Terrance Is Interested In Weird News

By Author: allan
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Terrance is interested in what he calls the "weird news" and sees the information he gathers on the Internet as something he can draw on in school:

I like to look at the weird news, like yesterday I looked at news about the world's heaviest man wanting to carry the Olympic torch. And I looked at one about a man who sticks crabs on himself for, I guess, entertainment.That's how I like get all, mostly all my information. Like today, I could go on the Internet to look up just random things, and I just bring 'em to school. Thomas Sabo Necklaces

Though Terrance seems most at home with the "plenty of things you can do while you're on the Internet," he is also familiar with print media, which he devours with a similar information-gathering purpose:

I read Jet and People magazines. And I also like the newspaper. I'm a big fan of the news, actually. I like gossip, [about] celebrities, mostly. Like child stars who would have been big but are not big now. And famous marriages and stuff that are breaking up in divorces. Terrance spends his own money, acquired ...
... by raking neighborhood yards and cleaning a nearby barber shop, on newspapers and magazines. Terrance's self-motivated reading outside of school belies the easy binaries often drawn between "readers" and "nonreaders" among our middle and high school students. When asked whether he reads books, however, Terrance sounds more like the reluctant reader familiar to educators:

Uh, it's not really. Well, I got books that I read outside of school, but I don't read them all the time, like every day. I mostly just like lie on the bed or [get] on the Internet or play a game or something. So I really don't read anything when I get home. Even though Terrance describes himself as "practicing every night and all day, reading on the Internet," he neglects to count these literacy practices as reading in the shadow of school-sanctioned book reading. In school, although Terrance admits that "some days I don't feel like reading," he will read, particularly when he is able to connect the reading to his interests:

Today I didn't feel like reading a book for second period, but I read it anyway because it's actually interesting facts that they have in there. I mostly like go to the library and get nonfiction books. I get murders, biography sketches, and mythology books. And I get thriller books.

Terrance's interest in the reading he does for school includes accessible thriller fiction by R.L. Stine, his ROTC field manual, and surprisingly, both for him and his teachers, Shakespeare: Thomas Sabo Rings
In my English class we're reading Shakespeare now, and I'm actually liking that. I didn't think that I would like Shakespeare. I actually like the way they talk, like the way that he had Romeo and Juliet talking in the play. I actually like that, the way that it's just talking.

Terrance describes how he discerns the meaning of what Romeo and Juliet are saying by using the context around puzzling phrases. He similarly works his way through his ROTC manual. On the surface, then, Terrance might appear to teachers to have little interest in reading. Given his documented reading difficulties, teachers might assume they need to limit the level of challenge they offer him as they choose instructional texts. But if we ask Terrance, we find that he brings a wealth of literacy practices and knowledge, as well as some charmingly idiosyncratic interests and motivations, to his reading. Like Terrance, we are in danger of discounting the reading proficiency he has if we limit our survey to school reading tasks.

Terrance notes that "Teachers and my momma and my friends and family helped me actually understand what I was reading." He explains, they got me in support classes where the teacher actually helps me with my work and projects and homework and stuff, so I do a lot of reading in there on the Internet and do projects, and she helped me read and understand everything like that.

Terrance's out-of-school reading demonstrates his facility with new literacies that are interactive, multi-modal, and often Internet-based:

Well, my favorite type of reading is reading on the Internet because there's actually a lot of things I can read and some things, like CNN, MSNBC, like the news. I like to watch the news a lot so I just surf the Internet and watch the news or listen to the news. I also like to read like the billboards that they have outside, them big tall signs.I like to read those especially because some of them now are like high tech and they switch like a slash-up.