at their own reading levels. Many times, the issues they bring to school with them are the very topics they want to read about, although for some students whose emotions are too raw as a result of their troubles, those issues are the last things about which they want to read. Bibliotherapy can offer an easier, emotionally safer way of coping with the problems that confront these adolescents.
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