In Which Something Weird Happens in Reading Class

Sometimes getting kids to read is simply a matter of finding the right book.  I usually have one or two students who make miraculous strides in this area each year, but there are a lot more than normal this year.  A LOT.  Like, ten so far.  And we're only one-third of the way through the year.

The point of this is not to make myself sound like some amazing teacher.  I really didn't DO anything other than read a bunch of books and then pass them on to kids.  Sometimes I get lucky and something clicks.

But what happened today was unprecedented in all of human history.  Or at least in seventh grade history.  Some background...

I teach an elective class called Battle of the Books.  Students in the class read books that I have selected for them, take the Accelerated Reader tests over them, and earn points for their team.  Winning team gets a fabulous prize at the end of the trimester.  Trimester One just finished, and the class was split between kids who wanted to read every day all the time and kids who would rather eat bees than read a book.  Kinda challenging. 

One of the latter type of students barely read anything throughout the whole last trimester.  Today during first block, my partner-in-crime teaching colleague extraordinaire told me that she had to take away a book from him during math because he wouldn't stop reading.

"What?  No you didn't!" was my immediate response.

"Oh yes I did!"

"SHUUUUT. UUUUP."

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER!  WHAT IS HAPPENING?

So the students comes to my class before lunch.  With his book.  He wants to know if it is an AR book because he couldn't find it when he looked it up.  So I of course literally dropped everything to look it up.  Turned out it WAS an AR book (books with subtitles are often difficult to find in the system).  When I told him that it was worth 5 AR points, his eyes lit up.  "What?!"  he exclaimed.  "I have two more of these books!  And I love them!  That's gonna be, like, fifteen points!"

So third block rolls around at the end of the day and of course he's reading his book.  Almost done with it, by the way.  And then I notice something EVEN WEIRDER...two OTHER boys who would never have been caught dead reading a book last week WERE READING BOOKS!  I had to stop class to ask them what alien had switched their brains--but I wasn't mad at the alien because it was SO FREAKING AMAZING. 

And, I'm not gonna lie, it was QUIET.  Instead of causing chaos, kids wanted nothing more than to sit down with their respective noses in their respective books.  Even some of the other students noticed how different it was.  One of them said to me at the end of class, "It's like books are the new fidget spinners or something....look how focused they are!"

Ah friend...I hope with every fibre of my being that your words are true.  Because then my work here will be done.  At least for an hour or so.