Olivia’s Blog

Honestly I don’t disagree with anything Ripp says about graphic novels. I did think it was weird to read this after reading Passionate Readers where she suggests counting graphic novels as 1/2 or 1/4 of a book towards a student’s end of year reading goal, but I also know that people can change their minds. It’s no secret that graphic novels help struggling readers a lot– both in terms of offering decoding practice that isn’t quite so daunting as a full print novel and by allowing them to read books written with their age group in mind alongside their peers without worrying about those books being “too hard” for them. I think something that is less talked about though is how graphic novels can be challenging for advanced readers. I remember in 4th grade the Bone series by Jeff Smith became insanely popular in my elementary school. They ran out of copies at the book fair and everyone, even kids who had been fake reading for years during silent reading time, was trying to get their hands on a copy. And I remember that I HATED them. When it was finally my turn to receive the banged up copy of book one from the school library and I was so disappointed. I knew there were kids that read those books for WEEKS at a time, who would read it cover to cover and then go back and reread their favorite parts; but I read the whole thing in less than a day and I couldn’t even think of what parts I would like to revisit because those speech bubbles just didn’t have enough words in them to convey something for me to remember.

In hindsight, my frustration with graphic novels (which continued through high school) stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t reading them right. I was always told that I was a reader. I was tracked into the gifted program early on because I could read quickly and fluently. And while pacing and fluency are still skills you need in order to digest graphic novels, they are not the only skills you need. I was reading graphic novels like they were regular books, scanning from left to right, concentrating on the words, and flipping the page as soon as I had read all of the text. Reading this way meant that I was missing half the story that these books were telling. The illustrations in graphic novels are not just appealing or enticing, they are kind of the point of the story. They fill in the gaps between the more sparse dialogue and narration blocks. Graphic novels force speed readers to slow down and really sit with each page. You have to pay attention to the composition of the page as a whole– Where are the dialogue snippets in relation to the characters? What order are you supposed to read this conversation in?– as well as interpret the stories being told by each image, the emotions being portrayed on faces, actions, colors, and everything else. There are additional skills at work in addition to the ones you use to read a traditional book.

To this day I still struggle a little bit with graphic novels. It is hard for me to slow down and really take in the story. Now the main barrier for me reading more graphic novels, and putting them in my classroom library, is the cost. Graphic novels are so expensive. Even good used copies are twice as expensive as a used copy of a regular book, and there aren’t nearly as many used copies available because public libraries keep graphic novels in circulation for way longer (because they are so popular). By the time they are ready to retire a book its practically falling apart. I know Ripp advocates for quality over quantity, but it is super hard for me to justify spending so much on just one book when I am trying to be efficient. So while my classroom library currently does not show a love of graphic novels, I really do love graphic novels for myself and for my students. However, I don’t think they should be labeled as “easy reads.” They are just challenging in different ways.

I feel like all of my opinions about booktok and things like it need to be prefaced by my pretty negative personal experiences with social media. Growing up I did not have unmonitored internet access until I was 14, which was pretty late for the time. While the rest of my friends were lying about their ages to make Facebook accounts in 5th grade, I was still only allowed to use the family computer for 15 minutes a day (and of course only websites my parents had screened and approved of). Social media meant exclusion for me, it meant jokes I didn’t get and references I didn’t understand, until it didn’t. When I started high school I got a smart phone and access to all of the apps I had been missing out on.

It was around the same time that I stopped reading outside of what was assigned to me in school. While there were definitely other reasons (I am not making the boomer argument that phones are the death of culture) but my new found social media habits definitely played a role. After I was done following all of my real life friends and family, the algorithms quickly figured out how to keep me scrolling on the apps for hours with influencer content. Instead of reading books, watching movies, making art, writing, or doing any of the other hobbies I had in my pre-smart-phone-life, I was consuming content related to those things. There were reaction videos, tumblr blogs about TV characters, instagram artists posting speed paints, and a whole sea of reviews, critiques, commentary, and vlogs that were all competing for my attention. My attention span was zapped. I couldn’t sit through a movie, I could only watch movie reviews. I read fanfiction of books I had never read. I watched other people react to TV show clips thinking, “wow I should really watch this” and then never did it. My social media addiction only got worse in college– getting so bad that picking up a book that wasn’t assigned to me or starting a new TV show was triggering an actual fight or flight response.

