Oregon Public Broadcasting

School's back in session, and that means teachers are starting to think about how to inspire students in the coming year. Commentator and high school English teacher Bob Balmer recently caught a glimpse of something that inspired him.

I saw the girl leaning against a pole while waiting for the bus. Her right hand was planted against her hip, but it's what she cradled in her left hand that captivated her and me.

It was a book. An open book. A book she stared at as if the traffic that rumbled past and the dog sniffing at her feet did not exist. 

Such devotion to the printed word shivered my spine, as it would any high school teacher whose job is to teach adolescents English.

In a high school English class the baseline objectives for reading are to expose students to literature, to encourage students to think critically and to make sure students comprehend what they read. 

For most students, reading assigned books is a chore. It's a task met with impassive faces.

Some students will say: Do we have to read this? 

I'll reply: It depends.  Do you want to pass the class?

Or, when that annoying query doesn't make me grumpy, I'll say: Give the book a try. It might surprise you.

This invariably elicits a groan that only a high school student can produce.

The books I assign might include The Great Gatsby, Ricochet River, The Secret Life of Bees, Huckleberry Finn or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, a student may be interested enough in an assigned book to enjoy it, maybe even read ahead of the class. 

It happens. 

Last year while reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, one student, a boy who stumbled over words as if they were high hurdles, liked O'Brien's work so much he checked out a copy of the book from the public library. This was a gold star moment. In that a moment, school transcended passing a test to measure adequate yearly progress. 

And sometimes, if I'm really lucky, the student may ask for another good book. If he likes that book, he might ask for another good book and suddenly a student who considered books the equivalent of tilling rocky, barren ground may have found a lifetime activity.

So as the school year begins, I'll conjure that girl at the bus stop and hope that five, 10, 15 students find a book so intoxicating they, too, carry it to a bus stop.

Once there they wait for the bus, the book open, their eyes roving across the page, gobbling ideas from a universe created by words arranged in an order so captivating the reader won't care if the bus ever comes.