Hey – Ryan here with VARSITY
Quick question: how do you start your very first class of the year?
Here’s how I do it. I stand up and I look at the kids and they look at me and I’m quiet and I look at them and I say,
“Raise your hand if you… HATE… READING.”
You wouldn’t believe how many hands shot up into the air! I’m not surprised (and neither are you). almost all the hands shot up in the air. They all think that they hate reading and I said that they think that they hate reading…
So, I call on this one kid one time and I said, “You hate reading?”
“Oh, yeah I hate reading. Sir.”
“Okay great…” (well not great but you understand), “what do you like to do?”
“Well I love to play soccer.”
“Okay, do you watch soccer?”
“Oh yeah!”
“You have heroes in soccer?”
“Sure I do!”
Okay, who is your favorite soccer player?”
“Messi.”
So I go onto the computer and I pull up Messi’s Wikipedia page and I put it on the projector. I zoomed a little bit and I tell the student,
“Go up to the screen and read that first paragraph to the class.”
He looks at me kind of funny but he goes and he does it. He reads the first (paragraph) and he is so excited about what he is talking about, he starts to interject his own knowledge about Messi.
So…
“Okay, thank you. Have a seat.”
He sits down and I ask him in front of the class,
“Now, didn’t you hate reading that?”
and he says
“No I don’t, I love Messi! He is my hero!”
I said, “okay great, but you just read that to the class, you read the whole one or two paragraphs and you just said that you hated reading.”
“Well I didn’t hate reading that” he said.
“so, what do you mean?”
“I loved reading that. I love soccer!”
I said “okay.”
(With) some students, it clicked. Some didn’t. So, I clued them in. I said, “here is the deal – none of you hate reading. And if you say so, YOU ARE A LIAR! You read all the time! You read things on the television, you read your texts on your phone from all your friends, you read things on the computer, you read books for fun, but it’s just school, you read a lot, you read on the grocery store… You read so much – you don’t hate reading…
What I think you mean when you said that you hate reading is that you hate reading what the teacher tells you you have to read and then you have to report on.”
So many students shake their heads – I’ve done this so many times – so many students shake their hands and said, “yeah that’s the truth.”
I explained them, “Listen, the reason we have to do that, is we have a series of skills that we have to make sure that you can master and we can’t read a hundred and fifty books or a hundred and fifty stories for a hundred and fifty students to know that they can do that in a story that they like, so, we assign a certain set of stories and you read them and we know them and we can see if you can master the skills in those stories.
In addition to that, we might just find that you like to read something new, you might like a new genre, you might turn up that you like poetry when it’s presented as a poetry slam. So not only do you not hate reading but in these classes, you’ll grow in your interests – writing as well.
So next time you are in front of your students, you may consider starting off with a “negative” and asking them,
“Who hates reading?”
You may be surprised how you can turn that negative so quickly into a positive for your classroom!
This is Ryan from middleschoolEnglish.net. Have a great day. Bye.
Why do you like being in 4th grade? What is your favorite thing to do? Explain.
