"I want my [students] to become readers with my help, not in spite of me." —Stacey Riedmiller7/9/2018 Week 5, Blog Post 5 Reflecting on what it means to be a teacher who reads based on the ideas in this LLED course and this article by Stacey Riedmiller. We're hitting the big questions here: Have my thoughts about what it means to be a teacher who reads shifted because of this course? What have I learned here that I'll use out there in the classroom?
To start, before this class I knew comics had a place in my classroom (and they still do, but now I have even more evidence to disprove the nay-sayers!). However, I also knew that I personally skipped the YA genre for the most part and was woefully underinformed. My mom stuck a Stephen King book in my hands back in fifth grade (I’m not advising or suggesting you do that, in fact, please don’t give young children books very obviously not meant for young children) and from there it was all Stephen King and Dean Koontz and the random classic that I wasn’t really equipped to properly appreciate and then whatever was assigned for class. The exception to my decidedly “adult” reading was James Pattern’s Maximum Ride series (I do suggest you put that series in the hands of your students) and I still think about Maximum Ride. In hindsight, I think my love for those books comes from their appropriateness for who I was as a young person at that moment. Informed educators would agree, I believe. (Look at the takeaways for the last few weeks. There’s a pattern.) All this to say I didn’t (couldn’t?) appreciate YA books the way so many YA books deserve to be appreciated. And I definitely didn’t recognize their value in the classroom. Now I’m ready to fight anyone who doesn’t believe in YA books for their students (okay, maybe not fight, but I’m certainly armed with some intelligent ideas and empirical evidence to make my point thanks to this course). I’m excited about YA books. (I’m an excitable person in general.) Excitement is so often contagious. (I'm going to capitalize on that contagious quality of excitement with book talks and a "books I'm reading board" [see earlier posts] because being a teacher who reads means being a teacher who reads books that belong in the hands of their students and therefore knows which students' hands they most belong in.) On the other hand, grumbling and resisting are even more contagious. Stacey Riedmiller talks about this, about encouraging kids to read what they want to read and being excited for their choices. If we can’t get excited about reading and about YA books, how can we think our students will be excited? And here’s where a new (new to me) idea comes in: rewarding students isn’t helping them. Some of the educator books discussed earlier talk about this and it made sense, but I Riedmiller drove it home for me. Students need to read for themselves and be excited about reading on their own. Young readers need to motivated by their personal internal reasons, not our superficial external motivators that do nothing to support the bigger picture of supporting lifelong readers. We don’t want to discourage students from reading (grumbling about their choices), but we also don’t want to make students read only because they’re seeking something from us (rewards, grades). We want to support the choices students make and offer suggestions and encouragement as they’re wanted. But it’s something else from this course that I’m really, really excited about. The passion I have for representation and discussion and critical thinking about the world around us, especially the world around us that doesn’t look like us or talk like us or think like us, that passion is represented in YA books. The work I want to do in the classroom, the conversations I want to have, they’re already started in the space of YA books. (Just look at “the ‘write’ books” part of this blog. It’s right there at the top right of your screen. There I’ve sorted books by what they’re doing. And for the most part, these are just the books I’ve read this summer- there are so so many more out there!) I am so excited for these books and the ideas and the conversations they’ll ignite in my classroom.
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AuthorI'm a high school English teacher looking to share with students, parents, and peers some of what I'm learning in the classroom as a teacher. Archives
October 2018
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