How to Persuade Teenagers (and Adults!) to Read Challenging Texts

What are the pleasures of reading, and how will anyone enjoy them in the digital age?

by Matt Bardin, Zinc Learning Labs Founder and CEO

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When I was a kid, my parents explained how 19th-century sailors ate no fruits and vegetables and got scurvy. I wondered about my teeth falling out as I forced down mandatory carrots.

Most parents and educators I meet use that scurvy logic to promote reading. You’d better read books to make you smarter, more worldly, more empathic—to get into college, land a higher-paying job, a better career…

All of these things are true, but please stop. It’s not working.

Put simply, only one valid motivation exists for reading: pleasure.

Certainly reading entertains and transports us. A used, paperback thriller, mystery, or even historical fiction has more narrative, escapist bang for your buck than any movie or TV show (especially if it’s 800 pages long!). The information density in books compared with, say, podcasts or videos, delivers a much deeper pleasure in learning—of becoming better informed about anything from invertebrates to investing.

Beyond just facts, however, great texts open and build out new regions in the mind. The best writing materializes new ways of seeing, thinking about, and understanding the world in a kind of thrilling mental homecoming. Yes, that makes sense. I’ve been here before. Well, no I haven’t. But now I’m here. And I belong. Given that language is the operating system for our brains, sometimes the words and syntax themselves deliver that profoundly satisfying expansiveness.

Okay, wait a minute. All of that isn’t quite scurvy or rickets, but anyone with a smartphone, much less those of us trying to influence teenagers, knows the long list of digital treats barring the path between our brains and books. In my childhood home, no kid chose a piece of fruit while a single cookie remained in the cupboard. How can we expect anyone to read when reels, clips, and heart-stopping explosions call to us from our pockets?

Technology succeeds by making things easier. Tech’s highest, most lucrative achievement, our online existence, transfixes us with a constantly refreshing torrent of novel stimuli requiring less and less effort. Before picking up a static, paper book with no pictures, we must choose NOT to watch a movie, TV show, sports highlights, how-to videos, or up-to-the-minute influencers. We must opt out of shorter, newer news articles and the infographics and video clips that increasingly accompany them, much less tweets, posts, stories, reels… Mark Zuckerberg must have felt like a genius for acquiring Instagram—until TikTok came along with faster cuts and a better algorithm.

In this environment, isn’t reading higher-level texts, including books, poetry, essays, and scientific studies pretty much over? An esoteric art for a shrinking cohort of nerds and their descendants?

No. Not at all. Every parent and increasingly most kids know that living online robs us of something essential. Reading, especially on an adult level—a profound pleasure that has never reached more than maybe 15% of the population, solves one of the biggest problems in our digital lives and, therefore, finally has the chance to become ubiquitous.

The internet has killed advanced reading the way the tractor ended physical effort. When technology eradicated manual labor from most lives, many people became sedentary, but, within a short few decades, hundreds of millions began voluntarily exercising.

That’s about to happen much faster with reading, and the change will be led not by older adults but by millennials and teens.

The ease of the internet disempowers. It feeds us endless novelties, but, as the scientist in Jurassic Park watching his zoo animal devour a goat observes, “T-rex doesn’t wanna be fed. He wants to hunt.” Effortful reading restores and rejuvenates. It’s our most interactive media—an act of collaborative creation between reader and writer that connects us across cultures and eras.

Digital tech’s success contains the seeds of our screens’ demise. They suck us in. Their tricks work. Yes, I do want to learn about these other products that match my past purchases! Just one more football/basketball/soccer/hockey/baseball highlights video won’t take that long. And, yeah, I do “need to know” about another outrageous thing perpetrated by opponents of my political side! No one emerges from a day/afternoon/evening spent on a screen feeling refreshed, but teens and millennials are on another level.

Raised on first Snapchat and Instagram and now TikTok, they coined the term “brainrot” to describe the negative side effect. Before I was born, my dad had a three-pack-a-day smoking habit. He lit the next one off the dying embers of the last. That’s about where many teens stand with regard to their phones. Unlike their peers even five or ten years ago, the current generation knows they have a problem—a minimally pleasurable, soul-shrinking addiction. I never saw my dad smoke. He quit when he could no longer stand the hacking cough he woke up to every day. Online adolescence has brought an entire generation to an anxiety/depression precipice that has them ready to gnaw through their digital cage, and reading offers a powerful antidote

The greatest pleasure of reading may be the effort itself. Unlike almost everything on our screens, reading places non-trivial demands on our minds. The words live on a static page with no sounds or pictures, much less video. Our brains must do the heavy lifting of converting letters into imagined sounds and then, as we “hear” them in our heads, connecting those words with images, ideas, and experiences. For several thousand years, writers have attempted to put whatever lightning they feel in the bottle of poems, essays, plays, and books. None of these has any meaning or value though without the brains of readers working to construct them.

