BV is a very big boy, almost as tall as me and, well, big. He’s the one who, when I tell him to stop talking, says, “I wasn’t talking! Gosh. Did you just give me a strike? I hate this class.”
He’s had a hard time getting into sustained silent reading this year, mostly opting for the magazines I have in my classroom for students who don’t bring their library books with them. This is fine by me, as it is supported by Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide.
Actually, BV has had a hard time getting into anything academic this year in my class, so even his opting to leaf through a magazine–“I just look at the pictures,” I heard him say to someone recently–is a step in the right direction, especially since on two consecutive days he’s come to me to ask if I could get additional issues of the National Geographic (and no, the several issues I already have don’t have any naked people in them….as won’t any I add to my collection).
And then today he came to me during the reading time and said, “Mr. Jacobs, I found a mistake.” His face showed a mixture of pride and uncertainty as he pointed to a National Geographic photo caption about China’s Hunan Province.
“Good catch,” I said. “It looks like it should be human, doesn’t it? But actually, that’s correct–it’s the name of the province.” (Then I told him about the Hunan restaurant I could barely bring myself to look into as I walked past years ago when I lived in the city, for fear of cannibalistic evidence.)
A victory in two ways, I say: He willingly read in spite of himself, and he just learned something.
