One Student Victory

I have a book I've been trying to get my students to read all year. It's a series of books, really, but I figure as long as they read the first, they'll want to read the rest.

I tried to get my students to read it last year, too. Apparently it was too, "boring."

I love this series of books. It's like Harry Potter, but more American-y. The character has a solid family where most of them love him (he's got that one crazy, rude, power-hungry grandma and his dad is missing, but his mom loves him and his uncle and other grandma are nice.) The story is a little slower paced, but I like that.

The other day I sent a student to the back of the room to grab a book. My students generally dawdle when they do this (I, apparently, do not own enough "contemporary" YA novels). But he spent a comparatively short amount of time and grabbed this book to bring back to his desk to read.

I expected that he would pretend to read this book until he was allowed to leave his seat or do something else. I expected he would pretend to read as he has done with every other book. I expected he would pretend to read this book like every other student who had picked it up

It has now been three or four school days since he picked it up. Everytime I have seen him since then, he has been reading this book. I've watched his torn paper bookmark steadily progress through the book. I've even had to ask him to stop reading and pay attention to the lesson for the first time this whole year.

I want to ask him about the book, but I'm afraid if I do he'll get weirded out and stop reading. That's the last thing I want. Instead, I watch how he interacts with this book: like it needs a bookmark that won't hurt the spine, like it stays within close reading distance and is never on the floor, like he doesn't care that reading it is not "cool", like he doesn't know I'm dying to know what he thinks of this book. He just keeps reading it.

Perhaps it is a small victory, but for me, that's victory enough.

The Spinning Jenny

A week or so ago when we were studying about the industrial revolution, I gave my students an assignment to create an ad for either the Spinning Jenny or the Cotton Gin. The instructions were to create an ad on a blank white paper. It needed to compel the reader to buy it. It also needed a picture (I mean, how else were we going to know what we were buying?).

Today, late, in the turn in basket I received a final ad for the Spinning Jenny. On a blank white paper, in his best 6th grade handwriting, sans picture, it reads:

Buy the Spinning Jenny!!!
•Faster than ever!
•Easy to operate!
•Useful
•Incredibly Hard To Draw!

Available for a limited time only.

GET Yours Today!!!


I mean, I'd buy it. Wouldn't you?