Texts

I am supposed to teach reading strategies and not books. When I put together my reading groups, I group kids who are reading at approximately the same level, and then identify the strategies they need to work on to become "better readers. " With one group it may be reading consonant blends and building fluency, another may be working on interpreting metaphors and identifying foreshadowing. Once I have identified the groups, I head to the reading room to find multiple copies of a book they can all read.

Here is the limiting factor. The fact is that I do teach books. I happen to like books, and I want my students to like them, too. But I can only teach books I have. Sometimes I find a perfect text, but there are only four copies and I need eight. Sometimes I find a complete set of something that is painfully boring, or should be in the high school. Usually I try to find a set around a social studies or science theme so I can make up for the all the time I don't spend teaching either of those subjects. I hit jackpot when there is a thick stack of a book I have read and enjoyed and have the notes for. Usually, I have ten minutes to pick a book before running off to copyplanmeetprep.

Right now I am teaching Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. Jackpot. It's a challenge for my top readers, but oh the joy of hunkering down to a twenty minute conversation about Reconstruction and the cotton gin and symbolism with kids who seem to get anything you throw at them. I luxuriate in these sessions, while I watch David wander around the room and avoid reading, while I ignore him, knowing that I should be spending time with him working on diphthongs instead. But it is simply too much fun talking with my motivated readers. For a minute. Then I send them off with focus questions and chapter assignments and extension projects for another two days, so I can wrangle the rest of my class up to grade level. I enjoy my time with the other kids, too. Trying to light the spark of reading and hope a fire catches before middle school. I even find satisfaction in hearing my most reticent readers begin to recognize written words as their own, internalize patterns and make connections. But it's those twenty minutes twice a week that is my dessert. My just desert.

In chapter 2 of Roll of Thunder, the Logan kids become irate when they realize that their text books are cast-offs from the white school, ten years old and tattered. That afternoon, after discussing the chapter, I pulled out the only science textbook I have available so we could read about the moon and its phases. One of my students immediately turned to the front of the book, where the generations of previous students' names were listed. The first date was... 1990. Twenty years. Twice as old, and just as tattered, as the books in Cassie's 1930's Mississippi. I apologized and offered that perhaps not much has changed about the moon in that time.

This afternoon I received a set of $1,000 "clickers" to go with my Smartboard, so my students may respond anonymously to quizzes. A great assessment tool, I am sure. But I would love to have some science and social studies text books. I'm just that old fashioned.