I interrupt, “May 6! I wonder how Riordan’s going to weave the Minotaur myth into this one.”
“Hey, Michael and I signed up to take mythology next year.”
“Matthew, you could teach that class! Think about all of the mythology you read last year.”
Matthew helps me stack chairs and pick up trash while we talk and talk about books. It is nice that we can fall back into talking about books so easily when we have not seen each other for eight months, further proof that Matthew and I are connected as readers long after my role as his teacher passes. We catch up on all of the series we are following and rehash our impressions of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I tell Matt about the movies based on Inkheart and Uglies that are coming out soon. I show him the new feline-fantasy Warriors books that I snagged from a book sale. (Ally, Hanna, and Matt had begged me to buy the books the spring before.) Matt reveals, “I buy books all of the time. I spend all of my money at Barnes & Noble.” Our conversation starts to reveal more disturbing facts about the health of reading beyond my classroom.
“Matthew, why don’t you go to the school library?”
“My teacher never takes us to the library. The only way I can go is before or after school, and I am always rushing. Whenever I find a book I like there, it is the third in a series or something, and they never have the first one. They don’t promote reading over there [at the middle school] the way that you did.” He sighs, “Well, no one promotes reading like you.”
I wind up digging through the class library to find Matthew some books to read that I know he did not read last year, teasing him, “Well, I guess it’s manipulative of me, but if I loan you some books to read, you will have to come back and see me to return them.”
Matthew’s dramatic declaration that “no one” promotes reading the way I do may not be completely accurate, but he only has the eight teachers he’s had since kindergarten to go on. Providing students with piles of books to choose from and giving them time to read them seems too easy, but it works, and I am not the only adult invested in motivating children to read who knows it. A sampling of comments on my blog entries bears this out.
Why we should validate students’ interests when recommending books and using them in class:
If we want children who are avid and excited readers, we need to let them read what interests them.
—Donna Green, posted March 13, 2008
How spending more time assessing students and less time reading beats all the joy for reading out of them:
It is sad how illustrating the importance of reading and writing (through testing) has come at the expense of the passion some kids have for it.
—Jason, posted February 29, 2008
Why the best reading program is still the first reading program most children encounter while sitting on a parent’s lap—connecting with books and spending time reading:
Providing kids with lots and lots of interesting books and time in which to read them seems too low-tech, too easy, too lacking in rigor. Of course it can’t possibly work.
—Erin, posted February 13, 2008
Why reading is about the children and the books, not the programs and the teacher:
As an English teacher at an alternative high school, I have seen many students who are non-readers become motivated to read simply through having the opportunity to choose their own books. In my view it is vital for our students to have easy access to books to which they can relate. When students find such books, they suddenly can’t put them down. I love when this happens.
—Terry, posted February 15, 2008
These pockets of reading zealotry are not enough, and we all know that these teachers are not in the majority. We should not have to become underground teachers. Something has to change. Students should not have to suffer. Every time they pick up a book, we punish them with overused worksheets and unending analysis and discussions. Why would they ever choose to read on their own? There needs to be more of us, and we need to get a lot louder about telling our administrators, colleagues, and parents what we believe. Of course, we have to believe that students need to read more and have more control over their reading in the first place.
Until that happens, I will still get e-mails like this one from Kelsey’s mother:
This is a big TAKS [Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills] year for Kelsey. Can you give me some advice on what we should do to help her pass? I know you are busy with your students, but you seemed to reach Kelsey.
Yes, the same Kelsey who triumphantly passed the TAKS in sixth grade, the year I taught her. Her mother is worried about the TAKS again, and has to contact me to get advice? Am I the last teacher who reached her, two years ago?
The students trickle back to me in pairs, and send me e-mails begging for lists or to find someone, anyone, who cares about the latest installment in the Clique series. It is touching, and I miss them all. It is gratifying to know that I have had an impact on them to such a degree, and that they are still reading. They shouldn’t have to struggle so much to remain readers, though. It is heartbreaking that their reading communities have not expanded or evolved since sixth grade. I know that without dedicated class time to read or a community of reading peers to support them, some stop reading. The experiences with reading that I share with my students are that fragile.
Read all of the books on teaching you want, even this one, but my most recent e-mail from Ally, who spent all of seventh grade in a teacher-controlled reading environment, says it all:
Mrs. ______ has given us a reading assignment with books we actually WANT to read! I never thought it was possible. . . . She is having us choose from books like The Sands of Time, The Book of Story Beginnings, The Sea of Trolls (I chose this one), and Code Orange. For once I can read a book in her class that is enjoyable.
It took seven months for Ally’s classroom to get back to the first day of sixth grade. Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books to become readers, they may choose never to read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them.
