Authors: Donalyn Miller,Jeff Anderson

The Book Whisperer (19 page)

BOOK: The Book Whisperer

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“No, Daniel, just the one.”

Brittany whines, “Do we have to keep that lame log to get the ticket? I don't care about the ticket if I have to keep that log.”

“Hey guys, you are already doing the reading. Getting the ticket is a nice bonus, don't you think? I will keep a folder on my desk for the Six Flags logs, and when you complete yours, stick it in the file. I will turn them in to Ms. Taylor [the school librarian] when it is a little closer to the due date.” Someone digs out a calculator to see how many days of in-class and nightly reading they have to complete in order to rack up 360 minutes.

“Let's see, if I read at least twenty minutes a day in class and twenty minutes a day at home, it will take me nine days to read 360 minutes. Hey, Mrs. Miller, how much time do we have?”

“Two months or so. I imagine that most of you will be done before winter break.”

I am grateful to Six Flags and our librarian for administering a program that promotes reading. I think their goal of rewarding students for reading by giving them a fun day at an exciting theme park is a noble one. What I take issue with is the embarrassingly little amount of reading that students are expected to accomplish over an extended period of time in order to earn a reward. In addition, I have never observed a student who developed a long-term reading habit because of an incentive program. Even if students are somehow motivated to read because of the ticket, free pizza, or other prize, odds are that they will abandon reading as soon as the incentive is earned. Unfortunately, the only purpose these programs serve is to convince students there is no innate value in reading and that it is only worth doing if there is a prize attached.

Alternative: Reading Bestows Gifts on the Reader

I want my students to learn what life readers know: reading is its own reward. Reading is a university course in life; it makes us smarter by increasing our vocabulary and background knowledge of countless topics. Reading allows us to travel to destinations that we will never experience outside of the pages of a book. Reading is a way to find friends who have the same problems we do and who can give advice on solving those problems. Through reading, we can witness all that is noble, beautiful, or horrifying about other human beings. From a book's characters, we can learn how to conduct ourselves. And most of all, reading is a communal act that connects you to other readers, comrades who have traveled to the same remarkable places that you have and been changed by them, too.

Rewarding reading with prizes cheapens it, and undermines students' chance to appreciate the experience of reading for the possibilities that it brings to their life. For students who read a lot, these programs are neither an incentive, nor a challenge. Yes, my classes participate in the schoolwide incentive programs when they are offered; after all, they would blaze past the requirements anyway. But I never let my students lose sight of what the true prize is; an appreciation of reading will add more to their life than a hundred days at Six Flags ever could.

WHISPER

End-of-Year
Evaluations

SCHOOL IS OUT FOR THE YEAR, and several altruistic students are spending their first day of vacation helping me move into my new classroom. Melinda, a former student who is now in high school, shows up to help, like she does every summer, and supervises the less-experienced volunteers. Carting boxes of books and dragging bookcases down the hall, I briefly contemplate whether I have too many books and then quickly discard this notion. Can you ever have too many books?

Turning my attention to my desk, I sift through the neatly clipped and stacked piles of forms I still need to file. I grab one stack to take home and readâmy students' end-of-year surveys, in which they filled out a questionnaire that I designed to identify how students have grown as readers during the school year (see
Figure 6.3
). Reading through these surveys later, I consider my students' personal feelings about reading, whether they met their reading goals, their favorite books and genres, and their heartfelt opinions about reading response letters, genre requirements, and in-class reading time. Data from these surveys shows amazing growth in the volume of reading my students did and a marked change in their attitudes toward reading in general.

On their reading surveys from the first week of school, my fifty-four students reported reading 939 books in fifth grade, an average of 17 books per student; twenty-four students had read 5 or fewer books the entire year. During sixth grade, the same group read 3,332 books, an average of 62 books per student. The least number of books read by any student was 22. Students' attitudes about how much reading they did ranged from disbelief to amazement to pride. Bongani was so proud of the number of books he read that he photocopied his reading log to show to relatives. With great drama Ben claimed, “I feel reborn!” and Mathew, who had read 0 books in fifth grade and 40 in sixth, remarked, “I read more than I thought I would in a lifetime!”

FIGURE 6.3
:
One Student's Feedback, Shown on Evaluation Form

Source: Michelle, grade 6.

