"I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself." -CS Lewis, The Great Divorce

9.22.2010

Thing #53: Students...reading

Each year I've taught at Ocean Lakes, I have assigned an independent novel project during the first quarter. It fits in well with our unit on short stories, and I hope that picking out their own books encourages kids to read. I'm not always sure that this is the case, but alas, I hope and pray.

Today was the library-book-check-out day. All three honors 9 classes took a brief sojourn down to the library (ooh ahh) to find a good book to enjoy. This includes the typical gossiping in between shelves and at tables after books have been selected. A fair amount of conversation revolves around the books, but often, the conversations fall to more pressing matters like boys and sports and did-you-hear chatter.

But today, I got the shock of my young teaching career. My third block, mostly pretty chatty and eager to learn girls with a few fairly motivated and insightful young men, went to the library. After a brief orientation, they selected books of interest. One by one, they chose books and sat down to flip through their finds. Suddenly, I realized it had become eerily quiet as the librarian and I conversed. I looked to my right, and there, sitting in careful spacing, were about seven of my students, heads bowed over newly selected books...reading. To the left, around tables I saw the same carefully bent heads over pages of literature.

My heart is still smiling at this amazing sight. How wonderful that these young students have found books that interest them and have heeded my instructions to begin reading immediately. I simply hope that some of them find joy in their selections.


Ok, even better about this - and I can't resist sharing - is what many of them did upon returning to the classroom. Before leaving, I told them to take the total number of pages and divide by 21 to figure out how many pages they should read a night. This would give them enough time to read and have a week left to work on the project itself. When we walked in, out came the calculators and the planners. They listened! They did what I recommended without reminder! They wrote in their planners! Oh joy! Oh happy day!

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