The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

I never wanted to go into the military. I'm a pacifist at heart. I don't like guns, or noise, or angry people. War is terrifying to me, and the idea that I would ever be on a front line (or a rear line, or anywhere in between) is laughable. I would break and run at the first sign of an enemy. I never wanted to be a police officer. I'm afraid of bad guys. I would most likely choose conversation and negotiation in any given situation, and I understand that sometimes it's necessary for police to make a different call. I'm not so great at making decisions under pressure. I procrastinate a little. I never wanted to be a judge. I don't like the idea of having to make decisions that will determine the outcome of the rest of a person's life, of trying to balance reality with constitutional law, of deciding how to make a punishment fit a crime. I never wanted to be a doctor. The power to hold life and death in your hands is just a bit too much for me. I am happ...

One of my classroom convictions (that's what I call them instead of resolutions) for 2018 is to do better about giving consistent book talks. I tend to be a little sporadic and give a bunch of book talks at once, and then forget to do it again for a couple of weeks. So, I started in mid-January (we missed a lot of school because of bad weather and a lot of class because of testing), giving a book talk every day. Last week, I talked about historical fiction. This week, I knew I wanted to talk about dystopian books, because I have a lot of kids who said they wanted to branch out into new genres during the second half of the year, and dystopian was a genre that was mentioned frequently. And then I came up with an idea that I think will be beneficial to my readers, but that will also keep me on track with my book talks. I went to a Book Love  workshop with Penny Kittle last year, and she talked about how to build reading ladders (a la Teri Lesesne) with genre. Thus, reading ladder bo...

I sit down next to David on the couch. It’s reading workshop time, and as usual, he’s staring around the room, over the top of his book, at other students in class, pretty much anywhere else, trying to avoid looking at the page in front of him. He’s reading Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover , but he also fidgeted and stared over the top of Snitch by Allison van Diepen, Monster by Walter Dean Myers, The Living by Matt de la Pena, and pretty much every other book I’ve placed in his hands since day one. We are halfway through the school year, and I have tried a lot of strategies to help him find books he will enjoy. Most of them have failed. We just finished a mid-year reflection and goal-setting assignment, and I need to talk with him about his answers, in particular his answer to the question “What do you do during independent reading time?” His answer was illuminating: “Wait for it to end.” Each year it seems that my professional reading life bends toward a particular idea, an...