Drawing Him In
What I Believe Made the Difference

I teach 7th grade English Language Arts. Each day we have 20 minutes of sustained silent reading, SSR. One year, I had a student named Terry who ,from day one, would come into my class and sit, refusing to read. When I asked him why, he would respond with, “There’s nothing good to read at our school.” I said, “Really? In the whole library?” He told me that the things he read were inappropriate for school because they were so dark and gruesome. I took this as a challenge. We went to the library and I pulled all sorts of CSI and Unsolved Mysteries type of books. These were true stories of murder and such. Really gruesome stuff! But, Terry just looked at them and shrugged. He was not interested, while the other students swarmed the books I pulled and checked them out.
One day, I had an idea. I remembered some books that my son had loved when he was that age. They were science fiction, about an underground prison, called The Furnace. I brought the first book of the 4 book series in and started reading the first few pages aloud for the class. Then I handed it to Terry. Lo and behold, he kept reading! He devoured that book over the next week and asked for more. He came to class excited to read and to tell me about the book. I ordered more copies and began reading it myself and Terry kept recommending it to others. By the end of the school year, he not only read the entire series, but found that the author had another series of books that he wanted to read. So, I ordered them, too.
Terry was my biggest success story of that year. My whole goal as an English teacher is to share my love of reading with my students and get them to love reading also. It took a little time, but I kept learning more and more about Terry, his likes and dislikes. But I also proved to him that I was not going to give up. This I believe, is what a good teacher does. A good teacher gets to know her students, even the toughest ones. By doing this with Terry, I took a boy who was checked out and drew him in.
