What am I reading...?
So far this summer I have read All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn, Five Presidents by Clint Hill, and My Jasper June by Laurel Snyder. I am currently reading the The Inn Boonsboro Trilogy by Nora Roberts. It's a little light romance reading to begin summer vacation. Yesterday I bought Separate by Steve Luxenberg. The secondary title says "The story of Plessy V. Ferguson and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation." I also just ordered Last Boat out of Shanghai by Helen Zia and The Hardest Job in the World by John Dickerson. And, of course, I ordered Conner's weekly dose of literature in the form of Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons by James Dean. I'd say I'm headed toward the serious side with my reading and that's probably a good thing. Serious reading for serious times.
We just finished summer school in my little corner of the world. I gave kids a chance to read anything they wanted for around 30 minutes a day. The students that I had are my incoming 6th graders. They hadn't experienced my opportunity to read anything you want for -- minutes yet. It took them a while to get on board with this. At first I think they had an idea that they needed to pick something that they thought I would like for them to read. However, by around the second week of school they had figured out that I really meant choose anything and they began to make more personal choices. I still stand behind the notion of the only way to get better at reading is to read. Read what you want. Re-read things you liked.
Usually during the summer I pick up old favorites, but like I said before we are in serious times and the best way that I know of for me to learn more about important, serious things is to read. I can watch all the news shows available on all the channels I have at my fingertips. But, I won't really understand everything until I dive into the scholarship from others who have done the work to present information about things that have shaped who we are. I still have confidence in authors and historians to tell me things about history that I need to know to make decisions about how I want to contribute to the future. I need to know the facts, the true facts, in order to speak to all the misleading "stuff" that students may come into my classroom with that they have heard from television or social media. If I can hold up a book and say to them, "but, what about this," I can present credible information in a time up of much mis-information. At this point, the printed word is where I choose to go for answers.
Happy Reading! Only...6 weeks to prepare before school begins!
