Fall Semester Will Be Full of Reading

Fall semester 2016: I'm beginning my fourth year at Clark State Community College and my first at Sinclair Community College.

Every semester at CSCC, I've tried to integrate projects and activities for my students to do outside of the classroom, that break the normal molds of "read this, read that." My go to projects usually involve improving grammar and everyday communication mixed with projects like "Pay it Forward" and traditional book reports.

This semester I've decided to challenge my students to read more and blog about what they read (how the piece impacts them, what they like about it, so on).

A basis I use for my courses involves students understanding the concepts of why we read and why we write: to be or to entertain, to evoke emotion, to educate, and to be or to enlighten. This concept then builds further into the beginning stages of analyzing what we read beyond just memorizing something; address your response to something you read then determine what the writer did to make you feel that. The better we can analyze a writer's motives when we are in the role of reader, the easier it then becomes to emulate motives in our own writing.

Why this project? Why make them read? Why make them blog?



Well, and this is just my opinion, even with all the iPhones and tablets out there, and with reading material at our fingertips, are we still really reading just to read anymore? Most of us read something because we are told to, i.e., in class. And at that, most of us are just reading to memorize something for a test because the teacher tells us to or something at work because our boss told us to. But how many of us, and how often, are we really absorbing what we read? How many of us are using the things we do read on a daily basis to really shape our thoughts, emotions, perspectives? I'm talking beyond the Pokemon Go map, beyond the facebook statuses, beyond the textbook, beyond our iPhone screen full of text messages littered with emojis and abbreviated words.

And the blogging thing, well, it's a neat concept. A virtual diary... our own little space to jot down our own thoughts to share with our peers and not be criticized, not be condoned about what we are holding in our hands and letting our eyes take in... but rather, to be supported and encouraged to keep reading, to keep sharing.

So we are all blogging this semester. I hope that most students will take to it, once they get their blogs up and running. I figured if I asked them to take on this task, then I should contribute as well. Now, I might not be able to post every week, since I'll be reading everyone else's posts, but I want to demonstrate that this project is really pretty easy and is just a matter of sitting down, thinking a bit more about something we've read, and share with a viral audience (their peers) the impact a said piece of literature has on us.

So here's the first post of the semester:

The last book I read is called "The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace," by Jeff Hobbs. I actually just finished it before the semester started. I first became aware of this book last September during Sinclair's Writing Week, where a member of the faculty read an excerpt from it. I partook in the festivities to read an excerpt from one of my short stories that was published in Flights. It was exciting for me! Anyway, I heard the excerpt from this book and put it on my summer bucket reading list.

In a nutshell, it's about a intellectually gifted African American man who survived the mean streets of Newark, N.J., where he was raised by a single mother, who worked day and night to send him to a private school, only to find himself a college student at Yale University. Upon graduation, he moved back to Newark and embarked on a mission to find riches and success... thus leading to his demise. A fairly habitual weed smoker dating back to high school, his adult years were spent making plans to find success via way of dealing drugs. Of course, it ends just as the title of the book alludes to, but not without an effort on his part to return to his old high school as a teacher in hopes of showing the younger teens of his neighborhood that they did have options, there were ways out.

The writer of the book was Peace's college roommate, and the amount of time he took to research and write this book... writers and readers alike will appreciate. The details. The perspectives. As a writer, I found I had much respect to give the author. An easy task he did not take on.

As for the story itself, the story of Robert Peace... In reading this kid's story, his ghost has found  a place in my heart. Despite being angry with Peace often while reading his story, I got it. I understand the mission he was on. He had a vision for his American dream, and while I don't applaud the way he went about making his money to fund his dream, it was the way he knew. On the other hand, the anger I felt came from in reading his story, in learning what he overcame, and how he got to Yale, only to make the decisions he made about pursuing his American dream, which led me to think that he never cared about making better decisions to get where he wanted to be in life. Against the warnings from friends and family and the secrets he kept from his mother, he went to great lengths to hide the fact that he didn't care about breaking the stereotype life that he held in such high regard.

Everything he tried to teach the kids he worked with seemed all for not because he lived a secret life that exemplified exactly what it was that he as a teen tried to escape; showing them that they could too. However, he put himself right back in it.

His story saddened me most of all. His story reminds me that we aren't all afforded the luxury of escaping where we come from, who we are. Or are we? More importantly, do we want to?