Books, Tutoring, and Middle School

In the summer of 2009, four days after landing back in the USA from England, I moved to Boston to become an educator-extraordinaire. Really, I was there to become a full-time middle school tutor at a charter school in Jamaica Plain. After a year of contemplating the themes of race, gender, motherhood, and the "New Woman" in Victorian literature, I was ready to take on what I felt was a more pressing issue: making kids like reading.

I was excited to work with kids and to work in middle school. I love middle schoolers. When kids reach high school, they become full-blown teenagers. I can't stand teenagers. They simultaneously annoy me and scare me. And they can smell fear from a mile away. I am still convinced that the teenagers that attend a school around the corner from my apartment are saying shit about me under their breath every time I pass by. Seriously.

Middle school is not easy. You have girls who have had their periods for four years already and you have boys who have yet to, well, grow. It is all kinds of awkward. But I am sort of awkward. Case in point, the best book I read while in 6th grade was Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia. I did a book report on it. It was awesome. Awkward, right? So I think I fit in there well. Also, I have a special place in my heart for middle school. It was during that time that I was first introduced to acting, to writing, and to the possibility of not becoming a lawyer when I grew up. Middle school and I go back like babies and pacifiers.

Okay, I didn't mean for this post to be about my love of middle school.

Anyway. Boston. Tutoring. Saving the world with reading...

I was assigned to five 7th graders. Four girls and one boy. I was to tutor them in English and math (and life in some ways). Most of them...liked math better...but they were stuck with me.

I am a firm believer that all kids can like reading...provided you give them books they'll enjoy and meet them where they are at (That is a lot easier said than done). I believe that a love of reading can happen at any time, but that middle school is a great time for it. These five kids certainly showed that.

Two of my kids liked reading...sorta. They had difficulty finding books that they liked and could read without too much difficulty. So they would tell me reading was stupid and proceed to complain the rest of the tutorial. It occurred to me that they just needed the right story. So I read A Midsummer Night's Dream with them.

And they loved it.

Did they get every word? No. Did I have explain quite a bit? Yes. But were they excited to read it? Praise the heavens, yes they were.

One of my other kids would get bored with a book. Even the ones about basketball players that I found. But this kiddo had a secret: he loved poetry.

Poetry. Now I could get behind that.

So I found a book of poetry. And he would read poems. When I went back to visit the school the following year, his new tutor told me he still read poems from that book. Holler.

I also believe that reading can solve pretty much any problem (except maybe...okay a lot of things...but work with me). Two of my kids loved reading and were strong, mature readers. Their problem was that they were almost teenage girls and therefore they fought. They fought with each other and they fought with me (I got the silent treatment for a good two days once...). The other issue that came up was race. One girl was Black and the other girl was Asian. They would have fights about "who had it harder". How did I choose to deal with this? I made them read A Thousand Splendid Suns. I made them read about other girls in the world who certainly have it harder than them.

Miraculously, they loved the book. It inspired conversations. They read ahead in secret (I got to yell at them for reading ahead. "Ms. S," one of them said, "you are the only tutor in history that yelled at her tutees for wanting to read more." Yup. That was me.). Did it solve their issues? No. But did they bond a little (even if it was over getting yelled at by me)? Yes, siree.

All this said, I don't think I am very good at teaching kids how to read. This, and a lot of other reasons, caused me to drop out of a teacher training program that year. Still, I harbor this hope, this dream that all kids can find books that they love--probably because books were my haven growing up, my little world, my little escape. Even as a social work intern in a school, I found myself wanting to read and write with my clients in therapy. If this writing thing works out, I hope to find myself working with kids again, showing them how a good book can, and I know this is cheesy, change everything.