My college professors really should have stressed the importance of savoring beautiful writing while I had the chance. I analytically devoured the classics without understanding that those would be the last books I’d ever read. While teaching has made me love and respect children even more, it has whittled away any interest for pleasure reading. I’ve become intolerant to most literary devices, cliché sentence fragments, “quoting” from the text and all (save the question mark) forms of punctuation. Truth is my brain feels fuzzy when I try to read works intended for adults.

Oh John Dryden, how was I to know?

So in honor of National Read Across America day, I called upon an old love. It turns out that the bottom of page fifty-two in The Great Gatsby was all the healing I needed.

Many of the classics that were shoved down my throat in high school never made much of an impression. Fitzgerald’s writing felt different, however, as I wondered about my own mysterious green light. At an age that my students unknowingly sprint to, adolescent years are filled with such uncertainty. Fitzgerald emphasized some magnificent recognition and longing held in the human heart. I think every teenager fancies themselves a Jay Gatsby or Holden Caulfield. Throw Esther Greenwood in there for me while you’re at it.

“It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

With Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation right around the corner,

I decided to reread Gatsby and was reawakened by the afternoon. But reading makes me hungry.

Breakfast pizza.

There are tons of recipes out there but you can crack an egg over just about anything.

I leave the pizza to our in house Italian and mix up raspberry red wine spritzers.

Lazy Sundays lose their luster when time is lengthy.

What’s the best way to teach alliteration to six graders? I should probably make them pizza.

Savor this final Sunday before we spring forward into more daylight. The birds have returned to our kitchen window and I’ve got just the pair of pants to cut off into shorts. Warm weather, return to me!

And in honor of Dr. Suess, who also shares the holiday this weekend, remember that “You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.”

xo KMC