What to Read? (Reflection #2)

            This past week I have been thinking extensively about what texts we should teach as English teachers that will fully engage and excite our students while also encouraging meaningful reading and response.  According to our Bomer text, students begin to hate reading once they hit Middle School.  Before they reach this educational level, many young children and adolescents enjoy reading and even look forward to shopping for books.  So what happens?  Many believe (myself included) that this happens due to lack of student involvement, therefore interest, in classroom texts. 

So what texts should we choose?  Should we be teaching the predictable high school English canon which includes books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Odyssey, The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, etc.?  “The purpose in secondary and tertiary education was to make sure they read good things; the result is that they don’t really read anything.” (Bomer 71) Where are the more contemporary texts that our students actually might want to read?  I’m not saying that these books should be excluded entirely but shouldn’t we be looking for texts from this decade?  We should be choosing texts that students will be able to connect with in a meaningful way.  But how do we do that? 

In many of my placements, I have seen most of my cooperating teachers promote independent reading by taking students to the library and letting them choose any book that interests them.  This is a nice idea, but most students wander the aisles of the library not knowing what to choose.  Many of our students don’t know what they are interested in because they have never interacted with any text in any meaningful way. So what happens is that our students choose a book that they have no real interest in and either sleep or zone out during their independent reading time that these teachers have set aside.  This independent reading time has become a waste of time.  As teachers, we need to introduce them to texts that they may have never seen but will truly interest them.  We could do this in a variety of ways:  book talks, lit circles, classroom libraries with reviews.  In one of my placements, my cooperating teacher had an amazing classroom library that included student reviews of each book.  These student reviews were effective because they were written by students for students.  I have also seen literature circles in another placement.  This worked well because students were able to choose the book they were assigned and were able to discuss and connect with the text with other students.  I hope to use all of these ideas in my own classroom because I have seen very few teachers who have classroom libraries, who do book talks, or even include lit circles in their classrooms. 

In my current placement, the students are currently learning about the elements of plot by reading a series of stories of suspense.  My cooperating teacher has chosen all of the texts that they are currently reading.  Most of these short stories are engaging and suspenseful so most students are engaged and are actually enjoying the unit.  Because of the level of this particular class, my CT has had to model many reading strategies.  This has included mostly whole-class discussions which have been led by my CT and me.  I hope that as the year progresses, we will be able to involve our students more with what they read but I also hope that they will be able to interact with each text more meaningfully. 

The truth is, I still struggle with two questions:  How am I going to help all of my students discover their own reading lives?; and with so many books to choose from, how do I go about choosing texts that will excite them, teach them about the world in which they live, and find authors that they can identify with?  I realize that there is no perfect answer to these questions and I hope to do my best with helping the majority of my students find texts that will excite them and also challenge them while developing their critical reading skills that will turn them into life-long readers.