For The Love of Reading Informational (and Fictional Text). A Shout Out to Valentine's Day with Graduate Students

The goal was simple. Tonight, we approached multiple texts from numerous angles and I have Nic Stone and Target's LOVE glasses to thank. The glasses were in packages of 6 and very inexpensive. As I handed them out I simply said,

• you must nurture a love of reading,
• you must share what you love to read,
• you must help them to love their worlds by giving them relevant reading material, 
• and you must remember, that most won't come to your class loving to read and write (your job is to offer them a lens to do so)

We started out the evening brainstorming world events that stopped us in our place and made us think deeper about this life thing. On the upper-age scale of the trajectory, I was interested in some of the news that held this generation's attention,

• Amanda Knox
• Casey Anthony
• 2016 Election
• Kobe's death
• Michael Phelps (then Lochte)
• Kevin Ware's broken leg against Duke
• Obama's Election
• Bin Laden,
• Janet Jackson's Super Bowl Goops
• Berlin Wall
• 9/11
• Sandy Hook
• Challenger Explosion
• Michael Jackson's death
• Hurricanes
• natural disasters
• Jeff Dulos
• 2012 Mayan Calendar
• Tsunamis
• Mike Tyson's Ear
• The Stamford Woman Who Lost her Face to a Chimpanzee
• Anita Hill Hearings (#MeToo)
• Y2K
• Sandy Hook

The fact that there are times in the world where "office cooler" talk occurs, and people simply are abuzz with global affairs (although these tend to be national) is what I wanted students to brainstorm. 

We did a short reading of Nic Stone's 1st chapter in Dear Martin, and I shared the ways I would chunk reading/ viewing/thinking experiences to introduced the novel (hence their glasses, and the ones I also put on the author). We looked at supplemental texts, commercials, Colin Kaepernick, Trayvon Martin, etc to bring a frame to the introduction.

We did a lot of reading about motivation and information text for the week, but I argue that it is the teacher's job to bring investigation, curiosity, possibility, and world connectivity to the reading experience. What good is learning if we can't help young people to make the connection to their personal lives? 

As for the glasses, I simply think they'd be great to have in the teacher drawer of every classroom for therapeutic reasons. "Hey, I can see you're"having a glum day. Why don't you put these on for a while to see if your day grows a lil' more lovely?" 

"Hey, I can sense the rage coming in with you. What if you wore these and spent the next 60 minutes thinking about what you love most and hope to accomplish in the next few years?"

Basically the glasses were 20 cents a piece. The possibilities are endless. I prefer an optimistic, hope-filled vision to a bitter, spiteful one.

And that was my Tuesday lesson.