During the last week of school, I was approached in the
hallway by Lucy, an 11th grade student at Wagner. She said, “Annie! Yesterday I went to my sister’s college
graduation and it was amazing!” I asked
her why it was amazing and she said, “it was so inspiring! I want to go to
college now.” (Mind you, this is a
student whose transcript does not reflect that of a student who is on a
college-ready path).
I asked her to tell me more, and she mentioned that she
LOVED the keynote speaker, a man named Andrew Cuomo. I asked her, smugly, if she knew who he was. She said, “he’s the Governor of New York.” Then
she admitted, quietly, that she didn’t know who he was when he started
speaking. She “Googled” his name while he
was speaking, she read his entire biography off of her phone. She told me with excitement that he was from
Queens and went to Father Molloy for high school, which is where her neighbor
goes to school. She went on and on,
describing to me the details and struggles of his life, all of which she read
as a result of her quick search on her phone.
This lead me to think…
What if I had been a teenage girl, sitting in the audience,
listening to a speaker who inspired me?
What steps would I have taken to find out about the speaker’s background
or biography? Would I have simply asked
the adults to fill me in? Probably. Would they have been able to provide me with
the same information that this Lucy had found on her Blackberry? Very unlikely.
When I was a youth (or a “ute” as Alma would say), if I
wanted to read about something I didn’t know about, I had to put in a
completely different type of effort. It might be that my father and mother,
both prolific readers, had a book or magazine around about a subject. But if they didn’t then I would have to seek
out an expert or go to the library to learn more. There was no Google, let alone the internet,
and so I was my own search engine.
The world of reading has changed. Adults (especially teachers) love to say that
kids today don’t read. But anecdotal
evidence all around us suggests that our kids READ ALL THE TIME. It’s just a
different type of reading. A child like
Lucy might not be reading Anna Karenina
during her summer break, but she is engaging in an important and more immediately
useful type of literacy, and she’s probably doing it more often then we
imagine.
In developing the purple period intervention for the ninth
graders, I decided upon a scholarly reading workshop. The interaction I had with Lucy helped me to
come to this decision. The scholarly reading workshop, in its ideal form, is a
bridge for our student readers. A bridge
from a reading world that could be described as a largely self-centered,
sporadic scans of text to one of scholarly reading – reading that will make
them more informed, more curious, and more capable of the inquiry process.
This week I heard Terry Born, Wagner’s founding principal,
say that we have to provide youth with a chance to be committed to
something.
If that is true, then the purpose of the scholarly reading
workshop is to bestow in every ninth grader a commitment to reading. Being a committed reader, indeed, might be
the first step to being a life-long learner.
