What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Happy back-to-school time, everyone! The teachers in my division have been hammering away at new bulletin boards, exciting lesson plans, and team building activities since last Monday. I've really enjoyed my time with my colleagues and was especially impressed with how our division handled back-to-school professional development (more about that in another blog post).

Usually on this blog, I post a summer reading list of books I want to read that summer and hope we'll all read together. I usually cross off two or three of them and then move on. So, this year, I didn't even do that. I knew I'd have to read at least one book for our school's summer reading program and one for the class I took in July. Otherwise, I just let books good books happen to me.

Our school did away with required summer reading where a student writes an essay when we're all back at school a few years ago. I never had to do that in high school, but I understand it was a common practice. We've struggled with wanting to encourage kids to read over the summer but not wanting to squelch any burgeoning love of reading under the heavy stacks of "have to" reading. 

The school's new librarian came up with a couple of ingenious plans. First, she set up student-teacher book clubs. Teachers could select from books we thought kids would enjoy and she facilitated students signing up with a funny video and class visits. We then had two book club meetings in the community over the summer. At one of them, another kid we knew, who had also read the book, stopped by and talked with us, too. Our group read Into the Wild and it spurred a lot of interesting discussions about what it means to be adventurous versus stupid and cruel to your parents. I haven't heard how other book clubs fared. On Friday, we have our last meeting where we'll eat pizza, watch the movie, and talk about the differences in portraying a story across different media.

I also read two great teaching books this summer I want to tell you about. For the Central Virginia Writing Project, I read Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them. This book really helped me refine our writing workshop in my class and create a more structured peer conferencing program. It's definitely an English teacher book. I also re-read Teaching for Joy and Justice which just got me excited as I reminded myself why I got into teaching in the first place: to help students find their voices and project them in healthy ways. I underlined just about every activity in this book. The book's author co-teaches a history/language arts class with her husband, so she's got some great ideas for teachers in other disciplines.

One of my good friends loaned me her copy of I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith of One Hundred and One Dalmatians fame. You know those books that you're sort of angry when you're done because you loved it so much and now it's over? This book made me that kind of angry. C also devoured it and he hasn't read any fiction since the last Game of Thrones book came out.

Brigid Shulte's Overwhelmed helped me think about how I buy into the ideal worker culture that privileges face time in the office over meaningful work that we finish before going home to our families. Two of my new academic year resolutions are to stop trying to multi-task and to let go of trying to feel on top of my work. Teaching, by its very nature, is never done. There are always newer bulletin boards to put up, better ways to arrange desks to facilitate student learning, a cool update to make to the class website. I want to do these things. But I don't want to do only these things. I want to write and practice yoga and spend some time camping. I've never been one of those teachers who can leave things at school on Friday and pick up where I left off on Monday. I don't think I ever will be, but this year I'm going to take one weekend day off from work and try to be more efficient the other six days of the week. I'll let you know how it goes.

Help! My Students Have Read All My Magazines!

A few days ago, my students asked me if we could get some magazine subscriptions. We're trying to raise money to get some engaging, immediate texts into our classroom. Could you help us out?

If you donate within the next seven days and use the code INSPIRE, the Donors Choose team will match your donation.

Thanks for helping us out!

Fall Reading Adventures: Son

Yes, yes, it's nearly the winter solstice. So, that means there's time for one more fall reading adventure! For my birthday, I received the last novel in The Giver series. I didn't even realize there was a last novel in that series till I came across it at this wonderful bookshop in Norfolk.

But it's great. Son is told from the point-of-view of Gabe's birthmother. Gabe is the baby who spurs the main character, Jonas, to action in The Giver. I found it really interesting to learn more about the dystopic community that started my life-long obsession with dystopic fiction.


When my students saw Son on my what I'm reading board, we had a walk down memory lane. The Giver was the last required book some of my students finished reading and the last required title a lot of them actually loved. We talked, in classes of all levels, about the nature of the community, if it was good that the citizens didn't have to feel pain, and what other places in the world were like.

The prose here didn't excite me like The Giver. Maybe I'm more discerning that I was at nine. May Lois Lowry, like me, wanted to get to the end so that we know things end up okay for the people we love but questionable for the world in general. Who knows? This book would make a great enrichment project for classes reading books like 1984 or Brave New World. Son could also make a great selection in a dystopic fiction literature circle. 

