"I don't know, I don't read books"

The first week of placement was a week of extremes; I came in with a vision of what I thought the classes would be like, only to experience a great deal of frustration when these expectations were torn down. Over the course of the week, however, things improved and I am now a bit more hopeful about what the next nine weeks has in store. This placement is far different from my other two placements, although in many ways, it is the same; the similarities between the two placements lie mainly in the phenomenon we read about time in time again. Kids are reading little and are often struggling, even in the “regular” classroom.

I am in placement that spans the spectrum of the tracking system. There is one advanced class, one “regular” college prep class, three inclusion classes, and one “resource” (special education) class with students who have mild intellectual disabilities and/or specific learning disabilities. My first day was spent sitting and watching students take something similar to a benchmark for their reading and their math scores, which spanned as high as a perfect score and as low as 6 out of 40 reading questions.

In terms of literacy, I was lucky to have a host teacher who had oddly enough created a journal topic that essentially asked students to write about their favorite book, although not entirely. She asked “If you could preserve one book for the future, what would it be and why?” I was shocked and sort of disappointed to hear a SUBSTANTIAL group of students in all of the classes (even the advanced class) say “I don’t know any books. I don’t read.” Others put the book Night by Elie Wiesel, which I think is a fantastic book, but many of them put “It’s a good book” as the single reason they would save the book. I found out later that they had read the book in class. It troubles me that they had so much trouble coming up with any other books from outside of class, and that they could not decipher the significance of a perfectly acceptable book they discussed in-depth during their class. I will be doing my unit on Raisin in the Sun, followed by To Kill a Mockingbird. All of these will be read aloud in all of the classes; I am not sure how I feel about this, because on one hand, I think reading aloud is highly important, but on another, it is going to take an incredibly long time to even cover the material without discussion.

he resource class is reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone aloud. Most read on a first or second grade level and have IEPs that require reading aloud. I spent a lot of time teaching vocabulary one-on-one with a student who could not read the vocabulary words or the definitions. I did this every day this week, using sentences off the top of my head and examples I could find in the classroom. Not going to lie: when he took his quiz today and got all of them right, I felt great, especially when I read out the word “rigid” and he repeated my example of “the book is more rigid than the paper.” Feels good. I hope I can have more involvement in the resource class; we are about to start reading Rumble Fish.

I made an effort to engage all students I saw reading independently about what they were reading. Those students who were reading were more than happy to talk to me about it. I questioned one girl about what she was reading and found that she was reading a manga book. When I told her I knew very little about manga/anime but that I wanted to learn more about them, as well as graphic novels, because I want my students to be able to have the option to read them, she lit up. We spent (probably too much) time discussing it and the next day, she came in with the first five volumes and asked me if I wanted to borrow them. She seemed legitimately happy that someone was asking her about what she liked, which just goes back to the readings we have on student choice and motivation. Another kid was reading Paradise Lost; when I expressed how impressed I was that he was reading such a difficult and heavy text, he talked about his love of The Divine Comedy. Another student was reading a John Green book that I had just finished reading; she seemed completely shocked that I had read the book and was so eager to talk about the book that I had to promise her an audience later, but that she had to finish her essay in the meantime.

The students who enjoyed reading were eager to read and to talk about their reading. It’s encouraging to see those few students and to think about the possibilities of converting a few more students along the course of this placement. I am ready to accept the challenge head-on.