Just, wow.
Sep. 28th, 2006 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66I knew that this district was different from my experience in West Oakland, but... man. I knew that the librarian was really good, and that the library was well-equipped and that a lot of students seemed to use it at lunch and afterschool.
But it hadn't really sunk in that the majority of these students like to read. Today I scheduled library tours for my morning and my afternoon class, and just came back from the first one. The students were eager and excited to find books. They asked for suggestions and for help using the computer catalog. They knew their own interests and tastes. They listened while the librarian and I talked about recent young adult fiction (YAF) that we'd enjoyed and some of them immediately searched those titles out.
More amazing still, when we returned to the classroom and I declared thirty minutes of SSR -- Sustained Silent Reading -- they were demonstrably overjoyed and then silent, while reading, with maybe ONE kid who fidgeted a lot.
This is an entirely novel experience for me in my ninth year of teaching.
It makes me very, very happy. These aren't necessarily kids with really high reading skills, either. Many of them read far below their grade level. But they're motivated to read. They're motivated to access entertainment and information through the written word. Wow.
But it hadn't really sunk in that the majority of these students like to read. Today I scheduled library tours for my morning and my afternoon class, and just came back from the first one. The students were eager and excited to find books. They asked for suggestions and for help using the computer catalog. They knew their own interests and tastes. They listened while the librarian and I talked about recent young adult fiction (YAF) that we'd enjoyed and some of them immediately searched those titles out.
More amazing still, when we returned to the classroom and I declared thirty minutes of SSR -- Sustained Silent Reading -- they were demonstrably overjoyed and then silent, while reading, with maybe ONE kid who fidgeted a lot.
This is an entirely novel experience for me in my ninth year of teaching.
It makes me very, very happy. These aren't necessarily kids with really high reading skills, either. Many of them read far below their grade level. But they're motivated to read. They're motivated to access entertainment and information through the written word. Wow.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 10:52 pm (UTC)I'm currently in my fifth week of school, at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. It's been pretty good so far, though being an engineering major assures I'm always busy, even if refuse to recognise it. There were a few Solidarity people who showed up for the Detroit conference; we had one person show up to the YPSL convention beforehand. Apparently he was a YPSL when he was younger, and wanted to see what we were up to. I also talked to someone about my membership in Solidarity (I'm an offical sympathiser now), and we had at least one Solidarity member on our plenary panel.