Fall Reading Adventures: A Year of Biblical Womanhood

Do you all know about Rachel Held Evans? She blogs about the intersection of feminism and Christianity. Her blog became a book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, in which she spends a year living out Biblical edicts about women. RHE sleeps in a tent when she's on her period, celebrates Passover, and explores how women from Orthodox Judaism to Mennonite communities explore and live out Biblical definitions of womanhood.

Evans concludes that all such definitions of womanhood pick and choose from the parts of the Bible with which its adherents feel most comfortable (very few people expect women to camp out during their periods or marry their rapists). This conclusion means for Evans that she chooses to focus on the strongest thread of the Biblical narrative: liberation.

This is a blog primarily about teaching, so I won't get too spiritual here, but I have to say that A Year of Biblical Womanhood contained some of my favorite non-fiction prose of the year (and this is from a lady who finishes The New Yorker every year). Check it out (and recommend it to all your students who love feminism, exploring spiritual issues, or "stunt" journalism in journal)!

Fall Reading List: This is How You Lose Her

In case you haven't spoken to me all fall, I reckon it's time to let you all know just how much I love Junot Diaz. It took me several readings of the final story in his episodic novel This is How You Lose Her to understand why.

Like his earlier books, TiHYLH is narrated by Dominican-American Junior. Junior teaches at Harvard and is capable of being very good and very bad with the ladies at the same time. Never has he ever not cheated on a girlfriend. And it isn't until the very last paragraph of the last story he tells us does he even show a readiness to correct that behavior.

But he gets there. In the end, he wants to be better. And I think that desire to grow and change is what has drawn me back to this book, especially the final episode, several times this fall. For myself, it's helped me think long and hard about previous relationships and how I'm ready to hope those people turned out to be good people in the end. For teachers, there are some killer mentor sentences, like this closer:

That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get. 

If any of your mature, older students are moved by this prose (and your community is open-minded), direct them toward This is How You Lose Her, but it's definitely peppered with too many curse words in multiple languages to make comfortable students forced to read it.

Happy reading!

Sometimes I'm Scared of Literature

I love to read. I love to read just about everything. Anna Karenina makes me feel the same way as Cold Mountain. And I love to talk about what I read. At one time, I was an active member of three different book clubs (and a fourth that met electronically).

But sometimes, I get really scared to talk to my students about literature. So much of my training in ed school was about engaging students, teaching them skills that translate to critical thinking, and thinking about the role of school in a democratic society.

No one taught me how to lecture about Beowulf. Last year, I faked it. A lot. I borrowed powerpoints from other teachers about Shakespeare and The Odyssey. Now that my feet are a little wetter (and my body a little less exhausted), I think it might be time to venture into designing my own lectures.

Is that even useful? Some people say the lecture is dead. The Freirian in me wonders if there's a better way for students to get the cultural capital that I know they can use to compete if they choose to go on to college.

The tired teacher in me just wants to finish this jazzy powerpoint.

We Are So Behind

We are very lucky here in Central Virginia that Hurricane Sandy caused very little physical damage, and my prayers continue to go out to places like this town that had to cobble together uniforms to get to the playoffs when most kids weren't even living at home.

But we really couldn't afford those two days off.

I had planned for tenth grade to finish A Raisin in the Sun before Thanksgiving. Twelfth grade was going to read Beowulf by then. We haven't started A Raisin in the Sun, and I did read the first fifteen pages of Beowulf out loud today to last period.

The English department at school is moving toward a skill-based curriculum that emphasizes what students can do with texts rather than which texts they read. But I still think there are just some things every one should read -- if only to understand the allusions in headlines. I have three canonical texts for each class that I want us to read this year. We've gotten to one in tenth grade and fifteen pages into the first one in twelfth grade. At this rate, Shakespeare will have to happen over summer break.

Other teachers, does this happen to you? What do you do to stay on track? Or have you mastered the art of knowing they're mastering the skills and the texts themselves truly don't matter?

Kony in the Classroom, Part 2

At my new school, tenth graders read Things Fall Apart, so I'm teaching it for the third semester in a row. One of the great things about teaching the same book over and over is that I get to tweak my previous lessons instead of trying to come up brand new ones.

