Remembering Our Readers and Writers

This week, I forgot my students. In fact, I think I forgot them this marking period.

With multiple testing sessions and snow days creating a haphazard schedule of reading, writing, and thinking, my classroom lacked a necessary flow state for the past few weeks. I'm not proud of that.

But I am proud of my students, my readers and writers that do try so hard to tackle the difficult work I put in front of them. That's something that we often forget as teachers: we are the experts, and the tasks and texts we place in front of our students really are demanding. They just seem easy to us.

On my ride home from a teacher advocacy meeting, I remembered a conversation I had with a student today. He reminded me that he hadn't read a book since elementary school until my class.

No standardized test will measure that growth or change in his reading identity, but I know it exists.

Tomorrow I look forward to working with my students to tie up loose ends on their papers and whole-class texts. Until then, I'm off to search for next books on this kid's reading ladder. He's read one, and he knows he can't stop there--and I can't let him.

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