PHOTO BY Benjamin Hager
At the same time every day, silence falls on Jack Wallace’s eighth-grade English class. “You don’t hear anything for the next 15 minutes,” he says. That’s because the students are poring over books, devouring popular titles such as “The Hunger Games” and “The Last Olympian”. “It takes two or three minutes to pull the books away from the kids,” Wallace says.
It’s all part of the Marsh Middle School teacher’s classroom challenge to read 1,000 books by the end of the school year. So far, they’ve topped 700 books. Wallace tracks the progress through a blog where students write reviews. In fact, he has garnered full participation without setting any requirements. There’s no grade for this lesson.
“It’s all student-run,” Wallace says. “I think it’s because reading has become a really big social thing. They’re always recommending books to each other. That’s been really cool.”
At just 23 years old, Wallace is one of 10 Marsh instructors under the Teach for America program, which sends teachers to schools with a high number of economically disadvantaged students. Originally from Milwaukee, Wis., Wallace graduated from Yale University with a history degree. He devotes about 80 hours a week to his job — from tutoring at 7 a.m. to mulling over lesson plans at 9 p.m. But Wallace says that’s true of every teacher at Marsh.
And he isn’t the first one to launch a “1,000 books” challenge. “Some kids here have never read a book, and they’ve just made huge gains [academically],” he says. “And it’s not just in this classroom that it’s going on.”
Follow Jack Wallace’s English class at tcmarshreaderreview.wordpress.com.