This time, we did the Kony exercise as a pre-reading activity. We watched the video, read the same article, and then I had students answer questions about article that steered them toward author's purpose and persuasive techniques. The day after they did this work, we had a circle discussion on whether or not the Kony video worked, how people from different cultures should and do interact, and what colonialism means to both the colonizers and the colonized.

I'm not sure if spending more time on the activity, the kids being a year older than the ninth graders I did this with last year, or their honor status had anything to do with the increased level of participation and dialogue. But I'm definitely going to keep this as a frontloading activity rather than a summary. The activity also let the kids know that while Things Fall Apart starts out as a chronicle of traditional Igbo life, the book quickly becomes a text in conversation with the world around it.

I don't know about you other English teacher nerds out there, but I remember being really excited in college to start thinking about books as cultural artifacts and not just pleasant ways to pass the time or think about the world within the book. The whole experience was really cool to see happening for my tenth graders now. Societal awareness in English class, FTW.

Although I do have to wonder if this particular activity will be spent by this time next year. I definitely need to be on the lookout for cultural memes aimed at teenagers that give us a way to explore colonialism in the present day. Any ideas?

What We're Reading

Our Donor's Choose books arrived last week, and my students are so excited to delve into these books! I thought I'd share the list so that those of you who helped out know exactly what we got and those of you who teach might get some ideas. These books are targeted toward reluctant readers in the twelfth grade. 

Tyrell by Coe Booth
Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes
A toda velocidad/ Overdrive by Eric Walters
B Negative by Vicki Grant
Back  by Norah McClintock
Bang by Norah McClintock
Bull''s Eye by Sarah Harvey
Charmed by Carrie Mac
Dead End Job by Vicki Grant
Comeback by Vicki Grant
Chill by Colin Frizzell (this has to be a pen name, right? Love Actually, anyone?)
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
A Child Called It: One Child''s Courage to Survive by Dave Pelzer
Help Yourself for Teens: Real-Life Advice for Real-Life Challenges by Dave Pelzer
The Privilege of Youth: A Teenager''s Story by Dave Pelzer
Lost Boy: A Foster Child''s Search for the Love of a Family by Dave Pelzer
16 1/2 on the Block, Vol. 2 by Babygirl Daniels
Sister Sister by Babygirl Daniels
Glitter: A Baby Drama, Vol. 4 by Babygirl Daniels
Frenemies by Megan Crane
Second Chance (Drama High) by L. Divine
Jayd''s Legacy (Drama High)  by L. Divine
The Fight (Drama High) by L. Divine
Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur
T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. by Sanyika Shakur
Inside a Thug''s Heart by Angela Ardis
The Rose That Grew From Concrete and Other Poems by Tupac Shakur
The Barrio Kings by William Kowalski
Love You to Death by Natalie Ward
16 Going on 21 (Denim Diaries #1), Vol. 1 by Darrien Lee
Queen of the Yard, Vol. 7 by Darrien Lee
Grown in Sixty Seconds (Denim Diaries #2), Vol. 2 by Darrien Lee
DMZ 1 by Brian Wood, Riccardo Burchielli and Brian Azzarello
DMZ 2 by Brian Wood, Riccardo Burchielli and Brian Azzarello
DMZ 4 by Brian Wood, Riccardo Burchielli and Brian Azzarello
Snitch by Norah McClintock
El Soplon by Norah McClintock
Homeboyz by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Hip-Hop High School by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Hoopster by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Gangsta Rap by Benjamin Zephaniah
Midnight: A Gangster Love Story by Sister Souljah
No Disrespect by Sister Souljah
Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah
Harlem Hustle by Janet McDonald

Fall Reading List

I had so much fun with the summer reading list, but I didn't get to finish all my titles. I thought I'd try to make a list of books I'd like to read by the end of the year. You can read along or offer suggestions. Also, I plan to disappear from normal human life the day Junot Diaz's new book comes out, in case you are wondering.


Fiction:
This is How You Lose Her -- Junot Diaz
East of Eden -- John Steinbeck (for real this time)

Nonfiction: 
How to Be a Woman -- Caitlin Moran
Class Meetings That Matter 9-12 -- Susan Limber
Teachers Have it Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers -- Dave Eggers, Daniel Mouthrop, Ninivie Calegari
Conscious Classroom Management -- Rick Smith
Classroom Instruction that Works -- Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, Jane E. Pollock

Young Adult Lit
Little Brother X -- Cory Doctorow
Divergent -- Victoria Roth

That's kind of a lot, so we'll see how it goes! I hope y'all read along.

