Just, wow.

[maeve66]

I 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.

Comments

[mahogany.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this could be an example of kids that are excessively peer oriented, vs kids that have secure adult attachments. Is it possible that the children in the Oakland school were more peer oriented, in that they took take all of their cues from their peers, they look to their peers as their primary source of information and approval, and the opinions of their peers matter more than those of the adults in their lives? It sounds as though the children in your new school still look to the adults in their lives as their primary compass. Could this be one of the reasons that the children are more willing to embrace the social and home environments that encourage literacy?