Mind The Gap
Last week, during a professional learning session with a group of middle school teachers, we provided copies of the inspiring resource Passionate Readers by Pernille Ripp. As we read the section “Teacher as a Reading Role Model,” one question that made us stop and think was, “What are your own book gaps? What do you not read?” We circled around that question for quite a while, pondering how our own reading preferences may inadvertently cause us to be gate-keepers when building classroom libraries, recommending books, and presenting book talks. We realized we all have preferences and gaps and if we don’t recognize and address them, we are unintentionally narrowing the impact we have on readers and by missing opportunities of getting the right book into the hands of a student because we are missing entire genres.
Pernille Ripp believes, and we agree, that if we don’t acknowledge our own book gaps, we become more of a genre lover than a book lover. This is okay in our own reading lives but not as a teacher of readers.
As a team, we identified our own reading gaps and tried to address them:
Jill: I naturally gravitate toward realistic fiction and historical fiction. I love to read books, both (more…)
In this wonderful novel, we meet Timothy, a young man who is currently on one year house arrest for stealing a credit card. Part of his probation requirements is that he has to write in a journal (which is the book) to show his remorse to the courts. Timothy begrudgingly writes and starts to open up and tell his story causing the reader to quickly realize there is more to him than being a young offender. As his story unfolds, we discover he stole the card to pay for his baby brother’s medication. House Arrest takes the reader on an emotional journey as we experience what it is like for the working poor to try to survive and we are reminded how important it is to care and trust one another.
We all remember a moment from our childhoods where we started to doubt something we had never questioned before…we also remember how disruptive it was as our minds started unraveling and challenging what we had previously thought. In The Lines We Cross by Randa Abdel-Fattah, she illustrates this beautifully through a story involving two teenagers around divisive topics such as refugees, religion, and race.