Summer Reading List: The American Way of Death Revisited

I've had three good friends lose immediate family members this summer. Watching them grieve and not being able to do much but offer a chance to talk or a few canned phrases has been hard. What's also hard to watch is the way in which the funeral industry takes advantage of the grieving. In one friend's case, advertisements were presented alongside the live stream of her sister's memorial service.

Jessica Mitford died before live streaming funeral services became routine, but after reading her book The American Way of Death Revisited, I can imagine her take on the matter. Mitford explores how funeral directors often tell families that embalming is legally required when that is the case in only very certain, very rare circumstances. When the federal government took steps to ban that practice, cemeteries--often owned by the same three corporations that own most funeral homes--began to require embalming.

Using trade publications, interviews with funeral directors and consumers, and her own research, Mitford explores the ways in which funerals in the US differ from most other post-industrial nations in terms of cost, focus on the body, and terminology. If this all sounds a little depressing, I have to say that this book was surprisingly un-morbid. In fact, the section that describes exactly how the embalming process works has been anthologized in several writing textbooks.

Mitford doesn't gloss over the abuses of an industry that consistently takes advantage of families who are grieving or people thinking that by paying ahead they're saving their family money (the family still usually gets a bill that includes adjustments for increased fees). This book is very honest and, at times, very funny.

Because teenagers as a general rule like to question the status quo, I think many high school students would like this book. It could be very instructive for a creative nonfiction writing. A teacher could also use it as a literature circle pick paired with other books that look at how industries often take advantage of consumers (The Jungle seems like a logical choice). If nothing else, the unusual subject matter could be a great way to hook a reluctant reader.

Summer Reading List: Looking for Alaska

In the spring of 2010, my young adult literature professor suggested a number of books to us that I'm just now getting around to reading (this class was where I first heard about The Hunger Games). Among that list was John Green's boarding school novel Looking for Alaska. I had a hard time picturing my public school students being able to relate to kids with the means to go to school away from home (there were a lot of questions when I showed eleventh grade Dead Poets' Society).

Looking for Alaska, however, focuses mostly on students who have earned scholarships to a prestigious, fictitious boarding school in Alabama. The protagonist and his roommate explore the death of their close female friend Alaska. In doing so, they hit upon a lot of your basic YAL fare: identity, understanding money and class, love, sex, drugs, a little rock 'n' roll.

What makes Green's novel stand out (and it's starting to hit some bestseller lists seven years after publication) is his absolute honesty. With a lot of YAL novels, I sometimes think that authors have forgotten how teenagers talk to each other. Green hasn't, but that means there are copious curse words and sex. While I think that most teens would really enjoy Alaska, I can only recommend it as a free choice novel made available to students or incorporated as a lit circle book if you have a very supportive administration who understands this philosophy of young adult lit.

My next two summer reading list book reviews will be surprises not from the reading list. Get excited, fellow reading nerds!

Summer Reading List: River of Earth by James Still

James Still is a legend in Appalachian literature. Silas House and friends run a journal of Appalachian literature named Still in the author's honor. Many Appalachian Studies scholars consider Still to be the first Appalachian author.

I didn't know any of these things until about a month ago. I was excited (and maybe a little surprised) to discover a piece of Appalachian literature I hadn't yet explored and put Still's River of Earth on hold at the UVA library.

Once I got a hold of the book, it took a couple of days to get into the story. River of Earth is told from the perspective of a young boy whose family bounces between mining towns when his dad can find work there and farming rented land -- where his mother is happiest. A rotating cast of relatives and friends prey on the father's deep belief in hospitality whenever the family is able to scrape together a living.

Still struggles with the country life/town life dichotomy that plagues so many Appalachians. He also explores the ways in which mining is not a sustainable industry for the region. When a mine closes unexpectedly, so do schools, stores, and company housing. And he wrote this criticism in 1940.

