10 middle school boys start a book club at their school
Teachers now can't keep up with the demand.
A group of ten fifth graders at Truesdell Education Campus started a book club for minority boys, and now, teachers can hardly keep up with the boys' demand for more books.
A group of ten fifth graders at Truesdell Education Campus started up a book club for minority boys, and now, teachers can hardly keep up with the boys’ demand for more books.
According to the Washington Post, it all started when a fifth grader complained about his results on a citywide English test. He didn’t think those results reflected his actual reading ability, so his principal, Mary Ann Stinson, gave him a book and told him to read it.
That book, “Bad Boy: A Memoir,” by Walter Dean Myers, ended up changing the face of the school.
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The assistant principal, Michael Redmond, saw the reading assignment and called in a couple other boys to join in, so that the assignment wouldn’t feel like a punishment.
Redmond told the Post that by the end of the day, not only were all three boys engrossed in the book but their friends had noticed what they were reading and wanted in. Redmond had to order more copies of the book, because the library couldn’t keep up with the demand.
As a result, Redmond started a book club accepting the first 10 boys that expressed interest.
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Now, the club is the most popular club on campus and meets once or twice a week before school to discuss what they’ve read. Their last book was “Bad Boy” and the group has now moved on to “Monster,” a Myers novel depicting a teenager on trial for murder.
“These books are about people”
Kids like 10-year-old Kemari Stark are inspired by the club and by the new perspectives the books bring.
“In our classes, there are way less interesting books, and these books are way more interesting,” Kemari said. “These books are about people.”
“The books that we read here, we can relate to,” 11-year-old Devon Wesley, who is excited to read about boys who look like him, said.
The teachers are excited too, especially at the chance to shatter the stereotype that boys of color don’t read.
“What a beautiful thing, for teachers to be able to see boys who look like this be so into reading,” Redmond said. “We did not imagine that kids would be this serious about reading and about doing something that we didn’t ask them to do.”
