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Book Talk by Lea Kelley
“Miss Kelley, Miss Kelley!”
It’s time for lunch, and I’m standing at the bottom of the stairs that separate the middle school wing from the lunch room, sorting students into lines for hot lunch and bagged lunch, and generally preventing overzealous 6th, 7th, and 8th graders from running over our 1st and 2nd graders, who are still occupying the lunch room.
“Miss Kelley!” The 7th grade boys are quite a group. There are a lot of them. They are everywhere. They yell when they shouldn’t even be whispering. They distract each other in church. They lose their playground equipment at lunch recess, and chase each other around playing strange punching games during morning break.
“Miss Kelley!” They really want my attention. Has someone cut the line? Do they want to complain that they’re still waiting to go in the lunchroom? What could they possibly want?
“Yes?” I answer, finally.
“Miss Kelley, do you pronounce it Tob-I-as or Tob-EEE-as? Because I think it’s Tob-I-as, but he thinks it’s Tob-EE-as.” There are at least five of them ready to engage in this argument, five 7th grade boys, eager to argue over how to pronounce a character’s name in Veronica Roth’s Divergent series.
*****
“What page are you on?” It’s another 7th grade boy, the same boy who is always the first one out the exit door at the end of the day. He’s enrolled in math at the high school, so he usually spends his last period on our campus reading.
“I’m not very far,” I answer, keeping one eye on the young kids running wild around the pick up area and the other on the middle school students streaming past the door that I’m holding open. A 7th grade girl, another advanced math student, has walked out carrying Allegiant in her hands.
“She’s mad because she’s ahead of everyone else,” he says, gesturing to the girl. “She doesn’t have anyone to talk to about the book yet.”
“What page are you on?” I ask, and when he tells me, I point him in the direction of an 8th grader that I know is about as far as he is in the book.
*****
The windows in my classroom face out over the street where older students are dropped off in the morning. An 8th grader exits her car, her book clutched in her hands.
“Quick, what page do you think she’s on?” I ask, and we quickly place our ‘bets’. One of my advisees hurries out into the hallway to find out who guessed correctly.
*****
“Miss Kelley.” Another 7th grader stands in front of me, on a Tuesday early in November. I’m again holding the door at dismissal. “Do you think the Book Stall will have Champion?” He motions to the book that I’m holding in my hand. I’m waiting for the 8th grader at the top of the waiting list to exit so that I can give it to him. It’s release day, and we have two copies each for 7th and 8th grade.
“I’m sure that the Book Stall will have Champion,” I assure him, and he rushes down the stairs and around the block toward his house.
An hour later I’m in a back office at the bookstore, and I start to tell Robert, the children’s bookseller who visits our school with authors, about the conversation. “So, you’ll probably get a visit from—“
“He already came in with his dad,” Robert tells me.
“Amazing,” I say.
*****
“Miss Kelley, I was crying in math class today when I finished [TITLE REDACTED],” an 8th grade boy tells me, and the other students nod in agreement.
“Miss Kelley, I threw my book against the wall when I finished,” another boy tells me, and I tell him that I wanted to do the same.
“Miss Kelley, I wanted to cry but I couldn’t because my older sister was driving and she hasn’t read it yet and I didn’t want her to know how it ended,” says an 8th grade girl who has joined us at the Book Stall on a Sunday night to meet a favorite author for pizza and a Q & A.
“I forgot how sad the ending is,” an 8th grade girl tells us as she joins the class on our imaginary reading rug for read-aloud. She has just finished reading a different class favorite for the second time.
*****
“Yeah, well, I think Brian’s a jerk and she can do better,” an 8th grader argues vehemently. School ended ten minutes before, but a group of four or five 8th grade girls lingers. The principal, walking past on her way to a meeting, shoots them a quizzical look. We don’t have any 8th graders named Brian.
“They’re talking about a book,” I say.
It’s what we do.
*****
Lea Kelley, a Chicago resident, teaches 8th grade humanities at St. Francis Xavier in Wilmette, IL. She had not yet had any coffee when she agreed to write a post during the last days of NaNoWriMo. She writes about teaching at Miss Kelley Writes (misskelleywrites.blogspot.com), though not so much during November, and on Twitter at @leakelley. She arrived back from NCTE/ALAN with 17,495 words to go in her NaNo novel, so if anyone asks, this post was written by one of her characters.
Your character writes dialogue very well. Some conversations don’t get interrupted, even by curious outsiders who butt in to ask about “Brian”. It is a great day when book talk pulls people together. Keep up the conversation.
Thanks for the post. I love hearing about kids who are totally subsumed in books. Gives me hope for our future!
Love it! It is great that kids are talking books at your school. And I’m a bit jealous that you have a local bookstore so close to “feed the need!”
We are extremely fortunate to have such a great bookstore nearby.
Wonderful!
As a parent of younger children who love to read, I hope that they have this passion for books in 6/7/8 grade, and that they have a teacher like you who encourages it!
It’s a pleasure to hear, and a pleasure when I get stopped at school for another book recommendation. Love hearing about your students and that book love!
Awesome! I love book talk!!
This was truly elating 😀 How wonderful!
That is very interesting and it is nice to see kids that excited about reading books.
That is very interesting and it is nice to see kids that excited about reading.
I loved this post! It is a good day when I have a group of your students at the library door asking if I have a book that was just released that day. This makes me happy because first, they know the release days for most of the highly anticipated books, second that they know I will do my best to have them ready for check out for our amazing group of readers. We are blessed with Ms. Kelley our other LA teachers here at school, and our indie bookstore The Book Stall. We are building a group of enthusiastic and eager readers. Love it!
It is also huge that we have such a super librarian!
*sob*
THIS is what teaching was supposed to be like, instead of what it ended up being (which was tons of arguments about behavior, and very boring assignments on parts of speech that everyone hated). These are the little pieces of sweetness mixed up in the whole loaf, as it were. Glad you have so many to share.
Thank you for sharing book talk and kid stories. While reading yours, I could learn writing book talk in different ways. Awesome
Fun to share the vignettes of book loving students. Now I have a new writing idea. 😉