Although the main character's reflections are written in "standard" English, the dialogue is an extremely well-done southern Appalachian dialect. The novel's title comes from a sermon delivered by your run-of-the-mill hillbilly preacher:

“I was borned in a ridge-pocket,” he said.  “I never seed the sun-ball withouten heisting my chin.  My eyes were sot upon the hills from the beginning.  Till I come on the Word in this good Book, I used to think a mountain was the standingest object in the sight o’ God.  Hit says here they go skipping and hopping like sheep, a-rising and a-falling.  These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity.  My brethren, they hain’t a valley so low but what hit’ll rise agin.  They hain’t a hill standing so proud but hit’ll sink to the low ground o’sorrow.  Oh, my children, where are we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, begetting, and a-dying – the living and the dead riding the waters?  Where air it sweeping us?”

And in the midst of that dialect is a question that people have been asking since the beginning of questions. I think that Still makes a powerful statement about the ability of his characters to discuss God, environmental concerns, and economic plans in such a dialect. Hillbilly? Sure. Stupid? Hardly. 

For the classroom library, I'd recommend this book for any student interested in identity exploration. I can also think of a couple of boys who were interested in farming that I think would really enjoy reading about the family's struggle between that life and a life based on cash that can be earned in coal mines. Happy reading!  

Summer Reading List: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I finished one of the books on my summer reading list! Mama gave me Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project in my Easter box to balance out all the chocolate. I'm so glad that I finally got around to reading it.

I also have to confess something to you all before we go any further: I like "stunt journalism" where someone spends a year doing something like trying to find herself, create an object lesson on what the Bible really says about being a woman, or see what it is like to be a low-wage earner. Prior to looking at reviews of The Happiness Project, I didn't know that some people consider books like these pedestrian. I just think they are an interesting way to confront an issue.

Rubin takes her inspiration from Benjamin Franklin's quest for moral perfection. She spends time researching what modern science thinks makes us happy and then divides up the year to focus on one particular facet of happiness each month. Some of her suggestions about taking up a project and eating real food inspired me to finally finish my 2010 campaign scrapbook and to finally kick gluten out of my life for good since a doctor told me in 2008 I should quit.

She does a great job of explaining how to find happiness, but it isn't until the middle of the book she explains why happiness matters. Maybe it's just my friends, but I actually know a fair number of people who don't value personal happiness. These folks think of it as, at best, an indulgence, and, at worst, a distraction from serving others. Rubin makes the really important point that research continues to suggest that happy people can make others happy. Unfortunately, she doesn't make it until about halfway through the book. I think the book would benefit from an upfront discussion about why happiness matters.

For all you teacher types working on your classroom libraries, I would recommend this book for higher-proficiency readers. While you all know that I'm not into any of that gender essentialism business, I do think that girls might be particularly drawn to the ways in which Rubin organizes and analyzes her happiness project. A book like this would have been just the ticket for me in high school when my obsession with ordering my life toward some defined purpose through lists and plans began, but I also wasn't reading enough non-fiction to prepare me for college.

Next up: River of Earth by James Still -- I have about a hundred pages to go.

Summer Reading List

As I finish up with my yearly re-reading of Cold Mountain, it's time for the summer reading list! This summer's list is going to be much smaller in than in years past. Hopefully, I can get through these few great titles.

Fiction
River of Earth - James Still (suggested by many great people at the writers' conference I attended; still not sure how I haven't gotten to it yet)
East of Eden - John Steinbeck (because it's finally time)

Nonfiction
The Happiness Project - Gretchen Rubin (an Easter present from Mama that I still haven't read)
The Defining Decade: why your twenties matter and how to make the most of them - Meg Jay (She's a UVA professor who I've heard talking about this book on NPR. Plus I've only got four and a half years left in my twenties)
The Political Brain - Drew Westen (started but never finished)

Young Adult Literature
Looking for Alaska - John Green (because Dr. Matthews-Meth said so)
Wonder - RJ Palacio (because Kate said so)

I'm still looking for one other YAL book to round this group out. Any ideas, y'all? Also, I'm purposefully staying away from teacher books this summer. I've read so many since starting grad school in 2009, I think my brain needs a break to process all the ideas floating around up there and make them my own.  

An Update from First Block

Good morning friends! I'm rushing off to work in a few minutes, but I wanted to share something that happened in first block with one of my very toughest students.

