Colby Sharp is a husband, father, and a third-grade teacher in Parma, Michigan. He blogs at Sharpread, and is the co-founder of the Nerdy Book Club. He recently wrote an essay for our Open a World of Possible initiative, reflecting upon an early experience with reading, which we've repurposed here. The full version is also available in our new Open a World of Possible book, which you can download for free here.
I'm not one of those reading teachers who loved reading when I was a small child. I didn’t enter Kindergarten a reader and I was never really one of those kids that you would call “above grade level.” Every day, I did what the teacher asked: I followed along in our basal, read aloud when called on, and flipped pages during independent reading, pretending to be engaged with my book. I read, but I wasn’t a reader.
It took me until fourth grade to finally discover the magic of books. My teacher read Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet to the class and, for the first time in my life, I became truly absorbed in a book. I thought about Hatchet all the time and completely identified with the main character, 13-year-old Brian Robeson.
For the rest of the school year, I was obsessed with Brian and his fight for survival in the Canadian wilderness. I even convinced my parents to buy me my very own hatchet. (I still have it!)
Every day after school, I would run home, grab my hatchet, and head over to the woods behind the school. Once I got there, I became Brian: I built shelters, hunted for food (I never killed anything), and I searched for ways to be rescued.
Today, I am teaching in the very elementary school where I fell in love with Hatchet as a boy. My classroom is a mere 30 feet from the woods where I spent all those afternoons pretending that I was that Gary Paulsen character. As I enter my classroom every day and see those woods through the window, I can’t help but get excited about my 28 third graders who are looking for their own place to fall in love with reading.
