Teachers are Readers Too
We should be bragging more about our reading stats
A lesson to teach: Show Off What You Are Reading
I am not a humble person. While perhaps that is a personal problem I should work on, there is one instance where bragging is always appropriate: Telling my students how many books I’ve read.
A few years ago, several teachers at my school got together and discussed how we could promote reading. One idea was for every teacher to post a sign by our classroom door about our current read and our “just finished” read.1
Here is a sign if you want your own. Run it through the laminator so you can write on it with a dry-erase marker.
I love the concept of the sign, but the format didn’t work for me because I’m often reading several books at once and also I want to show off all the books I’d read over the school year. Hence the sticky notes.
I once saw a social media post of a teacher who prints out an image of the cover of the book she’s currently reading and tapes the picture to her classroom door once she’s finished. That is obviously WAY cooler than my haphazard sticky notes, but I don’t know if that is an approved use of the one secret color copy machine in our school.
Oh! The maven of the school’s color copy machine reads this newsletter! Lmk, friend.
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Not only should we teachers brag about all the books we are reading and have read, but we should also…
Bring books into the classroom for students to borrow, read, and see. Books (especially picture books!) make for excellent classroom decor.
Reference reading, book clubs, and how we share books with our fellow teacher-friends.
Ask students what they are reading and what their favorite books are.
Connect what students are learning in class to books. For example, when I gave my students this assignment, I also brought in and waved around this book and told the students how the assignment was inspired and informed by the book.
Read aloud to students. Even high school and middle school students!
In her Substack, Lauren Brown on Education, Lauren writes beautifully about the power of reading aloud to her history students. I was nodding my head along to every sentence she wrote. Here it is:
A book to read: East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
I moved that lone sticky note on my chart down to my “finished” section right after taking the picture (and I added three more! I’m currently listening to this one and reading this one and this one).
My friend/teacher-next-door and I were talking about John Steinbeck the other day and how I’d never read GRAPES OF WRATH and she said EAST OF EDEN is better and handed me her copy, which I promptly stuck in the corner of my class for a month and forgot about and then finally read it.
And I loved it!
Set (of course) in California during the end of the 19th century, it’s the story of two families2 with lots of Adam-and-Eve, Cain-and-Abel vibes. The main antagonist is a devil-woman who kills her parents, steals from everyone, runs a whorehouse, and plans decade-long sinister take-downs of her supposed friends and lovers. So that’s fun.
My favorite character is Lee. When the aforementioned baddie shoots her loving husband and abandons her baby twins, Lee is the man who steps in to raise the boys, run the house, and tend to the wounded husband.
Lee is Chinese-American. When another character asks Lee why he speaks “pidgin,” the following exchange takes place:
Lee ginned. “Me talkee Chinese talk,” he said
“Well, I guess you have your reasons. And it’s not my affair. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t believe it, Lee.”
Lee looked at him…man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.”
Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me.”
Lee said, “I know it’s hard to believe, but…If I should go up to a lady or a gentleman, for instance, and speak as I am doing now, I wouldn’t be understood.”
“Why not?”
“Pidgin they expect, and pigdin they’ll listen to. But English from me they don’t listen to, and so they don’t understand it.”
This literary technique/plot device/character trait, of a minority group of people pretending not to speak what White folks at the time considered “proper English,” was at the center of Percival Everett’s book JAMES. Ya know, the Pulitzer Prize winner that everyone and their teacher read last year?3
JAMES, a HUCK FINN retelling was revered as a code-switching masterpiece, but I had no idea that Percival Everett was possibly inspired by Steinbeck’s work as well.
Steinbeck wrote the scene above seventy years ago, before “code-switching” was a phrase. Steinbeck and Everett both give the same reasons why James and Lee chose to speak one way amongst themselves another way among White folks. The reasoning in JAMES leans a bit heavier on the self-protection reason, but I think Steinbeck’s writing about expectation bias is interesting (not to mention forward thinking) as well.
I’ve not read anything about Everett being inspired by Steinbeck, but I assume that has to be the case…right? What do y’all think?
A place to explore: China!
EAST OF EDEN is set in Salinas Valley, California. It’s a place I’ve been before, back in another life. My first husband and I lived in Las Vegas and his family lived in San Jose. So that drive through Central California, Highway 101, and those golden hills of California are well known to me. The only other Steinbeck book I’ve read I bought in Monterey.4
But alas, I have no pictures. San Jose is firmly etched into my mind, but some of those little surrounding towns are fuzzy snapshot memories.
Hence, China.
My favorite EAST OF EDEN character had not been to China ever. He’d been born in America to parents who had come to America full of hope and found only hard work and horrible deaths.
So Lee, here is China:
Happy teaching, traveling, reading! See y’all next Sunday.
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Because teachers are so cool, and OF COURSE teenagers want to be just like their teachers. Duh.
One of them Steinbeck’s own family
CANNERY ROW, of course
THIS! YES! Why doesn't every school, every teacher, every principal encourage something like this? Maybe they are afraid of what it would reveal? Thanks so much, Jenna. (I also think you'll truly appreciate Karen Russell's latest, The Antidote, and the historical perspective.)
As soon as I started the "East of Eden" excerpt, my mind went immediately to "James!" That's really interesting. Everett definitely had to be inspired by Steinbeck, even subconsciously. :)
I love the caption about Sarah Winchester...definitely gonna go down a rabbit hole about her shortly. :)
I LOVE that you have all your current and finished reads on your classroom door!! That's such a neat way to connect with students and to show them that reading is something they can carry with them all their lives!!!