Reading

Most high school librarians have to deal with a group we call "reluctant readers". These are kids who can read, sometimes very well, but choose not to read recreationally. Some choose not to even complete assigned reading. Of course, it's super tough for librarians and literature teachers and other bibliofiles to comprehend this, because reading is one of our favorite activities! It's kind of like the PE teacher trying to get me to care about basketball.

I'm not sure, but it's likely that I have a higher percentage of "reluctant" readers than most.
2 reasons:
1. My students speak 2 or 3 languages. Merely being able to spell in all of them is very difficult. Getting to the point where they can read on grade level in any of the languages is difficult. Choosing which language to read in is even more difficult.
2. For those of my students whose primary language is not Spanish, they have limited access to reading material of any kind. So Korean becomes the language of their parents and English becomes the language of homework, and Spanish becomes the language of friends. None of those activities involves a lot of reading.

But right now, guess what? We'd probably win the award for the highest number of students choosing to read. And they're all reading the same thing:
TWILIGHT
Some of my kids have never finished a book in any language. But they're picking up Twilight and reading it, cover to cover, as fast as they can. And they're coming in every day to tell me how many pages they've read (it's become bragging rights) and to talk about parts of the book. I've never connected with teens on this kind of literary level before. It's amazing. Of my 20 HS students, at least 10 of them are either reading the book right now, just finished the book, or want to read it over Christmas. (An additional 2 or 3 are listening to it on their Ipod, bc reading is still too tough for them or they couldn't find an English copy of the book.) Two other teachers are reading the books, too.
This is insanity!
Thanks Stephanie Meyer!