{"id":2295,"date":"2012-10-04T16:51:04","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T20:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=2295"},"modified":"2012-10-04T16:51:04","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T20:51:04","slug":"stealth-reading-in-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/birthmarked\/stealth-reading-in-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Stealth Reading in School"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Ms. O'Brien, Room 204<\/p><\/div>\n

One of my favorite things about teaching was Independent Reading.\u00a0 No matter what grade I was teaching, or which level, whether it was regular English or Creative Writing or Intro to Journalism and Broadcasting, we would stop for half an hour every Friday to read in silence. The students would bring books of their own choice and we\u2019d just kick back. The only thing you\u2019d hear was pages turning.\u00a0 Sometimes we\u2019d get to the end of our thirty minutes and take a vote to see if we should keep reading for another ten.\u00a0 Sometimes, after that, we\u2019d take another vote.<\/p>\n

Please don’t tell me that teenagers don\u2019t like to read. \u00a0They might not like to read what’s required, but whose fault is that?<\/p>\n

I taught one \u201cStandard\u201d level 9th<\/sup> grade English class with 12 boys and 2 girls.\u00a0 Some of the kids had never finished reading a book in their entire lives.\u00a0 We decided to do an experiment and read for half an hour every day for four weeks, just independent reading of books the students chose themselves: Crash, Twilight, Scar Tissue, Bleachers, Flipped, Calvin and Hobbes, Eragon<\/em>, you name it.\u00a0 At the end of four weeks, most of the kids were reading with a fluency and comprehension they\u2019d never had before.\u00a0 Some liked reading and felt successful at it for the first time ever, at age 14.\u00a0 I can\u2019t remember what I skipped in the curriculum to make it happen, but was it worth it? I\u2019d say so.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t it be nice if we let teachers let students have what they really need?\u00a0 They\u2019ll suck in what they want to learn like Slurpees up big straws.<\/p>\n

\"\"Today on the Promised\u00a0<\/em>Blog Tour, Emily at The Ninja Librarian<\/a> asks me how my teaching influenced my writing, and whether I thought of my novels for \u201creading across the curriculum\u201d when I was writing them. \u00a0I’ll tell you now, I learned far more as a teacher than I ever \u00a0taught.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite things about teaching was Independent Reading.\u00a0 No matter what grade I was teaching, or which level, whether it was regular English or Creative Writing or Intro to Journalism and Broadcasting, we would stop for half an hour every Friday to read in silence. The students would bring books of their own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,147],"tags":[109,55],"class_list":["post-2295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthmarked","category-promised-2","tag-promised","tag-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2295"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2302,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295\/revisions\/2302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}