How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading John Holt

“How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading” is a personal memoir of John Holt’s recollections of being an English teacher. Holt remembers the times when he was the teacher that made children dissect books until their minds no longer held the real meaning of them. Their minds were drilled into finding the ‘correct’ answer and moving on as fast as possible. After multiple arguments with his sister telling him his approach to teaching reading was wrong and hurting the children's love for reading, he slowly started to listen. In his memoir, Holt shows growth of being a dynamic character and his ways of teaching change alongside him. He is determined for his students to approach reading in a way that makes them enthusiastic about it. In “How Teachers …show more content…
“Mark Twain once said that a cat that sat on a hot stove lid would never sit on one again- but it would never sit on a cold one either... If they, so to speak, sit on a hot book a few times, if books cause them humiliation and pain, they are likely to decide that the safest thing to do is to leave all books alone”( 451). Holt compares Twain’s example of the cat sitting on the stove to kids reading books. If the reader has a bad personal experience with some object, event, or place, the reader is not likely to go back to that situation whether the next time may be enjoyable or not. This metaphor helps outsiders that haven't been in school for a long time relate to what Holt is trying to describe as a danger to children. His metaphor that compares the cat and stove to the children and books strengthens the overall tone of the essay, and it gives his memoir more credibility. More credibility builds up the author’s ethos, and the author's use of comparisons builds up his logos. A different device that Holt uses is a simile. “We treat a misspelled word like a crime and penalize the misspeller severely”(454). He is comparing the misspelled words to a crime. A crime is on a different level of severeness than an error in a word, but the comparison between the two misdoings magnifies the distress that teachers have when kids spell words wrong. The use of the simile makes the reader feel as if the world will end over one wrong word, and it over dramatizes the situation which is the key point of the simile. By adding similes and metaphors to his memoir they were able to make his piece more dramatic, relatable, and they strengthened the overall