Getting South Bronx kids to read is no easy task

by Thorsten Schier

Photo Credit: Thorsten Schier

“Uh, oh!” exclaims the lanky boy sitting in the back row. He half stands up out of his chair, where he only slouched earlier.

Jonathan is excited, not about a video game or a TV series, but a tricky passage of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. “The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, and when he thinks, good easy man, full surely, his greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls as I do.

These lines are from the play’s third act, where Cardinal Mosley, a close advisor to the King, is found out as a trickster and humiliated. “And who do we know that has recently had a similar experience?” Adela Branac asks her 10th grade English class. The class replies almost in unison and even the kids who have so far hung on their seats like tired drapes are awake: “Kanye West!” West, a rap star, was recently lambasted for an outburst at the MTV video music awards during another performer’s acceptance ceremony.

The pop-cultural reference is Branac’s way to keep classic texts relevant and students interested. The 31-year-old teaches at South Bronx Preparatory in Mott Haven, a public High School with 600 hundred students from the neighborhood. Living in one of the poorest areas in New York is not always easy.

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The debate rages how to get kids to read

October 29, 2009

Photo Credit: Andrew Lampard

The last book Glenn Afriyie, 15, read was “Holes,” by Louis Sachar, an adventure story whose main theme is racial equality. It was assigned to him last year in school. The next book the ninth-grade student at Jonathan Levin High School of Media and Communications in the Bronx will read has also been assigned to him through school. He has no interest in reading it. Continue Reading

Reading can be a hard sell in Hunts Point

“I’m not much of a reader,” said high school student Alexander Delacruz. “I’m a class sleeper.” The Hunts Point teenager was not alone. Devin Ricardo, 17, echoed, “Nah, I don’t like to read.” Marquis Liddie, a 15-year-old Banana Kelly High School student, said “I don’t read on my own time.” Continue Reading

At least they’re reading at the Bronx Academy of Letters

By Victoria Rossi

While reading experts warn of a drop in child literacy and wonder what affect the web will have on the generation that has grown up with it, librarian Kelly Overton has amassed a room full of enticing reads for young students. Browse the library bookshelves at Bronx Academy of Letters, and you won’t find many classics. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison makes an appearance, as does The Bronx is Burning, a non-fiction classic about 1970s “baseball, politics and the soul of a city.” But most of the nearly 3,000 books in this newly renovated library aren’t exactly high brow. There are plenty of colorfully-covered Goosebumps, Manga Anime, Guinness Books of World Record, and graphic novels, though—books meant to nudge children, one pulp novel at a time, toward a love of reading and eventually, literature. Continue Reading