On Reading Gaps and Book Recommendations

I have been racing through the pages of Carl Deuker’s Gym Candy this weekend.  Finding every moment I can to read it.  Not because I love football books, anyone who knows me would probably laugh at that considering I don’t watch any football, ever.  Not because I  am under a special deadline to get it done.  The book is mine, I can read it as slowly as I would like to.  No, because the book was recommended to me by an 8th grader and I know just the right 7th grader to pass it to.  But first I want to read it, to add it to my repertoire of books my resistant readers may embrace.  And so this weekend, Gym Candy and I have been spending a lot of time together and it has led me to contemplate my own reading identity.

I  speak and write (and even think) a lot about how our classroom needs to be filled with books and children eager to read them. How one of my biggest missions in teaching is to help students fall in love with reading or remain there.  How we must create interest for many genres of books and then expose students to them through informal book talks or reading displays.  But what about our own reading identities?  Do we give as much thought to what we read, what we share, what we embrace, as we do that of the students?  Are we branching out and putting ourselves through the very motions that we try to put our students through?

I know I am not.  If you were to look at my reading display you would notice a pattern; science fiction, fantasy (but not too fantasy-y) and a great realistic fiction story now and then.  Mostly new books, geared at 12 plus in ages.  Even though I should be reading for the Global Read Aloud.  It seems as if I have found myself as a reader a long time ago and firmly stayed there, happy with the destination. Yet, within my own reading preferences I am creating limitations in how I teach.  I am missing out on entire genres of books that some of my students might fall in love with.  I am becoming less of a book lover and more of a genre lover.  And that is a problem.

When we only read for ourselves, even with a mission to find great books to share with students, we forget to study our own habits.  We forget to see the book gaps, which many have blogged about before, and how these gaps affect us as book recommenders.  If you had asked me to recommend a great sports book, my list would have had  2 on them, now it has 3, and that is still not enough.

So when my former student told me to read Gym Candy he only had to mention it twice.  Not because I owed it to him and our continuing book conversations.  Not because this would probably be the only way he would ever recommend another book to me.  While both important, these were not the biggest reasons, but instead because it allowed me to make an investment in the students I have yet to reach.  In the students who need my experience with books to guide them.  For the students who don’t know what to read and hate the very genres I love.

So I pledge to read more widely.  I pledge to ask more questions.  I pledge to not judge and I pledge to recognize my own deficiencies in order to inspire my students to do the same.  There are entire genres I would never read on my own where  I would be just fine as a reader, but I would not be fine as a teacher.  So as I finish the pages of this book, I look forward to the next challenge and not to the comfort of the books I would naturally read.  Who knows; there may be an entire genre for me to fall in love with.  I just need to find it first.

If you like what you read here, consider reading my book Passionate Learners – How to Engage and Empower Your Students.  Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.

 

 

Filed under: being a teacher, Literacy, Reading