Dear Families of English 9 and 9A students:



Dear Families of English 9 and 9A students:

Hello! I am SO excited to work with you and your students this year as they begin their first year of high school—what an exciting time this is! I am entering my 12th year of teaching, much of these years have been spent with the 9th grade age group. I truly love 9th graders as they are still so excited about school and yet, they are learning day by day about themselves, their goals and their dreams for their lives. It is, I believe, the MOST important year of high school and I feel honored to spend it with your student.

In Northview Public Schools, we utilize choice reading in the classroom on a daily basis. This means that not only will students read much of their own choices in literature, they will read a lot. The expectation is for students to read a minimum of 1.5 hours outside of class each week! If your student already loves to read, hopefully his/her love will only continue to grow this year and if you have a reluctant reader in the family, then it is my goal to bring the fantastic world of reading to his or her heart this year.

A central goal of our reading and writing program here at Northview is to establish a reading habit in the busy lives of students in high school. I am hoping we can work together to recapture the pleasure and passion of readers. This letter is long, but the assumptions it rests upon are too important to be treated in a superficial manner. Please take the time to read this and know what you’re signing before you do.

The best books challenge our beliefs by helping us see through different eyes —to live a different life. For example, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult was wildly popular last year, but it is about a school shooting and I think we’d all rather believe that couldn’t happen here and don’t want to live the details. Another book that many of my students devoured was All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven—a beautiful written love story that also deals with the very real facts of mental illness in teenagers, another topic that can be difficult and challenging to address.

Yet reading allows us to confront our worst fears and live through them. Students love these books and I recommended both of them. I won’t know the details of every book students read and refer to this semester, and I won’t remember the details of all the books I recommend to students. What I seek for all of my students is a compulsion to read—for pleasure— for knowledge—for a passion for story or information that will keep them into the pages of a book past our assigned time for reading. With this passion ignited, I have no doubt that many of my students will read 10, 20, even upwards of 50 books this school year. It is amazing what reading can do to a young person who finally finds that “one book” that grabs his/her heart and never lets go.

Choice reading and reading for pleasure has tremendous benefits. Here are a few:

• Reading relieves stress. High school is stressful. Reading takes you out of the present and into another place and time; it is a perfect escape.

• Reading builds stamina to prepare students for college. Reading for an hour or two in one sitting is a basic expectation in college. In this class we will exercise muscles soon to be strained in the coming years. Reading for fluency and stamina has been proven to improve the reading rate for students. Fast reading develops confidence and an appetite for books as well as teaching vocabulary in context, which improves writing, but it only happens when students find books they want to read.

• There is a lot of talk in the media that ‘students today won’t read,’ but I believe students substitute all of those other distractions (the internet, TV, etc.) if they feel no passion for the book assigned to them. In my experience, students who haven’t been readers since elementary school will suddenly become quite passionate about reading with the right book in their hands. But those books might challenge your values. Is that okay with you? Can your child choose to read Crank by Ellen Hopkins, which delves into a teenager’s drug addiction?

I believe we have to trust these young adults more. We have to trust that books won’t corrupt them anymore than the movies or video games might. It is more important that they’re reading! So you may pick up a book left behind on a nightstand and open to a passage with the details of a group of child soldiers in Sudan mercilessly slaughtering an entire village (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah) and wonder why reading it is a homework assignment, and I will answer, “Your son or daughter chose it.” I might have recommended it because I read it and loved it, or the book may be unfamiliar to me because your child borrowed it from another student.

The bottom line: I will not place a tight filter on what is read in this class and I’m asking for your support in this. The books on my shelf range through many topics and levels. I hope you will talk to your child about what he/she is reading this semester. I suggest you get a copy of a book and read it if you’re concerned about the content. Research also shows that when parents and students are reading together and talking about the books, their understanding of the topic and their connection to one another grows immensely.

In order to help students find books that they are interested in reading, I have invested time and money into developing a classroom library that I hope will entice students. I have stocked my shelves with contemporary fiction, historical fiction, mysteries, romances, science fiction/fantasy, non-fiction, and classics. These books are available for your son or daughter to check out at anytime throughout the school year. All parents have different ideas about what types of books are appropriate for their children. If you are not comfortable with your son or daughter checking out books from me, please plan to make regular trips with them to the library or bookstore so you may shop and choose titles together.

If you want to know more about a book your child is reading, please try the School Library Journal web site, the American Library Association web site, or even . Or call me or email me—I’ll tell you what I know. Because I respect your role as parents and the traditions you hold sacred, if you want me to more closely monitor your child’s choices this semester, by all means, let me know this, and we’ll work out a plan that we can both contribute to.

If you sign this, it means you understand that books won’t be banned in my classroom and your child will be allowed to choose what he/she reads.

Thanks for your support,

Emily Alt English 9 and 9A September 2015

P.S. Our classroom benefits every year from cast offs. Please send books you no longer need to our library, especially ones you’ve loved, if you can bear to part with them.

Better yet… come to class and share a book with us. Share your passion for reading; get to know these amazing students at Northview. I would love to have you join us in the classroom for a Book Talk! Thank you.

I have read and agree to the contents of this letter.

_____________________________ student’s name

_____________________________parent’s name

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