Some Stories. About Stories.

 One of my greatest passions and joys is matchmaking between people and the books that will get them reading and speak to their souls. Sharing stories, both real and fictional, is transformative. It’s how we connect to one another. It’s how we travel to places we can’t afford. It’s how we learn about people we’ve yet to meet. It’s how we pass on history. It’s how we explore religion. The universe is made up of atoms and molecules, but it is also built on stories. I don’t believe that there are nonreaders; there are just some people who haven’t met the right book yet. I did not invent this idea, but it is a core philosophy I live by in my classroom and in my life on a daily basis.

One of my favorite eligible reader stories was a boy who came into my intervention class with low confidence in his skills and in his ability to grow them and put them to work. He told me on the first day that he was not a reader and would never be one, so I might as well not bother. Ah! I love a good challenge. It became my mission each day to discover about him all of the things he would let me in order to find my way in. We started each class period with choice reading, and he’d refuse to even “play the game” and have a book at his desk. He preferred sleeping, wall staring, trips to the bathroom- anything to get him out of this 10 minutes of torture. As I learned more about what made him tick, I’d make suggestions. He’d respectfully decline. One day, I had an idea. I brought a book to his desk and sat next to him. 

“Listen, Mrs. Ferri, we’ve talked about this. It’s not going to happen.” He at least had the respect at this point to look at me with pity, and that’s when I knew that we had room to move.  I told him that I was clear on his stance, but I wasn’t going to suggest that he read the book. He stared back at me with one eyebrow raised as I asked him to get out his notebook and a pencil, but he reluctantly obliged. He didn’t hate me, after all, he just thought he hated reading. I asked him if he would help me with a project. Instead of reading, I was wondering if he would flip through the pages and count how many cuss words he could find in the book in ten minutes. He was suspicious, of course, but he appreciated this alternative to his most despised activity. For a week straight, he’d come in, find “his” book on the shelf, and get to work on making his tally marks. By about day seven or eight, he let his curiosity get the better of him and started to look at the sentences that contained these forbidden words. He asked me what in the world this dang book was about, and I just shrugged my shoulders. By week two, he was back at page one, the tallies had become a casualty, and he was deeply involved in Andrew Smith’s world in Winger. He didn’t ever check it out or take it home, but he finished that damn (that’s a tally) book by the end of the year!

This only fueled my fire when I met another self-proclaimed non reader a few years later. We couldn’t have been more different as people (which led her to ask me when I chopped off my hair to donate it why I would ever get “that rich white lady haircut”… I digress), but we bonded more quickly than you would think over a few weird things we had in common. This bought me absolutely zero capital, however, when it came to reading. I could tell that she was one where any pushing would actually send her in a direction away from reading instead of toward it, so I didn’t push. Instead, I’d just cruise by her desk every day during reading time for a chat, and I’d leave a different book I thought she might like on her desk in my wake. More often than not, the books would go completely untouched, and I’d end up reshelving them at the end of the hour. Until, that is, the day she met The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. I’m not sure if it was because the movie had just come out with a lot of hype or if it was because the girl on the cover looked like her or if it was because I had finally just made her so worn down and tired that there was no other choice, but she started to read it. I couldn’t jump for joy when I saw this; coming on too strong with excitement would’ve scared her off. When she asked me a few days in if she could leave the book under her desk to make it easier to find each day, I played it cool and gave her a casual yes. When she left that day, I did a happy dance worth rolling the cameras back to see. This went on for a few weeks until one day when she slammed the book down, told me she would not continue reading it, and asked to go to the bathroom. When she came back from her break, I approached her to see if I could figure out where we went wrong. “It’s just this book, Mrs. Ferri. It makes me so angry. It’s hard. It’s not hard for me to read the words, really, it’s hard to hear what they have to say. Why do people treat each other this way?” We talked about how she had found a good book soulmate because it stirred up her emotions and made her feel things and think about life, even when it was hard. She took a break for a few days but found her way back. She ended up loving the book and made sure all copies were checked out of my classroom library for the rest of the semester. Score another one for Angie Thomas!

