Confirmation

It's a lazy summer day. Ian and Emily and I have "go to the public library" penciled in on our week's plan. Not that it means all that much; we never made it to "clean closets" yesterday. But we want to do this one. We do it each summer - our weekly jaunts to the library. Then, I get a request to participate in an interview on my campus, so our library time is cut a little short. No worries. We scramble through the shelves, searching for Kwame Alexander, Shannon Hale, and Gene Luen Yang. We find Real Friends along with I Am Fartacus and speedily check out, bolting toward my high school.

The kids set up camp in my classroom, and I race-walk to the front office. Luckily, I'm a few minutes early, so I inhale and chat up the remaining summer staff folks. In the principal's secretary's office, I'm introduced to the new track and cross country coach, Chris, and immediately, I know I know him. He's a 2002 Hebron High School graduate - our first class. I was here then. I shake his hand and introduce myself to him, but he doesn't remember me. Then, we start talking...

"Did you used to like Calvin and Hobbs or something?"

"Um, not enough for that to be memorable," I reply.

"No, maybe not that. Charlie Brown? Were you upset with the creator guy died? I just remember my teacher crying about that and thinking, 'Man, she must really care about that.'"

Uh oh. "Yeah, that's me! And that's what you remember?"

We grab the 2002 yearbook from the secretary's collection and flip. Yup, there's the sideways grin of the kid I taught and the late '90's Friends hair of the teacher he now remembers. We laugh a bit more and then settle in for the teacher interview.

After, conversation starts again. I return to giving Chris a hard time about remembering only that one thing about me. I attempt to jog his memory with the descriptions of the tableaus we did with A Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm almost certain there are photos - actual, from film photos - in my desk drawer of his class' freeze-frame scenes.

Then, he says, "I don't remember that at all. But I didn't like reading then either. I didn't like anything you guys picked and told us to read and said it was good. It was always boring. But I read now! Have you heard of ______________? I totally love his books!"

I'm not sure who the author was he said. To be honest, my mind was already fighting depression and joy. I had done this to him! I contributed to his dislike and lack of reading anything while a student because, back then, we read what I assigned and we took quizzes over what happened in the chapters, and while we may have had some fun discussing or creating tableaus, I didn't create readers.

Yet Chris became a reader anyway! SHEW! Hopefully, he isn't the only one to have escaped the curse I put on my students back then. Hopefully, others also found their way to their own reading on their own time of their own choices. Hopefully, more than one of them consider themselves readers now.

Thankfully, I've changed. In my English classes, we grow readers. We don't grow chapter-memorizers or Sparknote regurgitators or fakers. We grow readers, more and more each semester through student choice.

And, if I ever question or doubt myself in the future, I can now climb the stairs to Chris' classroom and talk to my former student/now peer and be reassured.

I'm gonna have to go ask him who that author is...