Afterword
READING IS FUNDAMENTAL. Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I heard these words on a public-service television spot, squeezed between my favorite TV shows, Bonanza and The Big Valley. Spoken by a young boy of ten or eleven—someone close to my age—those words were a call to action. I got the message that if I ever expected to know more about the world around me, I would need to read. Living in rural Oklahoma, my access to books was limited to the small local library and the picked-over shelves of my school’s classrooms. The encouragement and necessity that lived within this boy’s voice stayed with me. His was a message that reading could offer me the opportunity of knowing about other people and places. And I never forgot it.
At the time, America was experiencing roiling political change—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the resignation of a president. I saw reading as social engagement, a path to understanding this revolution—the ideas, the challenges, and the people. Reading was instrumental for me in exploring life far from my rural Oklahoma childhood. I was fortunate. I believed that I could be a part of something greater by reading. As a practicing school principal today, it is my duty to create an atmosphere that sends that same message to students. I must find teachers who believe that reading is a vehicle that allows students to travel beyond their classroom walls.
Yet how clearly are we sending the “reading is fundamental” message to our young people today? Are the students in our public school classrooms experiencing reading as a means to reflect on the world? I hope so, but I am also skeptical. Our national discussion of reading has been reduced to a talking point, a measurement score. How can we get our students to open books and start reading when, in many classrooms, the focus is on test performance? I believe in and support the idea that teachers and schools should be accountable
for students’ performance, but I fear that we on the inside, who work in public schools, are misrepresenting the fundamental idea of reading. Reading is more than a number. It is a civic responsibility—one that should live in and outside the classroom. And teachers and schools play a critical role in keeping this message on track.
By creating this sense of responsibility within our students, we are preparing them to be informed decision makers and contributors to our communities. If we create a passion for reading within our students, they will be able to carry on the kind of inquiry that is needed to function in our democracy. Our students are shortchanged if we fail to teach reading beyond the narrow definition of a test score. Our students are shortchanged if the fundamental message of reading is captured only in an encouraging word on a poster or an impersonal voice in a public-service announcement. We who work with children every day in schools across America have an obligation to live the reading life ourselves.
We must believe that reading is fundamental for ourselves, for our students, for all students in order to help promote the ideas that will carry each of us forward. Reading must lead our agenda as public school teachers and administrators, not in a way that is narrowly defined but in a way that helps students discover their own sense of purpose. Whether these young readers are from a booming metropolis or a rural community thousands of miles away, we can help them envision other possibilities through the words of E. L. Konigsburg, E. B. White, or Harper Lee.
Donalyn Miller believes that teachers and school administrators are obligated to create powerful reading classrooms. Donalyn Miller believes that students are more than test takers. Donalyn Miller believes that all students are readers, that students must lead sustained reading lives well past their school years. Hers is an important voice that carries the message that reading is fundamental every day in her classroom.
Won’t you join the book whisperer movement? By doing so, we will send a thunderous message that reading is critical not only for the welfare of our students but also for the continued health of our democracy. We will empower our students to sustain themselves and our nation. I challenge you to join this reading revolution, to do your part as a public school educator in the United States. Our children cannot afford our silence.
Ron D. Myers, Ph.D.
Principal
Trinity Meadows Intermediate School
Keller, Texas
Appendix A: The Care and Feeding of a Classroom Library
THE SMALL THREE-SHELF, PARTICLEBOARD BOOKCASE that I started with the first year I taught is still a part of my classroom, but it has been relegated to holding archived lesson plans and The Reading Teacher journals. The shelves began to bow from holding book tubs a few years ago, and like an old swaybacked horse, it has been put out to pasture. I won’t get rid of that shabby, cheap bookcase until it collapses. On days when I despair that I am not accomplishing much with students, that pitiful bookcase reminds me of how far I have come.
When my school, Trinity Meadows Intermediate, opened in 2006, teachers raced to move into their classrooms while construction was still under way. Installing phones in the classrooms, one technician wandered into the office, confused: “Hey, do you want a phone in that library back there?” It took the office staff a few moments to realize that the technician meant my classroom.
To say that my classroom is overflowing with books now would be an understatement. There is no library corner. The whole room is a library corner. My students are literally surrounded by books (see Figure A.1). In fact, we have so many books in the library that all of the large sets of books for share-reading and our after-school book club are shoved in a closet across the hall. When a guest came to my classroom for a visit, my students and I stuffed several crates of books into cabinets in the workroom across the hall because there was no room under my computer table for them. I felt as if I were hiding dirty laundry from my mother-in-law, afraid that my guest would not understand our need to have piles of books all over the place.