A final eligible reader that comes to mind to complete this trifecta was just a few years ago. He was in a tough class, one of the toughest hours I’ve had in my career, and we had a tough start together. We both had to put in a lot of work and a lot of faith to get our relationship to a good place, but we got there. When it came time for 4th quarter, he was excited to hear that he would have book club choices. This excitement died quickly, however, when he realized that choosing involved actually having to read a book. It didn’t matter how many choices there were or what the books were because he didn’t want to read any of them. He wanted to banter with me and his classmates, insult us all in Spanish, eat Takis, and have me roast him in the process. Many of his classmates felt the same way. On preview and ranking day, they started to play a “game” with me in which they each asked me to “guess” which book was their favorite choice. They really just wanted to me to pick for them because many were still disinterested and totally lost when it came to reading. Not my finest teaching moment. I played along, and sure enough, my game recommendations heavily influenced their rankings. The eligible reader star of this story ended up with Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt. It chose him because it’s a shorter book with simpler vocabulary but a plot that draws readers in with both its heartwarming and tragic nature. I’d never met someone who didn’t love it, and this book has brought so many to reading. 

To his credit, I asked our fair reader to give this book a fair shot, and he did. Guess what? Oh, you already know he liked it. This story would not be very fun if he didn’t. He didn’t just like it, though, he LOVED it. He bragged to his reading intervention teacher about reading it and took a quiz on it to earn credit for her class. He was TICKED that the quiz spoiled the end, which he had not read just yet (oops). He then spent his next few class periods finishing the book (double oops) and got a pass from his teacher to come debrief with me because he simply couldn’t wait until our class together 7th hour. He thanked me for the book (which I told him he should direct to Schmidt for his literary excellence) and shared with me that it was the first chapter book he had ever read by himself. He was an 8th grader. 

A few weeks later, he once again entered my room in the middle of a class that was not his and interrupted. Before I could scold him, he proudly handed me a stack of books he’d purchased for my classroom library from the book fair. You know, so I could “give other kids some books they might like, too.” He must have brought a cloud of dust in with him also because I just couldn’t keep my eyes dry until a few minutes after he left. It was a moment. In his advice letter to my students for the next year, he encouraged them all to get their hands on Orbiting Jupiter and any other books I recommended because I might just know what I’m talking about. Some of my students who loved that book through book club this year told me that there’s a sequel coming out in August, and you better believe it’s already been preordered on Amazon to send to my special reader at the high school this fall.

These three stories have some really important things in common. No, it’s not that I’m a great teacher or a reading magician (although, again, I do fancy myself a budding matchmaker and will forever be reading YA and working toward that end). For every success story, there’s another kid out there who I didn’t infiltrate just yet, but I hope that I can at least start to lay the groundwork, change some attitudes, and generate excitement and interest around books. What I hope each of these stories illustrates is both the power of books and the power of stories. I’ve seen it clearly time and time again with my own eyes, and I hope that putting these things into your eyes and hearts will help you to “see” even a fragment of the amazing things I get to see and be a part of every day.

You know what else these three books have in common? They could all be removed from my classroom library and the hands of students if the proposed Francis Howell Board of Education Policy 6310 is voted in. These books and many others, based on the guidelines presented. It would gut our libraries, our classroom libraries, our teaching, and our students’ opportunities. The high-interest collections we’ve been working to cultivate for years with donations from parents and students and whatever budget we could scrape together and, for many of us, our own money, could all be gone in a 30 second vote by people who’ve never read any of them. It would be devastating. Oh, the places we’d go and the things we could learn would be cut drastically. Do I think every book in my classroom library is for every student? Of course not! My students have made sure I know that, and I hope that learning came out in my stories. That’s precisely why I need a rich library full of different stories, though.  Each student will come to my classroom looking for something different. I won’t get them all, but I sure will try with each and every one of them to start making those perfect matches and to hopefully help them to learn how to pick their own. Students don’t learn the best lessons by taking away choices; they learn best when we can give them diversity in choice and teach them how to make the best decisions for what they need. When we limit the stories we put into kids’ hands, we limit the stories they can write for themselves. 

Please help us preserve our stories.

Love, An Avid Reader, A Mom to Lovers of Stories, and An Aspiring Book Matchmaker