My company works with clients and students of all ages, meaning our team members do as much tutoring as we do writing coaching. This post is for the parents of our younger students. Below, I hope to address some common questions about the most effective way to assign out-of-lesson work, also known as “homework,” to writing students who already have a lot on their plates (and these days, they all do). Let’s get started.

Many of you are rightly concerned about the declining quality of humanities instruction in k-12 schooling throughout the US – an ongoing deterioration resulting from our nation’s over-valuation of the STEM fields. As a result, the parents of Gilliam Writers Group students frequently ask us to give their kids homework, mostly to improve their analytical writing skills.

This is a reasonable request, as most students these days simply don’t learn how to write well until college, when it is very nearly too late. Professors don’t have the time or patience to teach the fundamentals of style, much less the structure of a good essay, to the countless hopefuls who yearly appear, full of optimism, at elite universities with none of the skills they need to thrive there.

In a way, I actually appreciate hearing the dreaded homework request from my students’ parents. It’s always heartening when a client believes that my lessons with their child are bearing fruit, and it’s even more heartening that they want their kid to engage deeply with my teaching materials.

However, in most cases, I decline to offer homework in the traditional sense – at least to my academic students. (My creative students have to do their fair share of writing practice between sessions, since they aren’t already completing tons of related, that is, creative assignments for school). I do, however, offer a very particular sort of homework to clients who want their children to invest more time in the Gilliam Writers Group process.

Here’s my secret technique: the only homework that ultimately makes for better writers (other than writing, which students practice regularly, if not always well, as part of their schoolwork) is reading — reading, that is, for pleasure. On a practical level, here’s what I suggest you and your kids do if you’re interested in pursuing intellectual growth outside of session:

First, I want you to know that young readers benefit most from this practice when they have the chance to pick out their books in-person, at an actual book shop. Something about the tactile experience of holding, opening, and leafing through a rich variety of volumes – maybe it’s the simplicity, the sense of discovery – seems to help students find books they truly enjoy, books they feel a sense of agency in choosing.

On a related note, I highly recommend that rather than giving your kids assigned readings outside of school, or asking their tutors to do so, you allow them to choose their own books without interfering. This suggestion applies no matter what you think of the quality of their selections, no matter their chosen titles’ genre or supposed “level” – anything goes, as long as the student is actually reading books and not only graphic novels or comics. It is crucial that your child feels encouraged to choose texts they find entertaining – yes, entertaining!

This may require some suspension of disbelief on your part. Very few young readers will pick out Wuthering Heights or Paradise Lost on their first go-round at the book shop. For them, “entertaining” might mean spy or mystery novels. It might mean war or adventure fiction. It might mean sports memoirs. It might mean fantasy fiction, sci-fi, or magical realism. Teens and young adults might find themselves most fully entertained by romance. Who knows? Who cares? The answer is, of course, your child – they know best what they want to read, and they care the most about whether they enjoy what they’re reading.

So don’t judge their choices, whether they are literary or not. Support them! Get curious about their interests. But I caution against premature attempts to hammer Shakespeare or Faulkner into the ever-shrinking leisure time of your exhausted, anxious teen. Shakespeare will come in time – but only if the young reader can learn to appreciate literature in a genuine way.

Alright, let’s get back to practicalities: to initiate this whole process, your child will need a full hour or two to browse independently through a bookstore of your choosing, their goal being to select a few books they want to read on their own, as a sort of leisure activity, in the coming months. If the student is an especially reluctant reader, be sure to ask if they’ve chosen a book because they enjoyed the first few pages, or simply because they know they have to choose one and “this one looked okay.” If, on the other hand, you are the proud parent of a straight-A student who thrives on positive feedback, be sure to ask if they truly want to read the text they’ve chosen, or if they’ve grabbed it mostly to please you.

A brief tip for parents: please have no illusions about “reading levels”– yuck! They aren’t real. Just like a baby lion will learn to hunt whatever gazelles it can catch (after, of course, a few clumsy mistakes), your child will eventually learn to choose books that match their ability. Then, with age and education, their capacities will expand, their tastes mature. No one is born with an innate desire to read, and especially not to read high-falutin’ literature. It’s an acquired taste.

