I made Amazon wish lists and asked friends to buy a few titles. I collected young adult books for my students to read and built a sizable classroom library. Even with the form deleted from the Internet, students still came in saying they had used it the night before. I took down the form when students gamed the system again by typing the same responses day after day (some did the same on paper). I changed the form to time-stamp when they hit submit. Students gamed it by saying that they were sure they had submitted it the night before. Later, I created an web form for students to type in their reading logs online. With less room to write, some students wrote more. When I wasn’t getting enough writing back from students, I squished blank lines together and made the spaces smaller.
Some had lots of instructions at the top for how long to read and how to write about the books. Some were multiple pages long with stars and pictures of books, and gave students ample room to write responses to what they read. I made dozens of different reading logs over the course of two years. " One basic tool for holding students accountable for reading outside of class is a “reading log.” This is essentially a paper where a student tracks what he or she read, for how long, and how many pages. I got a lot of books for Christmas, but most hilariously, not one but 2 copies of FEMINIST RYAN GOSLING.I thought I would just have to make myself scarce for the week in order to get through it, but then I decided to stick to Brian Kellow's biography PAULINE KAEL: A LIGHT IN THE DARK instead. The upside to cleaning out that room was that I found my parents' copy of Pauline Kael's FOR KEEPS, which is out of print.(They're all bound for the Half Price Books in Northridge, in case you are local.
But it made getting rid of old clothes feel really easy. A lot of them weren't even that hard to part with, which indicates that I still own too many.
This won't really count, but in the process of cleaning out some of my old stuff I was able to part with about 50 books from my old childhood bedroom.In particular, "that book didn't have a romantic subplot or focus on one person." You read it here first. Filmbook extra: My mom and I watched "Pitch Perfect" (the 2012 feature film starring Anna Kendrick) and she reports that it is not at all like the nonfiction book it's based on by Mickey Rapkin.