words, words, words

For the past three weeks, I have been counting down days, partly assuring myself I could make it that long until break (which is silly since it was right after a week off at Thanksgiving) and partly in a panic that I wouldn't get everything done at school in that amount of time.  This Monday, I was still grading rhetorical analysis essays.

I wasn't really in a panic about my on-level classes, but we are pertually behind where I want them to be in AP.  There are just more of them than me, and I can't get all I want done in a day and answer questions and scaffold for slower students at the same time.    I started out the year short twenty books of every single book we use and it took almost month and a half to get them in . . . So that was a month and a half of no homework, no outside reading.    Though there was much pulling, wheedling, cajoling, nagging, and downright forcing on my part and much angst on their part, we are officially caught up writing wise and only a bit behind  in what we should be reading.  I am excited that over break, they are to read the first chunk of The Poisonwood Bible.  When I first read it back in 01, I knew I wanted to teach it someday and the time has come.  

One of my big mental fights this semester has been this great hole in my students' vocabulary and general knowledge of history.  I have always pushed the idea that great literature is often a reaction to something a writer experiences or something going on in society, but that means one needs a bit of history.  My kids constantly say that they don't know what words mean when they skim answer choices in multiple choice or when we analyze a passage.  They are stymied that I don't need a dictionary. I am stymied because I am pretty sure I knew what those words meant when I was their age.  I am pretty st sure that my nine year old's vocabulary is as good as my juniors and seniors in AP.  And how, oh how, do they have so much blank space where knowledge of world history should be?  How did I know when I was their age?  I took the same classes they do.  And certainly they are encouraged to read more than my generation was thanks to Accelerated Reader programs.  But maybe, just maybe, that encourages quantity over quality. 

I did have a really good history teacher in highschool . . . though my English teachers were ineffectual at best.  More importantly, I read.  I came from a family who read.  We talked about what what we were reading.  We talked about current events.  Through my dad's job, he knew many people from other countries and we learned about those places when he brought them home to dinner.  My father doesn't have a prestigious job - he is an oil field chemist and we lived in Velma that was so urban and progressive that my class had 26 people in it. My mother who was a special Ed teacher before she became a home school mom read the Wall Street Journal every day.  For every book of fiction, she also devoured a book of essays, a biography, a history . . . 

As the semester wound down and parents saw that their child who has never had less than an A might be getting a B, the emails came flooding into my inbox. Invariably, they all boiled down to "what can I do to help my child be a faster reader, be a more sophisticated writer, and have a better vocabulary?"  And my answer is obviously to actually take note of all those suggestions I leave on the essays, but more importantly, read well written books.  And then we hit a wall because they often don't know what they should be reading, what constitutes well written. 

"What do you read, my lord" "Words, words, words."  

And so, I am making a list of those books that shaped me, shaped my my conscience, my world view, my essence.  They were fiction, but they piqued my interest enough that I then read non-fiction to further explore those ideas, places, and people.  To be sure, it will be an evolving list that includes authors and titles from now but also, more importantly, ones I discovered when I was sixteen and seventeen.  It is a wide and disparate list of genres and names, but perhaps it is a starting place.  Perhaps a student will fall in love with Bojalian or Kingsolver or Uris.  Perhaps the words will be seared into their minds and souls and leave a more important mark than just a bigger vocabulary.

If you have suggestions for this Rucker Reads list, be it classics or contemporary, please share.