Ms. T: We're going to do silent sustained reading today for just about fifteen minutes today so you can wet your whistle with your new books.

Student who is Typically Trouble (under his breath and upset about spending less time than usual on reading): Awww, man.

Student Who Loves to Call Out: What does wet your whistle mean?

Student who is Typically Trouble: Dude, you know what it means. Stop talking so we can start reading.

I've got approximately one and a half kids I can't quite get to in this class and just three and a half weeks left to do it, but I could have ended the school year on that exchange right there.

Kony in the Classroom

Everyone managed to finish Things Fall Apart despite our previous problem at least well enough to pass the test. I combined a take-home multiple choice test I brazenly borrowed from the internet along with an idea of Carol Jago's. She has students write poems in parts as one way to respond to literature. We dusted off Greg Orr's "Gathering the Bones" together and reminded ourselves of what good poems do (I had a lot of questions about rhyming, sadly). They then wrote their own-seven part poems that summed up some of the major themes and characters of Things Fall Apart and the work most of them turned in was both creative and accurate. I especially loved one student's re-writing of the theme song from Fresh Prince.

After they finished their tests, we watched Invisible Children's video about Joseph Kony. I know you readers out in internet-land have access to Teh Google and probably saw the video before I did, so I'll spare you a summary. Then we read some of the criticism about Invisible Children's methods and discussed if how privilege affects our way of understanding problems and possible solutions. One kid at the end asked what did any of this have to do with Things Fall Apart since it deals with Nigeria and Kony was most active in Uganda (points to that kid for knowing the difference!). Another student piped up that they were both about the ways in which Europeans cut up boundaries without understanding what's going on with the people who actually live there.

Livin' the dream, y'all. Livin' the dream.

When Kids Won't Read

Those of you who know me/survived grad school with me may remember the book When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do. I love this book. I internalized it's message of modeling great reading behaviors like predicting and thinking aloud. I believed that kids who can't read (not necessarily can't decode) need us to show them some access points. So, armed with some other reading strategies, I set off to get my reluctant readers interested in the written word.

Part of the problem is that I don't just teach reluctant readers. I also teach kids who are very capable readers but aren't confident in their reading ability or aren't sure college is a goal for them. I also think some of them just don't care. Obviously, it's my job to help them see why they ought to care, but I thought I'd gotten a little more buy-in on first block's first whole-class novel Things Fall Apart.

Monday, however, I realized that no one had read the last ten chapters of the book. I'd done reading checks, we'd had class discussions that connected colonialism and parental alienation to our own lives for the first fifteen chapters. After that, I thought I had them. I thought that the summative assessment would serve as our final reading check.

I was so wrong. We had a long talk yesterday about how I hope they go to college and fix the education system to include more student choice. About how some times you have to work at things that don't make sense in the moment. About why studying English matters and how I need them to trust me to help them practice those skills. This conversation served mostly to mask my anger. These aren't my kids from difficult situations. These are kids with two parents at home and collegiate aspirations.

I handed out the review sheet and told them to finish the book and call me with any questions.

What would you have done?

Please Give Us the Glass Castle!

My very wonderful teacher friend, Ms. Dillon, is working to get a class set of the wonderful memoir The Glass Castle through Donors Choose. These books will make a difference for readers of all levels at our school. If you donate by March 19 and enter the code BLOOM at checkout, your donation will be matched. Please help here!

Student Work Sample

Sorry for the hiatus, friends. We're on the block system at my school, so I got to start a whole new school year in the middle of January. Things are finally starting to settle down into a routine.

Every six weeks, my students turn in a short paper where they respond to a number of (hopefully) creative prompts about whatever book they've chosen to read. The following is a response that lost a few points on conventions but gained a lot in hilarity while responding to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.

If I had to have pizza with a character from my book, it would be Gordy because he is smart. I would ask him about math, science, and computers. Just to be a nice and try to get him to talk. Then, after all the boring things about school are done, i would get him to do my homework because I need someone to do my work that doesn't have anything to do. If he does not want to do it then I will bribe him and if that does not work I will wipe his face with the pizza.

If it turns out bad, then I will order more pizza and make him eat till he is fat then order two more and tape slices to his face because h is a loser. Then I'd slap him with pizza because he is boring. Then we would get kicked out and never be able to come back until we are ninety-nine. The end.