Rah! Rah! Rah! Sis boom bah! School Is in Session, and It’s Time to Get Fired Up about Reading and Writing, a guest post by McCall Hoyle

McCall Hoyle, avid reader, high school English teacher, and published author of young adult books, shares her thoughts on the importance of firing up everyone involved in education when it comes to reading and writing for pleasure. Yes, just for pleasure. No grades. No logs. No strings attached.

As a high school English teacher, my job is to teach standards that pertain to reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I could do that all day long using nonfiction and classic works of literature. But teaching is about so much more than content. Like many educators, and I include librarians in the educator category, I see teaching as a calling. For me, teaching language arts is about more than decoding and comprehending words or constructing grammatically correct sentences.

Teaching language arts is about inviting students into the humanities to explore the lives of others and to wrestle with where they belong in this world. I also really, really want students to take risks and experiment with using their own voices aloud and on paper. And what better way to facilitate reading and writing than by immersing students in tons and tons of popular fiction?

Nancie Atwell, my teaching role model and hero, cites a study in her book The Reading Zone. She references a study conducted by the International Reading Association that shows the single greatest indicator of academic success across contents is the amount of time young people spend reading for pleasure. If we trust Atwell and the IRA, and I certainly do, we best start spending lots and lots of money on all kinds of books. We must stock our public and school libraries, and even more importantly, our classrooms with high-interest books. Teens need to be surrounded by books. Books need to be displayed face out, and they need to represent a wide variety of genres, and characters, and authors that kids look like, sound like, and can relate to.

We know these things, yet time and time again, we in the classroom get sucked into the stresses and pressures imposed by pages worth of standards and hours and hours devoted to high-stakes tests, and in libraries there are the pressures of recommended summer reading lists and encouraging students to read what their parents and teachers want them to read.

Reading for pleasure matters. Experimenting with writing, and that includes poetry and fiction, not just five-paragraph essays matters too. That means we must arm ourselves with knowledge. We must charge ourselves to read more professional texts. Think the new release–180 Days by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle or an oldie but goodie, like Nancie Atwell’s The Reading Zone. We must vow to set aside time and money to attend professional conferences such as ALA and NCTE. And we must remind ourselves and each other daily of the importance of the work we do as teachers and as librarians.

Today, as we look out at the school year ahead, we must suit up in our metaphoric cheerleading uniforms and pick up the biggest megaphones we can find, and shout from the rooftops the principles that guide us in authentically teaching kids what it looks like to be literate in the twenty-first century.

Meet McCall Hoyle

McCall Hoyle writes novels for teens about friendship, first love, and girls finding the strength to overcome great challenges. She is a high school English teacher. Her own less-than-perfect teenage experiences and those of the girls she teaches inspire many of the struggles in her books. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s spending time with her family and their odd assortment of pets—a food-obsessed beagle, a grumpy rescue cat, and a three-and-a-half-legged kitten.

McCall’s second novel, Meet the Sky, releases September 4, 2018 from HarperCollins/Blink. It’s a story about a seventeen-year-old girl named, who’s struggling to keep her fractured family together. Sophie’s all about sticking to a plan—keeping the family business running, saving money for college one day, and making sure her mom and sister don’t endure another tragedy. Then a hurricane forms off the coast of the Outer Banks, and Sophie realizes nature is one thing she can’t control. She ends up stranded in the middle of the storm with Finn, the boy her broke her heart freshman year.

To learn more about McCall, her teaching, or her books find her on the web at mccallhoyle.com.

You can also find her on the following social media platforms.

Instagram: @McCallHoyleBooks

Facebook: @McCallHoyleBooks

Twitter: @McCallHoyle

Filed under: Guest Post