6 Moments: Sharing Bookish Joy

 

A couple of days ago I saw this post in a Facebook group for middle school teachers: “Been a rough week. I need some positivity. Tell me 1 thing about your job as a middle school educator that you really love.” In one hour, there were 47 comments, and only one of them was negative (“Nothing”). I was impressed that the poster had the impulse to reach out for other people’s joy rather than vent, and that so many others were so ready to share their joy.

That set me to looking for the moments that gave me joy. One of the things I really love is sharing books with students and seeing them grow in their independent reading lives. Here are some of those moments from this week:

(1) A 6th grader waved me over during independent reading time because she was so excited she’d discovered a comment from the author of the class novel we’re reading (A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park) on the back of the independent book she was reading (Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes). It was so fun to see that student experience the coolness of realizing authors read each other’s books, and recognizing known authors in other contexts. 

(2) A 7th grader is noticing interesting words in her independent reading book A Wind in the Door. I asked her for an example, and she flipped a couple of pages and landed on the word aeon. She said, “I had to look it up, and then the sentence made a lot more sense.” I pointed out that there is a chain of Japanese malls named Aeon. She giggled and said, “Oh, yeah! Maybe because they want you to come in and shop for a very long time!”
 
(3) Another 7th grader, in his 3rd language, is reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Caine. He said, “We do what she says in class.” I asked him to tell me more, and he expanded, “The way we discuss things with partners and in small groups.” So he’s not only sticking with this pretty advanced nonfiction book (last year he’d read nothing but fantasy), he’s understanding it and connecting it to his life! 

(4) I recently added Room to Dream, the third book in Kelly Yang’s Front Desk series, to my classroom library, and there’s a waiting list to read it! When the first reader finished it on Friday, I got to pass it on to the next reader. 

(5) A student who's usually an avid reader has been starting and abandoning books one after another for a few weeks. I'd been trusting what I’ve read about the ebbs and flows of reading passion, and telling her not to worry, she’ll find one. This week she started and finished Pay Attention, Carter Jones by Gary Schmidt. (Which I then turned around and recommended to a student who’d just finished Three Keys and had to wait for Room to Dream.)

(6) Another student is such a voracious reader that she’s already devoured most of the books in my classroom library that she’s interested in—mostly historical fiction. A few weeks ago I read my first Jennifer Nielsen book, A Night Divided, and this student snatched it up as soon as I book talked it. A couple of days later, she asked me if there were more books in the series. I said no, but the author has written a number of other historical fiction books set in Europe. She got quite excited. But it takes a while for ordered English books to make it to Japan. In the wait period, I remembered that on my high school shelf I had Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray about a Lithuanian family sent to Siberia by the Soviets. She finished that this week and was delighted to find out there were a couple more Sepetys books in our online library.

October can be a teaching slog—our grand vision at the beginning of a shiny new school year is beginning to fray at the edges, and holiday cheer is not yet on the horizon. It’s the messy middle. It’s a great time to remember to keep my antennae out for moments of connection, epiphany, growth—even the small ones. Because I generally find what I’m looking for—whether it’s reasons to be frustrated or reasons to be encouraged. Then tell somebody. Because things shared multiply—like iris bulbs. And whether you’re dancing or struggling through October, who ever said "no" to a little more joy?

How about you? How is your October going? What is something that gives you joy? Who have you shared it with?