I started therapy this year and have learned a lot about myself and how to break these patterns. In my professional and school life I am always working at a 10/10 all the time. I think every chronic overachiever struggles with burn out, and I am no exception. In high school I would mentally fry myself in class all day, bust it in rehearsals and club meetings after school, and then come home exhausted only to do more homework. In college it was the same, except replace theater and clubs with part time jobs and student organizations. Social media is mentally the path of least resistance. It is a lot easier mentally to watch someone else critique a new controversial book than it is to read it yourself and form your own opinion. It is a lot easier to fall in love with book characters when you can watch your favorite content creator make memes or parody videos of them. Social media is a way to feel in the know, part of a subculture, savvy to what is in right now, without having to devote time and mental energy towards doing any of those things. It’s like sparknotes but for life.

I think the manufactured microtrend cycles prevalent on tiktok and instagram really do not mesh well with the act of reading a book for a lot of reasons. Just from observation, book microtrends work very similarly to fashion microtrends, where a new product can go from conception to obscolesence in a single month– something that would have taken years in the past. However, the difference between fashion trends and book trends is in the amount of time and money the consumer needs to devote towards consumption. A trendy outfit can be purchased off of Shein for under 15 dollars, shipped in under a week, and then worn and posted to social media immediately afterwards. Books take a lot longer than that. If you are a regular person who isn’t being asked to devote their lives to two books a week every week for two months, it might take you an entire month to finish a novel. By the time you have finished it, the trend has moved on. God forbid you pick up a trendy title a few months after its initial release, no one will watch your content because it is old news. Unlike fast fashion, a new hardcover book will be expensive, and oftentimes harder to buy at all when you take smaller publishing houses and preorders into accounts. This entire process can promote overconsumption and book hoarding. It does nothing to help promote public libraries, which are the only books accessible to a lot of students (library books don’t photograph as well, often have outdated covers, and carry a socioeconomic stigma on a lot of apps).

I never downloaded tiktok when it became popular. I know if I did I would get sucked into the infinite scrolling and never emerge. I do not check the explore pages on Facebook or Instagram, and I have to literally lock my phone while I’m working in order to focus. I tried to get into book youtube content (booktube) but it also suffers under the microtrend cycle even though they are producing long form rather than short form video content. I’m not going to claim social media is the root of all evil or that it’s never helpful in a classroom setting. I know for some students booktok is probably an awesome addition to their reading lives. I know bookstagram can help motivate people to read more. I know that facebook bookclubs can build really powerful communities. But for me personally, all of it has only made me a worse reader and I know I can’t be the only person who has experienced it.

I will do my best to get secondhand info from others about how to incorporate booktok into my classroom, but it’s something I will be doing sparingly. I know part of the job of being a teacher is to provide strategies to help every student learn, even if those strategies don’t work for you personally, and social media is something that might work for other people. However, for the people it doesn’t work for, it isn’t a neutral experience. It’s not the same thing as a note-taking strategy or a pneumonic device you can simply stop thinking about if it isn’t helpful. Outside of the realm of booktok, bookstagram, booktube, and other reading hashtags, I’m going to be honest, I think social media is an actively hostile and dangerous environment for teenagers. I have only just recently figured out how to use social media in a “healthier” way (I don’t say “healthy” because truthfully I think it would be healthiest for me to not be on social media at all) and it took a lot of time and I couldn’t do it by myself. As a teenager, I thought I knew better when it came to social media. I thought all of the warnings from the adults in my life didn’t apply to me. I thought I was smarter than advertising, smarter than the algorithms, smarter than the companies that were profiting off of my data. But I wasn’t. I did all of the things that I thought I was better than– I talked to predators in chat rooms, I got sucked into FOMO, I started scrutinizing my appearance based on the facetuned pictures of beauty gurus, I was cyberbullied, I cyberbullied other people, I exacerbated a panic disorder and I wasted SO. MUCH. TIME.

Obviously social media isn’t going anywhere, and in fact you kind of need it in order to function in a lot of ways. I still have social media and probably will have it for the rest of my life, just like my students will. But I don’t need to ask my students to share even more of themselves online. The last thing I need if for a student to make an earnest (but potentially embarrassing) booktok for my class only to have it wind up in a cringe compilation on youtube later. I don’t need to tacitly promote social media in my classroom. I don’t want to be a downer, but I also don’t want to be irresponsible about this.

I desperately want to make independent, self selected reading happen in my classroom next year. During my student teaching, independent reading is something that just didn’t happen for a lot of reasons: 1.) I didn’t have books to give to students and 2.) Even if I had books, hybrid teaching and quarantines meant that students were more often than not absent and unable to access those books. I have already sunk a lot of time and money into getting a starter classroom library together with books that I hope my students love even a fraction as much as I love them. For myself personally, gathering my classroom library this summer has felt like buying a gym membership after New Years– like I need something to hold me accountable so I don’t wuss out of trying to do something difficult. I already went through the trouble, now I have to make it happen.

