In this pandemic year, nine Partners in Literacy reading volunteers shared reading remotely with nineteen 8th graders. Seven of these kids were students who remained at home when their classmates returned to school. The rest were chosen by their teacher to read with a volunteer because they were nonflluent readers or because their voices were never heard in school.
We read the required books together: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, The YA Omnivore’s’ Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. We read in small groups of two’s, three’s or four’s in separate Google Meets breakout rooms. Volunteers situated the books in a context, worked towards finding meanings for unknown words, and found hooks that would connect the student to the readings. For the last 5 to 10 minutes, all the groups returned to the main Google Meets room. Each student shared with all the others what had been discussed in their small group.
It was far from perfect. Most the time, our overworked host teacher was managing us and teaching to a class of in-person students at the same time. For the volunteers, there were long minutes in the Google waiting room while the kids grabbed their computers and signed in. If the the students were in-person at school, the hallways where they set up their computers to talk with us, were often noisy with other classes passing. There were technical failures of every imaginable kind. Still every week the volunteers were there- believing in the kids and the power of good books.
Volunteers never assumed the kids were up to date on their assignments, because they mostly were not. The volunteers started by every session by reminding the kids what book was assigned, where they could get it, if they had not yet, and how far they were supposed to read. After that, the volunteers made sure the kids had looked at Schoology, where all their assignments lived.
Not all, but most of the kids were pretty clear about hating school and reading. K, I was told, mostly slept in class. G. had done her best for all her years in school to never read aloud, because she stumbled over most of the words. M. had his own interests which did not include the assigned reading. He was a genius at avoidance and had a stunning vocabulary.
You might think that this school had a population of at-risk families. Mostly not. This is a school of affluent white kids and just a smattering of Brown or Black kids. We had all three.
Yesterday was our last meeting. It was on To Kill A Mockingbird. All of the kids who were there liked that book the best of the three. They liked all the twists that kept them “intrigued”. They said they loved the tenseness of the trial scene. M. said that he liked the image in the trial that “even the babies were quiet at their mothers’ breasts”. Tom Robinson’s death was tragic, but no one was surprised.
Actually though, they had not quite finished the book. The assignment of the last three chapters had not been given. They did not yet know that Scout would need to walk home late at night from the all school pagent without her shoes dressed in a ham costume made of chicken wire. Not did our students know that as promised on the first page, Jem’s arm was broken and he was knocked unconscience. Our student readers did not know that some man chased the two children with a knife with the intention of killing them. The students had no predictions, because how coud they have guessed that all those small slow stories in the first half of the book were preparing the reader for Arthur Radley (B00) to step in as the hero of that night. Our 8th graders could never have guessed that Atticus, Jem’s and Scout’s father and Heck Tate, the sheriff, contrary to everything else in the book, agreed that “It was a sin to kill a mockingbird”.
I asked the group, “Will you finish the book?” All of them said, “probably not”. After all is was just a school assignment and summer was here.
They had said that they liked the book. That was relative to other assigned books. In a summer of free time, they did not like it enough to read the last three chapters.
Can it be that great books have become only something that teachers assign and kids only read it when they have to, when there is some judgement of approval for following the assignment and some consequence for not?