Of the factors that students identified as contributing the most to their increased motivation and interest in reading, in-class reading time was selected as a significant factor by all fifty-four. Fifty chose our classroom library, and forty-six commented that having a teacher who reads helped them develop as readers themselves. I was surprised, in light of the fact that our class had no home reading requirement, that forty-two students indicated that they spent more time reading at home than they did before entering my class. This information reinforced my belief that students who read more at school are more likely to continue reading at home.

I use students' feedback as a tool to identify which components of our reading workshop need a tweak for next year. Book reviews, which I implemented halfway through the school year, were not as helpful as I had hoped they would be in sparking readers' interest. I think if we had begun writing reviews earlier in the year, they would have worked better because students would rely on them more than they did when we only created a few. The same goes for the after-school book club, which did not get off the ground until February.

Through this survey, students celebrate their reading accomplishments, express their opinions to me one more time about the structure of our class, and set future reading goals. By visualizing and stating plans for reading after my class, I hope that students will continue to move forward as readers. I tell them, “The most important books you will ever read are those you choose to read this summer. By continuing to read, you will prove that you are readers now without the requirement from me to do so.”

CHAPTER 7

Letting Go

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.
One does not love breathing.

âHarper Lee

I realize that I will probably never have the opportunity to read as much as I do now in class ever again.

âMichelle

T
O PARAPHRASE Gary Schmidt's
The Wednesday Wars
, one of my new favorites: teachers plant in the fall and harvest in the spring. Looking around my classroom this March day, I know it to be true. My students are bent over their books; one even reads it while blowing his nose and walking to the trash can. I end the year in the same way that I began it: sitting in my green chair, reading. Not reading in front of them as much as reading with them. I wonder, sometimes, whether I have pulled my students into a circle around me or whether they have opened their circle, and allowed me to come into it. Whichever it is, reading is what we are about now, and we are happy doing it.

Instead of following me around, begging for book recommendations, my students have started to make preview stacks and suggest books to each other. They are mimicking what I have modeled. They don't need me to support them as readers as much as they did in August, and this thought warms me and makes me sad at the same time. I know that they will be leaving me soon. For me, the worst part about being a teacher is saying good-bye to children whom I have loved, many of whom I will never see again. All I will have are the mental snapshots I take of them now, peeking over my book.

Alex is a reading bonfire, and our library and the time to read have been kindling for him. He is so consumed by reading that he tunes everything out, including even me at times. I hope I am not the only teacher he will have who does not mind.

If you have a book with a dog in it, give it to Melissa. Don't give sad books to Parker; she claims to hate them, although she seems to read a lot of them.

Molly loves suspenseful, fast-paced books and is very picky about what she reads. I have given her twenty books to preview at one time, and she has walked away without one. Selecting books she will like has become a personal challenge for me. I see a future in publishing for her.

Kenan and Michelle are head to head at their opposing desks, dueling to see who will finish
Inkheart
first. It appears that Kenan left his copy at home today and is reading something else. The lead, for now, goes to Michelle.

Bethany, Madison, and Dana are so enamored with Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters series that they have convinced me to use tridecalogisms, the thirteen-letter words that have such power over the darklings in the books, for our next vocabulary list (see
Figure 7.1
). They bring me new words each day. Instead of our usual ten words, this particular list will have thirteen.

Brandon, who had never been an expert in anything but getting into trouble before arriving in my class, is now the class expert in all things Gary Paulsen. When our new copies of
The River
and
Brian's Hunt
arrived, he stood at my desk and waited for me to cover them with Con-Tact paper so he could take them home. I knew when I ordered them that Brandon would get them first.

If Margaret Peterson Haddix has written a book Jordan hasn't read, I haven't found it. It is probably a good thing that the end of the year is close. I have almost run out of suggestions for her.

Daniel is lugging so many books home in his backpack to read over spring break that I worry he will have back trouble. He asks me every day if I have finished
Children of the Lamp: Day of the Djinn Warriors
, so he can read it next.

Josh and Riley, confident and popular, claim not to be readers, but both have quietly put more books into the hands of their classmates than almost anyone. They are proof that if you can get the cool kids to read, others will follow.

FIGURE 7.1
:
Madison's homemade locker tag shows her love for Midnighters.