Photo by Emily Featherston.
Pizitz English teacher Jill Wiggins discusses a passage from “Counting by 7s” with The Brown Bag Book Club on March 7.
In the 2016-17 school year, 81.5 percent of eighth-graders at Pizitz met or exceeded expectations on the ACT Aspire test, up from 78.8 percent and 71.1 percent in the two previous years, respectively.
Based on those scores, it isn’t hard to deduce that students at Pizitz are proficient readers.
What is less obvious, however, are the outside-of-class ways students are showing their love for the written word.
This spring, Jill Wiggins, who teaches seventh-grade reading, started The Brown Bag Book Club — a time for students and faculty to gather together outside a class setting to discuss literature and ideas.
“I wanted to foster a love of reading with something that wasn’t mandated by teachers, but that students could embrace and get excited [about],” Wiggins said.
The club read “Counting by 7s,” by Holly Goldberg, and met during lunch over the course of five weeks.
When she first introduced the club, Wiggins said involvement was initially sluggish.
“At first there was a great reluctance of kids to sign up,” she said, as many were hesitant to add additional reading on top of their regular schoolwork.
Since then, however, Wiggins said the club has filled up, and even those outside the current group are excited to know what book will be picked for the next go-around.
Wiggins said she chose “Counting by 7s” because of its multicultural message and focus on accepting others, as she thinks it speaks to the stage of life many of her students are in.
“I always say that middle school should be a safe place to fall, and it’s a great place to promote empathy and understanding and acceptance,” she said, “and that was really the goal of book club.”
Wiggins said she has also used the club as a way to introduce students to different cultures than they are perhaps used to.
As one of the book’s main characters is from Vietnam, Wiggins had the students and faculty try pho, a traditional Vietnamese soup, as a way to go beyond just discussing the book.
Just as with any book club, the students discussed the plot, themes and motifs in the novel at length, referencing their favorite passages and highlighting what they believed was important.
“It has gone really well,” Wiggins said, noting that the promise of free doughnuts probably hasn’t hurt attendance either.
Seventh-grader Anna Kate Archer said she wasn’t the biggest fan of reading, but decided to join anyway.
“I’m in book club because I don’t like to read,but I like all of the teachers and I want to get better at reading and just get to know more people through reading,” she said.
Wiggins said the spring book club will be reading “When You Reach Me” and “A Wrinkle in Time.”
