My students need book sets of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, No Choirboy, and Persepolis, to lay the foundation for a monthly book club over the summer.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” ― A.C. Grayling
Mullins High is a small, rural, public school in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.
The majority of my students receive free or reduced priced lunch and ride the bus. Their experiences and opportunities for global exposure are limited. But they are thirsty. They want to learn more. They want to do and see and know. My goal as their advocate is not to quench that thirst but to alleviate it, just enough, so that they continue desiring to be intolerant of ignorance.
My Project
Book sets (15 each) of Persepolis, No Choirboy, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian will serve as the foundation for a monthly book club. Over the course of a summer, students will meet in small group to discuss a shared text, a different one each month. We'll begin with these three sets of books, nonfiction and narratives based on personal experience, because reading these kinds of texts, in part, is how we learn about the world around us. Learning about people's lived experiences, learning about individual lives in the contexts of historical forces that have shaped our world, can give us insight into our own lives and the lives of other people. I encourage my students to devour as much literature as they can for this purpose. We're kicking off this program during the summer to help fight the summer slump by keeping students engaged and giving them (and parents alike) a safe place to go during the summer where reading is communal and enjoyable.
Reading nonfiction and narratives based on personal experience prepares students for lives outside of school, the lives they'll have as citizens.
We see ourselves in literature. So we read to make sense of our experiences and rehearse for the "real world." The only way for us to become good citizens is to better understand ourselves and the world we live in. Our aim is to discover truth, not just knowledge but an understanding of the underlying issues in each piece we explore.
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