Reading Passionate Readers was simultaneously really inspiring and extremely daunting. I was so excited by all of the potential in the book, but it’s also really hard to imagine implementing a reading regiment like that when I’ve never seen it happen in any classroom either as a student or as a student teacher. Obviously I know that it is possible because Ripp is writing from her own experiences, but it almost sounds too good to be true.

Nonetheless, I have decided to be commit to trying to make something like this work in my classroom because I really do believe that YA lit and independent reading are really important for helping to develop lifelong reading habits. For reasons unknown to god and man, I went ahead and got an entire English degree– but never have I once picked up a copy of one of the classics and read it in my free time and I don’t anticipate doing that anytime in the near future. Since graduating, I have read introspective literary novels, suspenseful spy thrillers, YA lit of pretty much every genre, and a book of poetry. I’ve liked almost every book I have read and it’s because somewhere along the way I learned how to choose books for myself, I learned how to find them in the library, and I have learned how to read (at least a little) almost every day. I also learned that I do much better when I can talk about my reading with others then when I try to do it in isolation. All of that knowledge has been invaluable to me and I wholeheartedly agree with Ripp when she identifies those skills as what makes someone a lifelong reader.

When I think back to my own reading role models, the people who taught me these skills, it wasn’t my parents. My parents are definitely part of the statistic of adults who just don’t read. My mom is a serial book abandoner who has told me how much she dislikes reading ever since I was five years old and she was tearing her hair out trying to teach me how to read. My dad seemingly doesn’t know how to choose a book for himself; I buy him a book I think he will like every year for Christmas, he reads them, says they are great, and then waits for me to put another in his hand the next year. My best reading role models were my elementary school librarian and my grandpa. Ms. Clark could recommend a book to ANYONE and believed in even a kindergartener’s ability to learn the dewey decimal system– no books were sorted by “reading level.” My grandpa showed me how his kindle could increase the font size on any text and how you could use Amazon to get book recommendations. Passionate Readers made me realize how important those connections were to me developing my identity as a reader, and how much I want to be able to be that person for someone else.

All that being said, there were several times in the last 2 weeks where I was just plain frustrated with these books. It bothers me that there isn’t really anything in there about how to balance reading and writing instruction. Ripp talks about the struggle for time in a 45 minute class period and I can only imagine how much harder that would be if you were in the midst of a writing unit instead of a reading unit. Both Passionate Readers and A Novel Approach have a huge emphasis on moving at a pretty brisk pace through both independent reading and full class novels, but none of the scheduling guides that they include show where writing instruction would fit in. How do you make time for students to independently read, while you are also trying to move through a full class novel, and you need to start scaffolding to help students write their own narratives all at the same time? I just feel like logistically there isn’t enough time for all of it. I feel like a lot of my anxiety around this stems from my experience at my student teaching placement where almost none of the grades students received were “reading grades”– they were all “writing grades.” And I really hope that that isn’t the case this coming school year, but if it is, if all of their summative assessments are longer pieces of writing, I really struggle to see how there would be enough writing workshop time when we have to take out a minimum of 10 minutes every day for reading.

I think my biggest fear in all of this is that I won’t be able to try any of this 100%, that I will have to modify and compromise these strategies to the point where they just don’t make sense anymore. That was kind of my experience last year when I tried to use a lot of the stuff from Beyond Literary Analysis. But like I said earlier, I already bought the gym membership so I am now personally obligated to show up and try my best 🙂

Honestly I pretty much agree with and support everything that Buehler has to say about YA pedagogy. I am beyond excited that the school I am working at in the Fall seems to be really supportive of using YA in the classroom. My team and I have two units planned that use YA as the anchor text: a narrative unit using The Outsiders and an analytical unit using dystopian novel lit circles (The Hunger Games, Unwind, 5th Wave, The Giver, among others).

I guess the thing that makes me the most nervous isn’t the use of YA in a full class setting, but rather the independent reading aspect of it. During my student teaching, independent reading was not a thing that we incorporated into the daily routine. Most of my students did not read books outside of the ones we read as a full class and I didn’t really have a classroom library to pull from to recommend books. Now I am being encouraged to build a classroom library before I start in the Fall (which is awesome!) but I’m honestly feeling overwhelmed. I feel like I haven’t read nearly enough middle grades books to have a rolodex of personalized and specific recommendations for my students. Honestly I don’t even really have a clear idea of what 7th graders even want to read these days.

