Pleasure Reading and My Boring Research

I'm doing some classroom based research for a graduate course right now, actually I'm putting the finishing touches on the study, but the point of it is to try to better understand how No Child Left Behind and the political pressures have affected the pleasure of reading for students and how they perceive themselves as successful learners.

It's been real interesting, and oddly enough, I'm not totally surprised by the findings. I'm looking at things from a few different angles, including socio-economic status and how it unfolds regarding literary success, and how reading level influences the enjoyment one gets from reading.

Of course, there's millions of teachers out there who know the answer to those questions, but I am tying them further in to No Child Left Behind. One of the more telling articles I came across was actually in The Washington Post and is nearly three years old. That article is titled Odds Stacked Against Pleasure Reading and in it, high school students talk about how much they enjoy reading and how much they hate 'reading class' at school. It's so true, and it's something I think about everyday.