I’ve always been a voracious reader. As a child I read in my free time in class, I read in the car, and I read under my blanket with a flashlight long past my bedtime. It was this love of reading that pushed me through even the more difficult books I was assigned in high school and it was this love that guided me towards a career as an English teacher. I wanted to encourage a new generation of readers to love literature as much as I did.

My love for the written word carried into college and then quickly disappeared. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy books; I did. The problem was I never had time to read what I wanted and my free time was minimal. I didn’t pick up a book for pleasure until the semester after I finished student teaching, reading my way through book after book while I substitute taught until the end of the school year.

That brief workload reprieve quickly disappeared when I found myself in a small school with four different levels of English. Over the next several years of teaching and then graduate school, I found little time for pleasure reading. Once I discovered that audiobooks were an excellent way to pass the time while also knocking books off of my “to read” list, I finally learned to love words again. The more books I listened to, the more books I wanted to read, and I finally started dusting books off of my “to read” shelf and slowly moved them to the “read” shelves. But I still struggled between the need to do my job well while also being an attentive mom to my babies at home, and my desire to read to myself instead of my own kids.

Then I decided to bring back silent sustained reading to my high school classroom. Unlike my first few years teaching, when SSR time gave me a chance to breathe and get some work done, I decided I was going to lead by example. I didn’t just plan to force my students to read books of their own choice for twenty minutes; I was going to pick my own books and read for fun alongside them. For years I had read articles by teachers who proclaimed the worth of writing alongside students and sharing their own words with them. If that was true, then there had to be some kind of value to reading with my students as well.

I started with fifteen minutes at the beginning of our one-day-a-week block period and when my AP/Dual Credit students begged me for more time, I bumped three of my class periods up to twenty. I didn’t complain about the loss of five more minutes of class time. Instead, I chose to embrace the extra fifteen minutes a week of uninterrupted reading time. I came to treasure that reading time as much as many of my students.

The English teacher has learned to love reading again. I don’t just love it, I need it. When the timer goes off I find myself just as engrossed in my books as they are, forcing myself to sometimes stop in the middle of a paragraph so that I can start teaching class. I’m not foolish enough to believe that each and every one of my students is fully embracing our reading time, but I continue to pursue being a good example, working my way through my “to read” list, reading fiction and non-fiction, adult and young adult, thin and thick books. I don’t want them to just think I read classics or a specific genre. I want them to see the value of reading from the literary spectrum.

As with most things in education, I probably won’t know the impact of reading along with my students until long after they graduate. But even if it is just that the English teacher has learned to love reading again, it will have been well worth it.