It is hard to imagine that February is already upon us and with February comes the day that we all love to celebrate, Valentine’s Day. This month contains Valentine’s Day but the month in general focuses on something much larger: Relationships.

February is the start of a month that focuses on relationships of all kinds from husband and wife to the relationship between races. It is a month where we spend time thinking about the ones we care about and how we impact their lives on a daily basis. However, in this newsletter I want to focus on a different relationship that most of our students are still learning about, still trying to figure out, and still developing- I am talking about their relationship with reading.

I feel that my own journey with reading mirrors the journey that a lot of our students are on right now. When I was in elementary school I was not a reader and I was not really a speller either, in fact, trying to read some of my elementary work was like trying to solve a calculus problem written in Spanish. This comes as a shock to most people who know me because I love reading now.  I had wonderful teachers and amazing parents who bought me so many books, but for some reason when I came home I would not read. I did have this amazing ability to look at the book as if I was reading, but the words just never went into my head. We had systems in place to reward me for reading, I could earn computer time, pick where the family could eat for dinner, and my parents even praised me when I did the pretending to read thing that I did so well.

Now this all changed for me in the middle of 5^th grade when I discovered a book in the back of the classroom called Calvin and Hobbes Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”. This book had very little in terms of academic value, it really did not teach me anything that was in the curriculum and was definitely not assigned to me by the teacher, what caught my eye was the really cool picture on the front. I took this book home and I still can remember my mother’s reaction of, “Michael, of all the books he could have picked he picked a comic book,” to which my father responded, “JoAnne, we’ve been on him to read since 1^st grade let him go.” I am 100% positive it was one of those parenting moments where they looked at each other, had no idea why it was working, but it was, so they rolled with it.

They went out and got me every Calvin and Hobbes book that existed and I read every one of them. Night after night I would lay on the floor in my room and just read them, I couldn’t get enough.  They were funny, engaging, and visual.  I loved those books, but like all great series the books end, you run out of material and I was done. I went a short span of not reading again, until I went to the library with my mom and saw a book on the desk of a kid kicking a soccer ball, it was The Comeback Challenge by Matt Christopher. Just like before I fell in love with this book, it was about sports, had action, drama, everything I wanted at that time was there and I fell in love with reading again. My parents went to the store and got me all the Matt Christopher books they could and I read them for the next two years. This pattern of falling in and out of reading books continued the rest of my life, I read Hatchet, Holes, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, Of Mice and Men, Congo, Jurassic Park, The James Bond Series, and so many more.

 It was not until much later in my life that I realized I had been a reader my entire life, I just wasn’t a school reader. When I had a book I was interested in and engaged in my comprehension was outstanding, my decoding skills unmatched.  I could summarize, expand, and explain any concept or chapter in any book that I loved with amazing detail. However, if I was assigned a book, if I had no choice in what I was reading, or if it was something I had no interest in I struggled, which is why standardized tests were so difficult for me.

As I sit here writing this newsletter I think of all the different paths our students are on right now in their own personal journey of becoming a reader. I wonder how their path is similar to mine or how it is different. I wonder if there are some students out there who love reading, but have not found the right book just yet. I wonder how many students are well on their way and have found series or authors that they have fallen in love with. I wonder how many kids still take a trip with their parents to a library to find a book, a book with a cool cover. (If anyone is wondering why Diary of a Wimpy Kid is so popular look at the cover it looks fun and looks like how kids draw)
I would encourage everyone to sit down with their kids and have a conversation about reading, find out what they are interested in, and see if they have topics that you can look up together. The best thing my parents did for me was to listen and support me along my journey, not to dictate which direction I had to go. They realized that individual growth comes from the individual and that it was their job to guide and steer, not to force or demand. That is why a kid who never got higher than a B on his report card in reading, still reads every night as a principal, and is still growing as a life-long reader.