I Didn't Get Stars, Points, Pizzas or Parties for Reading!

I'm a reader.
I've always been a reader.
No one paid me to read.
No one bribed me to read.
I didn't get stars, points, pizzas or parties for reading.


How did I possibly learn to read ?

My dad read books. (But he didn't read directions, ever, for anything )
My dad also was a story teller,he told us made up stories, true stories, and was  a poetry reader, James Whitcomb Riley (poet laureate of Indiana ) was read often in our house... Little Orphant Annie, The Bear Story, Raggedy Man, I still recite these by heart.
My mom had us read recipes, write grocery lists, we always had pencils, crayons and paper.
I don't even remember not having a library card, perhaps it was issued with my birth certificate.
Words, spoken, written & read were important in our house.

My 1st grade teacher, (who was also my 2nd grade teacher...looping before looping was cool) read aloud to us everyday, more than once a day.

She didn't control what we checked out from the library,

Like cars? Get a car book.
Like biographies? Get one.
Heck get 7, get one of each.
Want to read the atlas? Do it.
How about a globe, can you read that? Yup!
Like the pictures in that book that is WAY too hard for a 1st grader?
So what, check it out and look at all of the pictures.

Ms. Hale taught me not to be a reading snob. Anything in print was ripe for the reading, chapter books, picture books, cereal boxes, directions, maps, comic books, joke books, fiction, non-fiction, road signs...whatever floats your boat.Love it or need it, there were reasons for reading.

I was only 6 years old and I've never forgotten it. It guided me as an elementary teacher.

Reading is personal.

Similar to  Joe Bower's recent blog posts about reading, Daddy I Want a Book Buck, is story from my sister.

Her daughter who is in middle school has a book club with some other girls that their moms started years ago.  The girls had chosen to read a trilogy by Deborah Ellis, beginning with The Breadwinner and moving on to Parvana's Journey. Sarah LOVED the books, devoured them and in fact shared her copy with my mom (her grandma) because she thought Gma would love it, too.

THEN, as she celebrated this wonderful book to her teacher, she was told it wouldn't count for her "points" that month. The lexile score was too low.

(neither mother nor daughter knew what a lexile score was, why would they?)

This knowledge of the low lexile score  made the girls question whether they should even bother to read the 3rd book since it didn't "count".

It has a happy ending...the girls (and their mom's) decided book club was for fun and to heck with the points.

What would I be like as  reader if I had been bribed to read?
What great books would I have missed out on because they were too easy or too hard as defined by an incentive program?
Would it have killed my love of reading?

Are you killing the love of reading?

Great book to help you ponder that: Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading & What You Can Do About It. by Kelly Gallagher

How Do Your Students Know You Are a Learner?

I often hear educators say they want their students to be "life-long learners" or "life-long readers".  When they say this to me I always ask them:
How do your students know you are a life-long learner? A reader? 

I've seen many examples of this as I've been in and out of classrooms over the past decade, but can't really remember any from my own years in school.

Here are two of  my favorite examples:

That moment when students find their teacher's blog! ( I LOVE this one.)
( I don't remember the teacher's name or even the school, I wish I did, it had such an impact on me.)

I happened to be in the classroom at one of the New Tech school's in Indiana when students randomly googled their teacher and came across his blog. They were reading each and every post like vultures! and were rapidly quoting it and firing off questions to the teacher.

"Wait, you are in college? I thought you already went to college, you are a teacher? You still go to college? Why do you go to college?"

"Hey, I think this story is about me, is it about me? You learned about teaching from me?"

"People write back to you on this thing? Who are these people? Teachers?" "Do you know them?"

WHAT an example of not only life-long learning, but sharing his learning! The discussion that followed about learning, blogging and sharing was incredible.

Here is another, I've shared this one before, but I just love it for modeling life-long reading...

Amy Blackburn (@zebramommy1 ) teaches at a high school that has what we called at the elementary school "DEAR" or drop everything and read time.  I think it is once a week, but it could be once each day.  The teachers are to join the students in reading and resist the urge to use those few minutes to clear their desk, grade, plan etc...! I always noticed that Amy always kept her current book spine out on her desk.. Many times when I stopped by her room she was chatting about that book with a student. Several students chose the books she chose, followed the authors she followed and had great conversations with her around literature or life events. I vividly remember her discussing Nineteen Minutes by Jody Picoult  with a group of students. This conversation dipped into school violence, suicide, tolerance, recovery...so many topics!  Amy teaches  Project Lead the Way courses, in Bio-Medical Science and as far as I could tell she reads mostly fiction.  I love the relationships she had with students that were developed over the love of reading in addition to the ones she developed over exploring science.

There are a million little subtle ways to share that you are a learner, most of the time this seems to be woven in to the side conversations we have in the hall with students about the weekend.
I wonder if anyone is deliberate in the attempt to model that they are a learner? When I was a classroom teacher, I wasn't deliberate, about it, although anyone who has taught with me knows I share a lot with my students, so I'm certain it happened in some small ways. I'm confident I've  modeled it for our own children, they see me read & discuss education pedagogy, they see the stacks of books all over our house, they hear their dad say over & over "Seriously, we should own stock in Amazon, what did you download now?"  They remember when I was working on my master's degree, watched me learn to knit using YouTube and the standard answer to most questions at our house is "You can figure that out" followed by "Google it".

So, how do your students know you are a life-long learner? Principals, how do your teachers know you are a lifelong learner? Please share!