Another tip for parents: if you suspect your student won’t read unless given a bit more structure than their academically oriented peers, then I recommend keeping it minimal. Consider assigning them a certain number of hours per week of mandatory reading, making sure that said number of hours is determined through conversation rather than hurled down from on high like a court order. Structure can be beneficial for many budding readers, as long as you keep your hands off the content of their reading time by allowing them to choose not only their books, but the pace at which they consume them.

To re-iterate what may be obvious by now, I would ask that you let your child read these books purely for enjoyment, without forcing them to write about what they’ve read (outside of our lessons together — they’ll write about them plenty in-session), or, even worse, to “discuss” them with a group or book club after reading. There is no conversation more stilted than that of a book club whose members don’t want to be there. Your child knows this, and so do you. Reading should be cool, not lame. It should be personal, not (as far as possible) externally motivated.

At this point, you might be wondering: why am I warning you so strongly against all this? My answer is simple. Young people are likely to lose their love of reading if, every time they try it, they’re obligated to complete a set of dreaded additional tasks. Students these days already have plenty of tasks! They don’t need more intellectual labor – they need better, more thoughtful, more pleasant intellectual labor. Embrace Plato: philosophy as leisure. Throw out the Victorian schoolmaster: philosophy as duty. Reading begins to feel like a trap for those children whose parents confuse quantity with quality when it comes to learning; their over-stressed minds learn only that for every page they enjoy, there is a price to be paid in boring, extraneous work.

If these unfortunate dynamics stretch are allowed to continue for too many months, or years, the students trapped in them almost always come to dislike, resent, and avoid reading for pleasure. Reading becomes something they have to do for others, but never something they want to do for themselves. That’s ultimately a huge concern, and a barrier to their future learning; kids who read for pleasure usually end up reading way, way more throughout their lives than kids who don’t. They also become better writers and thinkers, and tend to find greater academic success. (Numerous studies on this subject are available on Google Scholar).

The solution? It all comes down to how the reading time is perceived by the reader. Each week, your child’s mandatory reading hours (if you find you need to make them mandatory) should feel at least somewhat enjoyable. They should feel like a space of leisure and freedom, and especially of safety. You don’t need to do anything to facilitate this experience except to keep your hands off the process. Every time they open a book, your child should feel like they are entering their own special world. A book is a friend – not a task. Just remember that not all friendships start with love at first sight; if your kid’s love of reading takes a long time to emerge, don’t worry.

Time to take this blog post full-circle: what is a tutor’s role in all this? There’s not much to it, as you might now suspect. Once I know what my young student is reading during any given month (once I receive word that they’ve selected a few books according to their whims, in-person, at a book shop), I start asking them to write about what they’ve read. Generally, I make them write about their chosen title in a formal, analytical style until I feel they’ve a) produced a thorough and valuable series of insights regarding the text, and b) improved their grasp of academic essay mechanics. This style of writing is extremely valuable — it is simple, effective, and elegantly structured, and mastering it is a great way to improve in an abundance of useful skills including logical reasoning, cultural literacy, critical thinking – you name it. (As wonderful as unstructured writing can be, I am an advocate of the formal literary essay as a building block of the K-12 education.)

What happens next? Nothing new – no massive capstone project is required. Each learning moment builds on the next, and when the student finishes one book, we move on to another one. They continue to engage with every new text on a deeper-than-normal level. And on and on, until the student becomes an astute literary critic and an immaculate academic writer (or, at least, a better critic and better writer).

Ultimately, mastery of the English language arts is all about practice (though as discussed above, less is often more when it comes to making lifelong readers — less parental intervention, I mean…not less reading). And that’s the wrap, folks! When requesting homework from your child’s tutor, remember these directives: fewer tasks, more reading for pleasure, more independence, more personal choice. As long as students have access to books they actually enjoy, then no matter how cheesy the text, no matter how simple the plot, every single page will pay dividends in the future.