The final days of any school year are usually filled with a mixture of relief, excitement, and expectation. Students are pumped to finish their exams, turn in their books, and retreat through the school doors into a promising three month sojourn of staying up late, sleeping in, catching up on their YouTube subscriptions, and producing endless Snapchat stories that will immortalize their teen-angst in cyberspace for much longer than many of them realize. With all this budding freedom at their fingertips, the next book my students are going to read this summer is the farthest thing from any of their minds.

In the past, I would always end each school year with a smile and a strong sense of satisfaction because I knew that the books I had assigned throughout the year were rich with history, shared cultural experiences, and academic merit that would prepare them for the rigorous reading expectations of college.

How could this type of exposure and expected rigor ever harm my student’s academic progress? Well, I knew many of my students were reading and enjoying the books I had prescribed, but I also observed that their innate desire to read and seek knowledge outside of the assigned reading was low, and to my chagrin, many students would omit to only reading sections of the book that they knew they would be tested on. For an avid reader and a lover of literature, this realization was heartbreaking.

I think the unsettling reality that my students were not really becoming life-long readers when they left my classroom had suddenly burrowed in deep, and I knew I would have to make a change. Continue reading →