Reading Time

At the high school where I teach, we have a daily reading time. Research suggests that kids who have the opportunity to read each day will do better in school, on tests, one of those things, I forget. Probably tests, because tests? My life.

I've been reading a book out loud to my students and trying to do voices. I'm not that good at it, but I'm trying. One of them told me the other day that she liked the voices that I did, that it helped her to tell the characters apart.

I got to the end of the book yesterday, the climax of this story, and had only two pages of the book left. So I start reading the two pages, and the lead character has to say goodbye to the people with whom he's lived and the place where he's spent his childhood, and I had a hard time reading the words.

I started to get choked up, and cry a little. My voice would not come out right, no matter how hard I concentrated on not sounding sad. And those kids? Those high school kids that apparently I as a teacher (or so the news says) am failing? Those kids looked at me and didn't laugh. They didn't look uncomfortably away.

They shared with me the names of stories that made them cry, telling me that I wasn't alone. And then they asked me to start reading them another book.