Reading Rundown

I've had several good days at school. Despite being generally fatigued and soooo not into it, I've had some really amazing lessons. How did that happen?

We're still reading Poe in my English class, and my kids loved "The Cask of Amontillado." They're a little bit in love with Poe right now, because we just read "Annabel Lee" yesterday, and I summarized "The Black Cat" for them. Two of them have since checked out story collections from the library, so I feel pretty good about that.

OOH! Speaking of the library, I took all my reading classes there last week and forced them to check out books. Obviously, there was the usual resistance from my non-readers, but I think I managed to match a lot of them up with books they'll find interesting enough to actually finish. (We'll see.) I definitely had great success when I told one class about a book I'd just read called Gym Candy, which is about a high school football player who takes steroids. Before I'd even finished my last word, I had a kid say, "Hey, I want to read that," and when we went to the library, he whispered to me, "Ms. Flower, can you hold that book for me?" And today when he finished his work he totally READ THAT BOOK instead of annoying me talking like he normally does. Wow!

In addition, I had several students in my fourth period class tell me they had finished their books over the weekend (they went to the library Friday) and they were already working on others.

AND ... my third period class--since it's longer than my other classes and is never interrupted for homeroom, class elections, or tornado drills--has been doing extra reading (I didn't tell them that, of course). It started with Encyclopedia Brown, which I read aloud as they tried to solve the mysteries. It would be the first thing they'd ask when they came in the room: "Do we get to read Encyclopedia Brown today?" We've also been reading Speak for about ten minutes a day, at the end of the period. I actually have a class set of that, so they can read it themselves, though they've told me they prefer it when I read because they can "hear the voices better," whatever that means.

So when I told them today that we were done with Encyclopedia, they immediately started clamoring for Speak. Not "Can we have a free day?" or "Let's take a nap," or "Do you have a movie?" No. They wanted to READ A BOOK.

Is this Bizarro World? Am I dead? Have there been any outbreaks of pod people in this area?

THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.