It's a dog's life

     Maybe it's hard to believe, but even teenagers enjoy being read to. All this week, I've been reading aloud to my 8th graders. Just a few pages a day, with tangential discussions and explanations tucked onto the end. After all, I teach reading and writing to Emergent Bilinguals.

    Emergent Bilinguals is the current nomenclature for students who are learning English but learned another language first. Last year Texas called this group English Learners--but isn't every student an English learner? I mean, I think I'm still an English learner... Previous to that, they were called English Language Learners, but for some reason they jettisoned  the word Language. You know, because. Just because. Before that? ESL, which is English as a Second Language. Still-regardless of the confusing change in title, my group is still made of kids who are new to the country and new to the culture.

    Emergent Bilinguals-or, as I like to refer to them--"my students," generally lack some cultural context for our reading passages. So I find supplementary texts, have them do some research, and search for universal truths in Pixar films or Marvel movies. No exaggeration-I teach them what the fictional tool of a flashback is by showing them the scene from Ratatouille in which Anton Ego is transported  back to his childhood by a taste of the aforementioned dish. Yes, it really zooms through his eye back to a scene of his mother comforting him as a young lad who has just wrecked his bike--said comforting done with a plate of stewed tomatoes and zuchinni. Talk about immediate understanding of a concept....

    But this book my kids understood quickly. This book they connected to immediately. This book they listened to enchantedly.

    It's about dogs.

    My Life in Dog Years--by Gary Paulsen. The premise is simple. During the author's adventurous life, dogs have played an outsize role. Saved his life--both physically and emotionally. Helped him connect with other people in his life. Inspired him to set goals true to his own untamed heart.

    So we've done a little research on hunting dogs and dug into some puzzling idioms--
from the wrong side of the tracks" and the like. But the context of loyalty and devotion and purity of spirit that dogs represent-that is already there. We call it background knowledge. It slumbers in our hearts already, only needing awakening by a slobbery full-tongued kiss.

    A playful yip.

    An exuberant tail a-shiver with unquenchable excitement.