FIGURE A.1: Our Classroom Library
Source: Hope Myers, grade 6.
Books Everywhere You Look
Plastic bookcases full of fiction line the walls and wrap around the entire room. These shelves contain rows and rows of plastic shoe boxes. I buy these from discount stores when bins are on sale for a dollar apiece and leave the lids at the store. Each book bin contains books, covers facing out. Since our class reading requirements are based on genres, the books are grouped that way. I order the books according to the popularity of genres. The bins start with realistic fiction, then fantasy and historical fiction, then science fiction, mystery, traditional literature, and, finally, poetry. Every few bins sports a computer-generated bookplate with the genre on it as a guide for students who are looking for books.
The bins are numbered, and every book has a sticker on the cover to match the one on the respective bin. The stickers make it possible for students to reshelve books on their own. Each bin is alphabetical—roughly speaking—within its own genre. If there are not enough books for a particular letter of the alphabet to fill up a bin, one holds several letters. When the bin gets full, I add another bin with the same number, and put the overflow books into it. This way, I do not have to renumber all the books whenever our library expands. We have over 100 bins in the class library now.
Milk crates full of nonfiction are stacked on the floor, with science titles in one; history titles in a second; general nonfiction, including how-to books and advice titles in a third; and biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs in a fourth.
Hardcover books don’t fit well in plastic shoe boxes; wider than the bin and too heavy, they tip the bins over. One tall wooden bookcase by the windows holds all of the hardcovers in rows two books deep. This bookcase is not in any order, and students cannot see the covers, but I have to make this concession in order to fit all of the books into it. There are a few students who prefer discovering books pulled at random from a bookshelf. I suppose this crazy-quilt assortment meets that need.
One large bookcase by the door holds dictionaries, thesauri, atlases, and other reference books for writing and social studies. The cabinet at the bottom of this shelf holds audiotapes, headphones, and the cataloguing supplies our class librarians and I need to run the library.
Each student in my classes, as well as other library guests, keeps a library card in a file box. When readers check out a book, they record the title, then check off the book when they return it. I use the same cards that librarians use in book pockets for recording due dates. They are available from a library supply company.
As we get more books, I take more personal items or books on pedagogy home to make more room. (Let’s not go into my book situation there!) I hide teaching manuals and ancillaries for textbooks away in cabinets behind my desk. I still use them, but I don’t want them to take precedence over the books I read with students. Books we will read together; picture books I use to model lessons; delicate, easily damaged books like our Robert Sabuda pop-ups; and novelty books like Dragonology and Egyptology I keep behind my desk in built-in shelves.
Acquiring Books
I have purchased every book in our class library with my own money. I cringe a bit admitting that, but I have my reasons. There is not enough money available in school budgets for teachers to develop such extensive libraries. (I talk to many teachers who claim they cannot implement a free-choice reading program in their classroom because they don’t have enough books.)
There are personal reasons for me to amass my own collection, too. I am a bit free with my book loans, passing out books to former students, siblings of students, and other teachers, some not even at my school. I have the freedom to do this because these books are mine, and I can loan my books to anyone I want to. If the books in my room were school property, I would never do this, of course. If they were, it would take herculean efforts for me to keep track of the number of books I loan out, and I just cannot devote this much effort to tracking every single boo
k in my room. Yes, books wander off, some for years, but a lot of them wander back. Books from former students wash up in my school mailbox, literary messages-in-a-bottle, with notes apologizing for keeping the books for so long tucked inside.
Furthermore, if I were to change campuses, my library would go with me. No matter what materials I lacked at the new school, I could do without as long as I had my library. This was the case when I changed schools in 2006. I did not have textbooks on the first day of school, but it did not matter; I had my books.
I am not advocating that you purchase books for your own class library, but all teachers spend money on their classroom at one time or another. I never invested in decorations for my classroom; the windows don’t have curtains, and there are no motivational posters papering the walls. I chide my students to pick up every pencil they find in the hall so we can have more books!
I do, however, employ methods for getting books that stretch every dollar. I scrounge books from book swaps, discount bookstores, and sales. I often purchase books from garage sales, where books are not big sellers. I frequently walk away with a box of books by offering the seller a few dollars to take the box away. I cull out the books that are worth adding to the library, and take the rest to a book swap later. My students and I buy books from book order companies, who give the ordering teacher points toward purchasing new books. Instead of holiday and teacher appreciation gifts, I encourage students to donate a book to the class library. Students bring me books that they or their siblings don’t want anymore, too. I honor the benefactors by designing a computer-generated bookplate with the student’s name and the year they were in my class on it.
The Book Whisperer Page 16