That simple abracadabra—our minds’ reanimating of the stored energy of words—can feel good when we read the cereal box. Certain texts, some sacred, some profane, have a mysterious protean power to reward our exertions with fresh manifestations every time we return to them, like fresh buds on some immortal bush. Every time we work the levers of our brains to experience those words, we find more and still more flowers for the bees…

If we see reading only as entertainment or a source of information, digital options preempt it. But the cognitive load—the effort required to sound out words and then form them into meanings in the mind—makes reading so much more meaningful as streaming algorithms capture our attention and delete our agency.

Are we all ready for this kind of rigorous brain workout routine? Probably. Young people definitely are, but they will need catalysts—supportive peers and adults who help them find the energy to start the reaction. Maybe we all will. In any case, here are the steps anyone wanting this cure will need to take:

Step 1: Desire. There’s a crucial difference between wanting to do something beneficial and doing it (and maybe an even bigger difference between doing it once and getting in the habit of doing it), BUT the inner spark that can kindle action needs nurturing and acknowledgement, even when no action gets taken. Sometimes just the impulse needs to happen hundreds of times before any deed. Discuss the benefits of reading but expect nothing. Look for the sparks but with honest curiosity about their experience. If you’re a parent, you may need a tutor, teacher, or relative to catalyze this first step, as anything you say may curdle instantly into conflict or pressure, thereby cooking the seeds.

Step 2: Choice. Do you want to read fantasy? Historical fiction? Classics? Philosophy? Mysteries? Do you want to learn about science, nature, or investing? You’re hunting that first, breakthrough reading pleasure. If you are a reader trying to get your students or children to read, perhaps you know what they would love. Suggest it. But respect the sanctity of their autonomy. There are tens of thousands of “great” texts to read, but it only matters what they think. If they want to read comic books or vampire romances, that’s fine. Just be ready with heartier fare when Captain Underpants loses its luster. And no point in continuing to read anything that’s not grabbing them.

Step 3: Build an off switch. Eventually, a great book will pull you away from your screens (and keep you blissfully away for hours!). But how to start? As they say in AA, the mind leads. Your lizard brain will always want to watch another video. Freedom begins when you don’t—when you find and practice tripping the override. Even if you don’t immediately pick up a book, creating a mental off switch for your devices is a non-negotiable baby step towards self-restoration.

Step 4: Reading is “Zinc-ing.” We made up that word to describe the imagination’s conversion of text to images, ideas, meanings, and experiences. The mind likes that effort. Even reading, “Springfield is the capital of Illinois” feels good if you let your brain enjoy those words. You’ve probably never been there, but what an odd thing to say. “Spring” and “field” are a pleasure, but what a generic and weird name for a city and how uncanny to juxtapose the fun sounds of the strangely spelled “Illinois,” first, if you happen to know them, with the devastating connotations of French colonists, cultural erasure, and genocide, and then secondly with the utter blandness of this sentence. Of course, you probably won’t bring all that consciousness to this sentence the way you might if you were reading “Hope is the thing with feathers,” but readers enjoy reading. The process is the same.

Step 5: Commit to ten pages. Habituated as we are to less-effortful stimuli, actually applying Step 4 above to a new text involves resistance. My initial reaction to pretty much every book I read—even those I end up loving—is, Well, this is boring. Paradoxically, the most rewarding voices on the page confront us with new patterns that take getting used to. Give yourself ten pages of concerted Zinc-ing. If you’re not with the writer after ten pages, move on. Go to the library or a bookstore. There are too many great things to read to waste more effort, but fighting through that first layer rewards you even if you put the book down.

If you’re trying to help someone who says they HATE reading, be compassionate and understanding. They’re probably not very good at it. Sure, they can “read”—meaning sound out the letters, but they may be scanning quickly for information or expecting the novel you gave them to sweep them away like their favorite TV show does. Not gonna happen. At least not till they know how to enjoy the effort.

If you or someone you know can help them discover that pleasure, they will come around. Yes, it involves effort, but the internet is making our teeth fall out.

You can follow Matt on Substack: https://substack.com/@mattbardin2.

Zinc Learning Labs Receives Clean SOC 2 Type 2 Attestation Report!

