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—Michelle Commeyras—

TEACHER EDUCATOR

Michelle has taught undergraduate and graduate studentsin the University of Georgia’s Department of ReadingEducation since 1991. Her previous teaching experiencesinclude teacher assistant in a preschool for children withspecial emotional needs and disruptive behaviors, teacher assistant in a junior high school classroom for studentsconsidered behaviorally disturbed, visiting teacher leadingcritical reading discussions with elementary school childrenidentified as gifted, teacher of U.S. history at a privatesecondary school, museum educator at the John F.Kennedy Library, sixth-grade teacher in a public school, teacher of life skills to adults considered profoundly mentallyretarded, and Visiting Fulbright lecturer on gender issues at the University of Botswana in southern Africa. A favorite reading of Michelle’s during the Readers as Teachers and Teachers as Readers seminar was KatherineFrank’s biography of Mary Kingsley. Michelle gets vicarious pleasure from reading about women travelers andexplorers, particularly those who have gone to Africa.Kingsley was a woman of Victorian England who traveledin west Africa with black Africans as her guides andcompanions.

CHAPTER 1

We Laughed Often:We Readers as Teachers

Michelle Commeyras

or 15 weeks we met. We were 19 women readers who teach.We were 19 teachers who read. And we laughed often as weexplored how our personal reading mattered to ourteaching and how our teaching lives mattered to our reading lives. Iremember laughing somewhat self-consciously when Barbara Robbins, a reading and language arts teacher of academically giftedseventh- and eighth-grade students, talked about reading

Crazy in Alabama

(Childress, 1993), a book her mother had recommended.Barbara warned us that it was “crazy and demented.”She told us that the narrator’s aunt kills her husband andchops off his head with an electric kitchen knife. This is before theaunt heads for Hollywood, California, where she’s going to be onthe television show

Beverly Hillbillies

. I think we were laughing inhorror when Barbara explained, “She’s heading for Hollywood, andshe’s got Chester’s head in a hatbox. She can’t find a respectful wayto get rid of it, so she keeps going along with it.”Barbara then observed, “And it makes no sense. There’s thisdichotomy. She poisoned her husband; then, when she thought hewas not really dead, she decapitated him. Then she whipped outhis head in front of her Mama when her Mama didn’t believe thatshe killed him.”Lori Whatley, who teaches first grade, got a big laugh from uswhen she said, “I know those people in that book. They live inThomsen, Georgia.” She, too, had read

Crazy in Alabama

.Barbara told us that she had told her students that very day aboutan episode she had just read in

Crazy in Alabama

. She was usingthe episode to make a point about one of the vocabulary words

they were studying—

antiseptic

. Just imagine how intrigued herseventh-grade students were when she told them that while thenarrator is cutting grass for an older lady, he is hit in the eye with a rock. His eye falls out on his cheek. In shock he runs to tell the oldlady what has happened, and when she sees him, she keels overdead. Barbara explained that it was not antiseptic for his eyeball tobe out of its socket.Barbara said that her seventh-grade boys were very keen toknow the title of the book, but she did not tell. She figured if theyknew the title, they would go get the book and the outrageouscontent would surely lead to some flack from parents.Betty Shockley Bisplinghoff, assistant professor in theDepartment of Elementary Education at the University of Georgia and cofacilitator of the seminar, was intrigued with the idea of cultivating mystery in presenting oneself as reader to students.Extending the idea, Betty B. imagined the first day of school withthe teacher saying, “You know, I have been with a book before thatscared me so badly that I had a hard time walking into a bookstore.”She saw the potential of this kind of drama in setting up seventhgraders to want to be readers.Our conversations that evening and thereafter blendedsharing what we were reading with one another, what we weredoing to share our reading selves with our students, and furtherimagining the possibilities for connecting ourselves as readers withourselves as teachers. Our point of departure was the observationthat in the International Reading Association’s position statement

Excellent Reading Teachers

(2000), no mention is made of theteacher being a reader, that is, having a reading life beyond that of reading to students and being familiar with children’s literature. Weseminar participants shared the goal of discovering the potentialsignificance of the teacher as reader.We may have laughed often and thoroughlyenjoyed laughing, but there was no doubt thatwe were serious about reading and teaching. In just three hours that evening early in our journey, we covered many topics that addednew possibilities to what one could do as a teacher of reading that was not commonly

Commeyras

We seminar participants shared the goal of discovering the potential significance of the teacher as reader.