As junior high English teachers, we see how the push to standardize curriculum and prepare for tests has us spending more time in meetings and reviewing data than reading the latest young adult novels. We ask students to be “readers,” but are we even keeping up with the latest titles or up-and-coming authors? This school year, we wanted to do something for our students and ourselves to make reading class, well, about the power and joy of reading again. We wanted students to find their way back to books this year. We wanted to find our way back to books this year — to be readers again.