Zinc Learning Labs is proud to announce that we’ve received a clean SOC 2 Type 2 attestation report.

This rigorous, independent assessment of our internal security controls serves as validation of our dedication and adherence to the highest standards for security, confidentiality and availability. 

This is an important milestone but is in no way an end to our commitment to our customers and the security of their data. Zinc Learning Labs views security as the foundation upon which our products are built and upon which trust with our customers is earned and maintained. 

Conducted by ACCORP Partners, a nationally recognized CPA firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, this attestation report affirms that Zinc Learning Labs’ information security practices, policies, procedures, and operations meet the rigorous SOC 2 Trust Service Criteria for security, confidentiality and availability.

Developed by the AICPA, SOC 2 is an extensive auditing procedure that ensures that a company is handling customer data securely and in a manner that protects the organization as well as the privacy of its customers. SOC 2 is designed for service providers storing customer data in the cloud.

As more enterprises look to process sensitive and confidential business data with cloud-based services like Zinc Learning Labs, it’s critical that they do so in a way that ensures their data will remain safe. Our customers carry this responsibility on their shoulders every single day, and it’s important that the vendors they select to process their data in the cloud approach that responsibility in the same way. 

We welcome all customers and prospects who are interested in discussing our commitment to security and reviewing our SOC compliance reports to contact us at partnerships@zinclearninglabs.com.

Love-Driven Effort: Student Agency in the Digital Age

by Matt Bardin, Zinc Learning Labs Founder and CEO

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No matter how cynical we teachers become, there is no deeper satisfaction than our students' growth.

In my work developing reading software for teens, I interact with secondary schools across America. Paradoxically, given how far behind the students are, the teacher always seems by far the hardest working person in every classroom. Between the pandemic and screen-induced brainrot, the effort to engage students has gotten much harder. Amazingly, I see teachers continuing to bring massive effort. Our ever-illusive reward? To see that light turn on in their eyes.

Teachers have always fought an uphill battle. Tasked with responsibility for others’ growth, we have limited authority over our students’ actions. We are coaches who don’t pick our players. To succeed, we need them to want to play, but the dubious traditional carrot and stick motivators—mainly grades—that our teachers used with us feel increasingly ineffectual in our new era. The pandemic left many students even more behind and hopeless about carrots, even as refinements in social media train their minds on a steady diet of the most passive pleasures.

The basic units of motivation have always been external and fear-driven. Work hard in school, we’ve told students, or you’ll get a bad grade, disappoint your family, look foolish in front of peers, or fail to get into college or secure a good job. We have been trying to train people like we train dogs. We love our pets, but our students’ lives demand cognitive skills that go way beyond obedience and rote moves.

Valid though these threats may be, they never worked well for a large majority. Decades of disappointing student results on standardized tests confirm what all successful educators know intuitively: if you push someone who’s stumbling, they fall down.

The wisdom of the internet explains these failures. With impressive determination and efficiency, big tech has discovered, cultivated and exploited neurological short cuts to our innate human laziness. None of the outside consequences mentioned above rewards the pleasure centers in our brains the way an endless stream of cute, surprising videos or exploding alien spaceships does. Almost all teens still want to please parents and teachers. Most still care about grades. But these fear-driven, extrinsic inducements cannot compete with the blunt force of intrinsic, algorithmic swipes and scrolls.

This is a huge opportunity for educators.

Should we reinvent learning to compete with screens as a garden of digital delights? We certainly must learn from the behavioral axioms the internet reveals, but, as Duolingo co-founder Luis von Ahn points out, learning, which is inherently hard, can never drive attention the way experiences engineered to be as easy as possible can. To succeed, our students need to exert themselves.

The victories of their screens over our students’ minds both demand a new approach from educators and create the conditions for something truly new and better.

Life online demolishes agency, our attentions and sense of self seamlessly extracted from us by the limitless novelty of the internet. No one feels the distraction, anxiety, and loss of self wrought by our screens more keenly than our post-pandemic young people.

But how can school compete, much less help?

As fun and compelling as dance clips, NFL mock drafts, or doomscrolling are, no one feels refreshed and invigorated by an afternoon on Reddit or TikTok. Hours of scrolling will never compete with the satisfaction of reading a great novel or mastering a difficult skill. Von Ahn points out one advantage his app has over apps that merely distract and entertain: “When you’re learning something,” he says, “You get meaning out of it.”

