December 21, 2005

CHS students read for pleasure

Central High adopts school-wide reading time on Wednesdays

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer

       School wide every Wednesday for 30 minutes, everyone at Traverse City Central High School drops what they are doing and reads.
      Whatever they want, just for pleasure.
      From 1:30-2 p.m. during sixth hour, pencils are down, lectures shelved and projects on hold as students, teachers and many staff pull out a novel, the newspaper, a magazine or get in some extra studying.
      Wednesday afternoon in Lorissa VanderZee's AP Language and Comp class, students quickly finished up an assignment as the minute hand marched downward. After announcements, they grew quiet and soon were absorbed in their reading: Brave New World, Hamlet, the Traverse City Record-Eagle, Fundamentals of Physics, a collection of essays. The room was hushed except for turning pages.
      The quiet time provides sort of a reset button for the usual scramble of the day.
      "It does help as a break in the middle of the day - you can have fun and read the stuff you don't normally have time to read," said Elizabeth Norton, a junior at the school.
      An avid reader on her own shoehorned around a demanding academic schedule, Norton finds time to read two or three 700-page books each week. A fast reader, the 30-minute segment on Wednesday contributes a bit to her output.
      Though sometimes it is hard to wrench herself away when time is up.
      "Sometimes if I'm reading a really good book, I'll go to the next class and keep reading until I get yelled at," she added.
      Ariana Jordan, a senior at the school, was reading The Shadow of the Wind Wednesday, relishing the interlude.
      "It gives you a break from class," she said. "I like it because after school, I don't have time to read."
      After reading Beowulf for 30 minutes on Wednesday, VanderZee believes that the program helps students and wishes reading time were more often. She lets students who might not have a book with them pull something from a small library in her room - which includes some essay collections plus classics including To Kill A Mockingbird, Loves Labor Lost, Jane Eyre and A Separate Peace.
      "I hope that it might encourage a little bit of reading beyond school work," VanderZee added.
      Principal Mike Murray inaugurated reading time last spring to provide busy students some time for pleasure reading. Citing studies that show reading fluency comes from pleasure reading, he wanted to boost the students' opportunity to explore beyond textbooks and assigned books. He noted that by choosing what they want to read, they are predisposed to like it and that can help improve reading skills.
      Murray noted that he was not certain initially how students would like the idea.
      "We wondered at first, because today's students are so driven, everything has to be practical: how is this going to help me in the world of work?" he said. "We thought there might be some resistance to this but there has not been any and students look forward to it."
      The principal implemented the idea for a while during his tenure at East Junior High but scratched it when the state stopped counting silent reading as instruction time. Subsequent rule changes have provided the flexibility to re-institute the idea at Central.
      Many Wednesdays, Murray will also use the time to read.
      "What I tend to do when I get the opportunity is to take a book and go sit in on one of the classrooms, just walk in and sit down with the students," said Murray. "As far as whether the teachers read: I walked into one of the teachers and he was so intent on reading he didn't even know I was there."