Reaching a Reader

Let's call him Daniel. Protect the innocent, so to speak.

Daniel is not a reader. In fact, he is a senior that still hasn't passed the exit exam, a diploma requirement here in South Carolina. He's close--last spring he scored a 197. He has to have 200. And he wants nothing more than to be done with the test so he can enjoy the rest of his senior year.

He came to me at the beginning of the year, wanting help for his fall administration of exit. We wrote and went over rubrics. I used every trick in my bag. And I asked him what he was reading during SSR. He wasn't, and that was a little bit of a problem. He was reading the exit exam workbook during SSR--his choice, but hardly building a healthy reading habit.

At the end of one of our study sessions together, he handed me an open door. He apparently heard on the news that if you don't learn to really read by third grade, then you'll struggle the rest of your life. He felt like he was struggling and was doomed to continue to do so. It was the opportunity I had prayed for. Someone on the outside was telling him what his teachers were telling him--you have to be a reader. So we talked about what he was reading and how boring he thought it was. We left the conversation without true resolution to our problem--just with me telling him to read a book and him saying sure, whatever.

Fast forward to the following morning. He's in math class across the hall from me. His math teacher does SSR during first block, just like all first block teachers have been asked to do. Even though I'm on my way out the door to yet another meeting, I grad Day of Tears by Julius Lester off my shelf and thrust it at him. "Trust me," I say. "It's great. You'll really like it." Not much of a sale, but apparently enough of one.

Daniel read that book. In fact, one teacher told me that she couldn't get him to do anything else but read that book. And the next time that we met for test prep, he had finished it and we used it in our test question examples. He got it. He really got it.

He took the test this week. Now we are playing the waiting game. But I'm going to grab the chance to give him another book, and another, until the day that he walks across that stage.

Need a real good story?

Sometimes you just want to escape. You don't want to read what the kids are reading. You don't want to read what you SHOULD be reading. You just want a vessel to escape in.

I highly recommend Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Gruen has created two settings in her novel that completely envelope the reader--a nursing home and a 1930s circus. She switches between the two as the circus arrives in town, sparking the narrator, Jacob Jankowski, to remember his days with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. As the reader soon learns, the show is hardly spectacular behind the scenes.

I'm not a huge fan of the circus. I went when I was a kid. Loved it. But, now that I'm older and oh-so-much-wiser, I can see the circus for what it is--large animals in tiny crates, traveling on cramped trains and trucks, only to be poked and prodded into showing off for a crowd of cheering humans. I think Jacob would have shared my views.

Be warned--there's a twist in the novel. I didn't think a novel with a prologue could throw me a curveball, but it did. I couldn't put this one down. I loved it from page one and was totally enthralled in the picture that Gruen painted of a Depression-era circus. Great, great read!

Do you believe?

Fridays can be rough. You can get knocked down, ignored, yelled at, and cussed at (or around). But this a reminder of what we need. From the mouthes of babes...

http://www.dallasisd.org/keynote.htm