The same can be said about making real effort of any kind. I still can’t tell my students how learning [substitute any topic a student finds difficult, from Shakespeare to cellular respiration] will serve them in their future, but the massive abyss of pre-digested internet “content” gnawing at their souls makes the exertion needed to learn anything redemptive. Joan Didion characterized such efforts as “small disciplines” and identified them as the key to the quality most desperately sought by so many adolescents: self-respect. When we work hard at something just for practice, we learn to trust ourselves and our powers. Doing so for a grade never delivers the same value.

Yes, we’re all lazy. No, we can’t all be saints or geniuses. But we also all—every one of us—love to work hard. There is no meaning or satisfaction in life without effort. That contradictory idea—that we’re all lazy, living for the weekend AND that we all love and need serious effort—must replace the carrot/stick model that never worked, bred discord and dysfunction, and is currently being dealt the coup de grace by digital tech.

Our classrooms can become a refuge of agency from the ocean of online distraction, not by telling our students to work hard or scaring them about their futures, but by getting them to experience and appreciate meaningful effort. Giving them choices helps. So does understanding their needs and providing tools that challenge each student at an appropriate ability level. But truly getting them in the game depends on their desire to play.

Thousands of hours of swiping and scrolling condition the mind to want to be done. As one teacher in Florida put it, “I don’t know where they’re in such a rush to get to!” Whenever my students work hard at something, I ask them what felt good about it. Some will say, “Nothing.” They act as if I’m trying to trick them into some kind of sacrifice. I’m not. I’m trying to give them the biggest gift they’ll ever get: the power of themselves. That’s usually good enough for most of them.

I’m not suggesting you change your approach to teaching because the old ways are failing, which they are, or to improve your students' test scores, which this will. Tech can support you with tools, but only teachers can transform learning. You should interest your students in love-driven effort because YOUR love for THEIR growth is your superpower.

You can follow Matt on Substack: https://substack.com/@mattbardin2.

Free Resources to Put the Joy Back in Reading

In a survey at the end of the 2022-2023 school year, The National Center for Education Statistics reported that only 14% of 13-year-olds surveyed said that they read for fun almost every day. This reflected over a 10% drop from 2012. At Zinc, we strive to put joy back in reading by both exposing students to texts on topics of their choice and teaching them what to do when they read. But our real dream is that all secondary students will have a book in their backpack—a book that they are reading for fun. 

To build excitement around reading, Zinc has developed Flight Reading Mission—a free, downloadable, classroom-ready kit with slide shows, activities, book-themed missions, and weekly point trackers to get your students reading and encourage a culture of independent reading in your classroom and on your campus. You can implement Live Mind as a six-week reading journey, or pick and choose from book-themed elements that fit your class needs.

Read the Room Book Choosing Game

A major goal of Live Mind is putting books in backpacks. We all want students to find books they enjoy reading. Live Mind is designed to promote positive reading habits like seeking out books for yourself.

Read the Room is an active game that helps students find a book that grabs their attention. A class can play in the classroom or school library. Google Slides are available with the rules to make things easier. All teachers need to provide are books!

Live Mind Missions and Points

In Live Mind, students can earn points by reading and by embracing the fun of reading. Each week, students will receive missions that help them engage with what they’re reading and practice positive reading habits. A short mission might be taking a selfie with their book or visiting the library. More involved activities would be creating a meal or a work of art based on their book.

Teachers set a goal for their classroom, and students will choose how they participate. We provide the missions, reading trackers, and a way to track classroom points. Students can track their pages or time spent reading, and a wide variety of missions means there will be something for everyone to try.

Book Talk

One of the best parts of reading is talking about books with other readers. For Weeks 2 to 5, Live Mind provides topics for small groups. These quick, fun discussion questions help students think about what they’re reading and share with their peers.

Book Talk is shared as a set of Google Slides, so teachers can easily share that week’s question with your students. Participating in Book Talks also helps students earn points toward the class goal!

Celebration Guide

When a class reaches the finish line for Live Mind, it’s time to celebrate! Students have worked hard and found some new ways to enjoy books along the way. With a class celebration, teachers can encourage students to keep up the excitement they’ve developed for reading.

We offer suggestions for fun ways to have a fun, reading-related celebration with your class that don’t require a ton of work or resources. Teachers are invited to let us know how they celebrate reading, and we look forward to sharing that excitement with you! 

Get Live Mind from Zinc

For a sneak preview, check out Zinc Book Talk, a multi-week set of book-themed conversation starters you can use as your next Do Now.

Do you want Live Mind delivered directly to your inbox? Enter your email below and we’ll make sure you’re the first to get the Live Mind kit when it launches in early January.

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