Hey Grace! I really enjoyed reading Ready, Player One. I liked how it was a modern twist on dystopian novels in the sense that it incorporated cool technologies. I also liked how school was online yet he could still be present in the classroom. That’d be fun. You also get to choose how you look like with your avatar, which is fun but also sad when you have to transition back to real life and deal with how you actually looked. Have you seen the movie Wall-E? I was reminded of how in Wall-E everyone is so overweight and no longer uses their muscles so they just float around in their wheelchairs. It seems like the world in Ready, Player One is quickly headed in that direction!

“The virtual world once again seems crucial to him because his peers are pretty much forced to judge him not by their looks, but by their personality and smarts.” I love that you said that! I agree. It’s cool that you can really create what you want to be and show the world what you want them to see. It reminds me of social media today. We can create these profiles online and choose to show friends, family, or acquaintances the things we want them to see. Except right now our social media is focused on sharing pictures from our lives so we can’t really hide who we really are… yet. It must be pretty freeing for Wade to not be held back by the way he looks or his physical limitations. He is incredibly intelligent, focused, and synthesizes cool references in order to advance in the Oasis.

I think the Oasis is almost essential for the people living in that time of destruction to escape from the horror of their real life momentarily. Yet at the same time it is the reason their conditions are so terrible. Instead of working in a positive direction toward bettering their societies in the real world, they are focusing on living in a world purely based on fantasy. I mean, I love the Sims but I would never give up my real life connections with people in order to interact online. We can do that now without giving up personal connections. That’s one thing about today’s society, we can connect with people we would have never connected to without the internet across the world but we aren’t giving up our personal, real life connections in exchange for that. At least not yet!

Let me know what you’re reading next :) I loved reading your blog!

In Miller’s first chapter, “Wild Readers Dedicate Time to Read,” I found many ideas to sponsor my students’ reading habits that I had never thought of before. Teaching reading seems difficult to me because I think a lot of students already struggle a lot with finding the time to read and finding material that is interesting to them. It’s scary to teach because I fear I will, somehow, turn my students off to reading. I need to make it look cool! Luckily, I have always really enjoyed reading and I am already pretty knowledgable about the different types of books that are out there that my students will enjoy but I could be reading a lot more Young Adult books to recommend to my students.

Teaching reading excites me because I know that once my students find books that interest them they will fall in love with reading the way Donalyn Miller and I have. Last semester I read the book Readicide by Kelly Gallagher which I really recommend to all future teachers! In the book, Kelly discusses the “reading flow,” which is basically when you absolutely lose yourself in a book and cannot stop reading. I honestly believe that once students get into the reading flow once they will get addicted to the feeling of losing yourself in a book they adore. In Readicide, Kelly talks about how teachers in school do not allow their students to get into this reading flow because they assign a lot of reading in chunks. I thought it was awesome that Miller had comfortable bean bag chairs in her classroom and allowed her students so much uninterrupted time to read. Having such a peaceful environment in her classroom sponsors the students’ reading flow and I need that sort of environment in my classroom. I loved how Miller encourages her students to read wherever and whenever they like and I really enjoyed seeing their logs of the places they pulled out their book to read.