Pizza Hut incentives for reading?

By Eric Jaen
Collegian Editor
February 27, 2008

After countless years parked in front of a television playing video games or watching Monday night wrestling every week, my brain seems to have turned into mashed potatoes. If you were to ask me to recall memories from my childhood, I would most likely see nothing but fog. Yet, there are still a select few memories that managed to survive, such as my eighth grade teacher’s rant about why houses shouldn’t face the street. More importantly though, the one thing I can appreciate to this day, and wish I could relive, is participating in that wonderful reading program, Book It!

For those of you who don’t know, or simply can’t remember, Book It! was sponsored by Pizza Hut and encouraged reading in schools, mainly from kindergarten to sixth grades. Students who read enough books to meet specific classroom goals were awarded with a coupon for a free Personal Pan Pizza at Pizza Hut. From there, they also received other various trinkets, such as a sticker or button to show off as a badge of honor.

While the Letter People were all well and good, the idea of receiving free pizza was just simply ravishing. As a child, reading was never really at the top of my list of things to do, seeming to be more of a chore than anything. However, Book It! gave me an incentive to pick up a book and make an honest effort to read. Critics who accused the program of promoting a more harmful than helpful message were in some ways correct, but at the same time were taking unnecessary shots below the belt.

Sure, my main objective was to score a delicious pizza with the toppings of my choice, but it was through this program that I, and I’m sure many other Book It! alumni, stumbled upon some of my all-time favorite books. Personally, fun reads like those sports novels by Matt Christopher, Goosebumps and Animorphs all proved to be just as entertaining as anything else on TV at the time. Oh, let’s not forget about The Baby-Sitters Club. You can always count on Claudia to have an extremely creative wardrobe every time. In any case, it sure beat reading James and the Giant Peach for the millionth time in class.

With all this talk about how unpopular reading is nowadays, it makes me wonder why there can’t be a Book It! program for us older college folk. I know it sounds absurd, but there are many times when I get a hankerin’ for a good paperback, but in all honesty I just don’t have the best work ethic. However, throw a few goals or incentives my way and I’ll most certainly make time for it. If there’s one other thing I learned in the past four years, it’s that students love two things: Freeness and food, especially in concert. So why not attempt to show them that reading isn’t all about those Shakespeare snooze-fests, and turn them on to some enjoyable authors that may cater to their demographic such as Chuck Palahniuk, or Bret Easton Ellis, all while sending a few triple P’s their way as well.

jaene1@lasalle.edu