Category Archives: success
Reading Under the Cottonwood Trees
Reluctant readers. Reticent readers. Struggling readers. Non-readers. The I-hate-to-read kids.
Call them what you will, these are the kids I work with every day. Getting them to read anything is one tough job—sort of like saying, “You may choose. Which would you prefer: to have your leg amputated or to have a root canal?”
My last class of the day, reading intervention, is my smallest. I have six students, all of whom have varying degrees of antipathy toward the written word. J-Boy, in particular, despises books. Every time I ask him to read for me, he says no.
J-Boy’s negativity casts a pall over the class, like yesterday’s gloomy weather, with rain falling from morning to night. Today, however, was bright and sunny with scarcely a cloud in the sky. During reading intervention, I looked wistfully out the window at the little courtyard behind the building and thought: I’d like to be there instead of here. Maybe I could take J-Boy outside to read.
“I need you to read for me, please,” I said to J-Boy, shaking myself out of my reverie.
“No.”
“Don’t argue with me. Just get your book and let’s read.”
“Can we go outside?”
“Yes.”
J-Boy’s attitude changed immediately. His look of disgust changed to delight as he grabbed his book and almost ran to the door.
V-Boy (another reluctant reader, who is in my language arts class earlier in the day) happened to be in my room doing some make-up work. “Can I go too?”
“Sure.”
So the three of us went outside to the courtyard and sat at a picnic table in the shade of some cottonwood trees. The boys took turns reading aloud to me from an Accelerated Reader book about snakes.
“Let’s finish this book tomorrow,” I said, “and then you can take the AR test on it.”
“Me too?” asked V-Boy?
“Yes, you too.” (Later, I cleared it with his last-period teacher.)
All three of us can hardly wait to read under the cottonwood trees again.
Magical Mystical Teacher 