By Nathan Nowatney
September 8th, 2015
For the past few years, Hartsburg-Emden has been pushing a new program they’ve called Hartem Life- How Authentic Literacy Touches Every Mind, Literacy is For Everyone.
The idea of this program is to throw practical, real-world reading at the students, so they know how to read, they can know how to comprehend the material they are given, or ‘read authentically.’
But… do classes like Phys-Ed. really need reading? I interviewed Principal Leslie, and here’s what he had to say on the matter.
“Being a former PE teacher myself, I had implemented that [reading assignments] in my classrooms in the past, and I am 100% on-board with that happening here,” says Leslie.
When interviewing Mr. Leslie, he seemed very passionate about the students of Hartsburg-Emden gaining that authentic literacy as described in the Hartem Life program.
When asked what Mr. Leslie felt personally about reading, he had this to say:
“I love to read- I read every day, every night. A lot of it is professional development, but a lot of it is for my own interest- my own fun.”
His favorite book is Seven Secrets of the Savvy School Leader.
I also asked Mr. Leslie if he wished he’d read more in high-school. He responded with this:
“Yeah, looking back on it, in high-school, the only reading that I was made to do was in English class, and maybe Social Studies class. When you go to college, that’s a lot of what you do. When you go into your first year of college, that’ll be a major realization, that’ll be a big part of whatever you take.”
So, for any of you college-bound students out there, or parents or relatives of said students, maybe you should look at this less as ‘the mean old teacher giving lots of work,’ and more like ‘assignments designed to help students read, and understand pieces of writing in the real world.’
