A Parent's Perspective

As I began asking my students to read books of their choice last year, I focused mainly on reminding students how much fulfilling reading can be. Reading enriches our lives by making us think outside ourselves, by connecting us to other people, and by letting us vicariously experience new worlds without leaving our own.

When I chose class texts, some kids loved them, but others simply endured them. Once I invited students to choose, I immediately had more meaningful conversations with kids about books and no longer had to hear kids groan about chapter assignments. Don't get me wrong; we'll still read some texts together to build our close reading skills, but most of our reading will focus on you setting your own goals and building your own list of favorites.  In your first blog, please make sure you tell me about what sort of goal you'd like to set for yourself and how you plan to reach that goal.  The more specific the goal, the better.  (You can choose a number of books or a certain length of book or a certain type of book, or you can challenge yourself to improve your rate to x pages per minute or to finish a book a week - you get the idea.)

My current goal is to find great nonfiction books that introduce issues I think you might be interested in. Since AP language is a nonfiction-based class, we have to practice with the factual, the argumentative, the descriptive writing style that characterizes most nonfiction, but any issue worth talking about has been tackled by fiction and nonfiction writers alike, so I'm springboarding off high-interest fiction by identifying the issues they address and finding corresponding nonfiction. This summer I read Ellen Hopkins' fictional books, Crank and Glass,  that address teen drug addiction, and I think the issue is always relevant, so I've started the year with a memoir called beautiful boy, written by a father who watched his son gradually succumb to drug addiction.

Honestly, I don't know if kids would enjoy this book.  I'm reading it from a parent's perspective, a perspective I willfully took on thirteen years ago. (My little girl is 13 today!) I'm not sure how students will relate to a story told through a parent's eyes, but for me, finding out how David Sheff's son slowly slipped away from him is terrifying. Utterly, heartbreakingly terrifying.

His son Nic, his "beautiful boy," first tries marijuana in sixth grade, the age my youngest daughter is now. She, like the son in the book, is artistic, creative, and yes, a bit rebellious.  She insisted on knowing the truth about Santa at age 6, looked up "questionable" material on Google at age 9, and peppers me frequently with questions about death and life after death. She craves information and wants to KNOW about everything. As I read the book, I wonder how far my own daughter's curiosity will extend someday, and I tell myself she ultimately makes good decisions and wants to please us. There is no reason for fear and no purpose to it.

Still, Sheff's predicament reminds me that raising kids is fraught with unpredictability. One of the main things Sheff repeats is that no one, NO ONE, expects his/her kid to become a drug addict. We assume we can protect them, and when we discover we can't, we feel hopeless. Sheff mentions the "familiarly contradictory" advice he receives from other parents, the ones who tell him "kick him out" and the ones who recommend a "lockup school," and as he does his own research, he discovers that rehab centers usually have success rates in the "single digits" (117, 118, 120).  With such a dismal statistic, he helplessly ponders, "But what else can I do?"(121) I hope, as I hope for my own kids and for all kids, that his son Nic will find a way through life's darker moments and rediscover his own beauty and purpose.