I just spent almost an hour searching for my Team Banzai headband. I knew I still had it somewhere. I got the headband at Windycon as a promotional item for the movie Buckaroo Banzai Adventures Across the Eighth Dimension in 1983, almost a year before the movie was released! Fortunately, I loved the movie, and I still do. I highly recommend it. I should have been grading papers or doing something useful.
Why was I looking for a strip of fabric related to a movie more than thirty years old? Because I just read a book that I completely enjoyed and it made reference not only to the movie but to the exact words on my old headband. And best of all, I was reading the books because my students had selected it!
The book is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and I recommend it as much as I recommend Buckaroo Banzai. It was a video game romp through 1980s pop culture and I joyfully ran through it in less than a week. It was a return to my adolescence, a celebration of my geekiness, and a gem of a story! It felt like it was written just for me!
Four of my current seniors had selected it to read for our current unit. My co-teacher and I offered our students a list of more than sixty titles. I have read most of them, but not all. So, after my students had gone shopping with our fantastic school librarians and selected the books that they wanted to read, I got my reading assignments
Most of the books on the list are books I loved. It was my goal to help them find a book they would love, too. I wanted every student to have at least one book that they read during high school that they would willingly and happily recommend and even read again.
And they gave one to me!
Teachers who allow their students to select their own reading knows that kids cannot be limited to teachers’ reading choices. Some of my favorite books were assigned to me by my former students. One of my students would stop by once a week and insist that I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It was a student who introduced me to graphic novels by bringing in a copy of Watchman, and I was introduced to both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett by a young man who insisted I read Good Omens.
I am the luckiest teacher in the world!
As I raced to finish Ready Player One, I felt so grateful that this was what my students had assigned me. They had provided me with the immersive and engaging read - the same kind of reading that I am hoping they experience.
And here is the best irony: the book is about virtual reality. It is set in a future America where things are so bad that everyone escapes to an online digital world called OASIS. We don’t need a digital world! We don’t even need a plug or a screen. The pages of the book work as well or better! Yes, I know that Steven Spielberg is making this book into a movie. I will go see it, but I don’t need it.
Yes, I want my students to master all those skills in the Common Core. I want them to be critical thinkers, effective and creative communicators, and self-directed learners. These are assessable and observable objectives. I also want to engender in them a love of story, an excitement for literature, and a desire to read. Science fiction was my entrée to this world. I read at an early age, as many children do. But they sometimes stop reading in high school. There isn’t enough time. There are too many enticing baubles competing for their attention. They only read what they are assigned and, even then, at a surface level.
It pains me to think that some have never (and some will never) experience what I just felt about Ready Player One.
I am optimistic. I will try to hook as many as I can. We read short stories and watch movies. We read together and read out loud. I am not giving up on them!
It is wonderful to know that I am never so far from the goal that I cannot re-experience it.
So this holiday season, I am grateful for gift of a great book and the remarkable and generous teachers and students who plugged me into it!
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