I am also struggling with trying to toe the line between having books that discuss serious topics and will introduce students to lives and viewpoints outside of their own, and not having all parents hate me within the first month of my first job. This is something I didn’t really have to deal with as much at my student teaching placement because my students were older and the parents were not super involved in school life. Now my students are much younger and this school has pretty impressive community involvement– which one one hand is fabulous because people are actually going to donate clorox wipes to my homeroom and parents will actually come to the open house and be interested in meeting their child’s teachers, but one the other hand it feels like I have to do a lot of appeasement in return, like if I screw up one time all of that support is immediately going out the window. I know Buehler talks about having a prepared schpeel for every book that you think might receive some backlash, a justification for why it makes sense from an academic standpoint to have students read that book, but I just find myself questioning whether that actually works. And I find myself really anxious about whether I am going to have the emotional capacity to keep doing that for years at a time.

While I am attempting to build my classroom library, it feels like I am constantly oscilating between extreme joy and extreme paranoia. I get the joy from watching book talks, adding titles to my thriftbooks.com wishlist, getting to just READ a lot of new and fantastic books, and imagining all of the things students might do with them (I will be stealing the study of book marketing and author branding from Buehler). But then on the flipside building my classroom library kind of feels like building a time bomb, and instead of thinking about putting the right book in the hands of the right kid at the right time, I’m thinking about the wrong kid showing the wrong book to the wrong adult and having to deal with the consequences.

This summer I really want to focus on building my classroom library for the upcoming school year. I have already done a lot of preliminary work on this– making lists, driving to every secondhand bookstore in the Athens area, raiding my parent’s house (and my friends parent’s houses) for those books that were so good that we asked our parents to buy them for us– but I still feel pretty lost.

I am teaching 7th grade this coming school year and I am really excited about it– I remember what a weird, emotional, dumb, intense, and pivotal year that was for me. Unfortunately for that same reason I am struggling to pick books that “fit” the year. I am struggling to decipher where the line is when it comes to more mature topics for students that age, and my own reading habits at that time are not helpful as I read almost exclusively high fantasy brick sized books about dragons (which I will be happy to supply to those that want them, but I feel like that will not be most students). In 7th grade I felt much older than I was. I felt like a lot of the realistic fiction labeled books talked down to me so I never read them. I wish that hadn’t been the case because in a lot of ways I was dealing with situations much older than I was and it might have been nice to have a book address some of that. But now as the adult in the room, I know that some kids just don’t want to read all that (sometimes you don’t want the dragon to be a metaphor for your broken home) and I know even more that some parents DO NOT want their kids reading all that. So I’ve found myself holding books up to some sort of weird morality scale of what is “allowed” to be read in 7th grade– oscilating between wanting to advocate for these books about uncomfortable truth and wanting to just rest on middle grades staples like Hatchet and protect myself from backlash. (For the record, I really like Hatchet, and my brother liked it even more so that is not a diss).

I have a few goals for this class:

1.) I want to read books that I wouldn’t pick for myself. This is something I am pretty used to doing as my reading habits are shaped by what is available at the public library at the time, but it’s still something I want to be actively thinking about.

2.) I want to better understand what makes a book “challenging.” Part of my list-making adventures has been trying to assign some sort of system to how “difficult” a book is. My school is very big into the lexile levels, but to be honest all of the lexile levels of the books I currently have are kind of the same (~around the 5th-6th grade level) and I wouldn’t consider most of those books to be comparable to one another at all. I want to be able to recommend books that appeal to my students’ interests but also books that are realistic for each student to practice their reading with.

3.) I want to have a system for putting books on my shelves and checking them out to students. I feel like this is a pretty basic goal, but I will be honest using my classroom space effectively is one of my weakest skills. I am so bad at sticking to an organization system. The last thing I want is to lose books or have them set out in a way that students can’t find what they are looking for.

4.) I want to learn about how other people incorporate independent reading in a consistent and meaningful way in the classroom.

I guess I will end this post with a reading/life update. I am currently moving and so I must go through the annual ritual of selling all of the furniture I bought on Facebook marketplace at the beginning of the year. There is an entire ecosystem of furniture in Athens that just gets bought and resold on Facebook every summer. I sold my dresser to a pretty rad looking biker woman who told me she just divorced her husband and was skipping town. I was sitting on the curb reading Legendborn while I waited for her to pull up with her truck. She told me the cover of the book looked badass and I told her that it in fact was a pretty badass book. I just finished Legendborn this morning (AHHHHHH!!!!) and I am about to start They Went Left. I was able to get a physical and an audiobook copy of They Went Left so I can continue to make progress while I drive to and from Goodwill and the dump looking for boxes. I have somehow already fallen behind, but I am hoping to be at least halfway through They Went Left by tonight so that I can get my flipgrids up.