Next Moves

As the summer draws to a close, I have begun reflecting on my summer of reading. The most striking feature was my failure to read one book for each day of summer. While I'm not into making excuses, I do think that the why's of this can inform classroom instruction.

So why?

Well, I was busy. There were two weeks when I was doing MIMI, which sucked up most of my spare time. Then there was the week I was recovering from getting my wisdom teeth out. Then, there were all the days I was called by a friend to do something that sounded exciting, so I set my books aside and did that other thing instead.

We tell our students that they need to be reading every single day so that they can become better readers, but we (for the most part) are not doing this. We hold our students to a different standard than we hold ourselves. How do I justify this for myself?

I don't really know. I do know that I read a lot -more than most people I know. But I don't read every day. And yet, I'm a better reader now than I was when I joined Goodreads in January 2011, and a better reader of children's books now than I was at the beginning of the summer. I think I'm realizing that the message doesn't need to be "Read every day," but maybe, "Read more than you did before." I made a goal to read 20 books in 2011 (I didn't count children's books, but I only read four or five of those that year) and I achieved it. This year, before I decided to read every day over the summer, I set a goal to read 60 books (counting most children's books). Next year, I'll probably set a goal to read even more. Or I might set a goal to read different genres than I'm used to reading, or to finally tackle David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which has sat on my bookshelf for close to two years.

When I think about teaching reading in the future, especially independent reading skills, I think I want to talk more about goal setting, and then how we set up a plan for getting there. When I set up my reading goal for this year, I originally only set it at 22 books. But then I realized that I was spending a fair amount of time with children's books as I prepared guided reading lessons, so perhaps those should count as well. However, children's books are much shorter, so if they count, then there should be more books in the goal. Hence 60 books. I think in the future, I'll set the goal even higher, knowing that I'll want to spend a fair amount of time reading children's literature.

Finally, I realized how important it is to continue reading books that are at your own reading level, not below. While I found a lot of joy in reading books meant for kids, I also missed the complexity of thought involved in adult books.

Moving forward, I think I want to keep reading and writing about children's books. I suppose this means I have to change the title of the blog, of course, but that's a small obstacle. I'm also forming a book club with some friends, so it will be nice to be practicing some of the skills I try to teach my own students. If anybody's out there, keep checking back to see more about the books I'm reading and my new endeavor with my book club.