For the last four weeks, I've prodded my little freshmen as we've plowed through Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird so fast that it ought to be a crime. Along the way, we've studied vocabulary, had great socratic discussions, written personal narratives, and examined primary sources. 

Selfishly, I always arrange to read aloud in class critical chapters from any book I assign. For Mockingbird, this meant the first chapter, a few in the middle, and of course, the final chapter. Most of my students were able to keep up on the independent reading (at least they were able to make it seem so in their chapter assessments), so by the time we were ready for chapter 31, my assessments indicated that the students knew this story well enough to connect with the content of that last part.

So I proceeded to read aloud the final chapter. If you haven't read the book recently or ever, don't bother going back to read this chapter out of context…I'm afraid you'll have to start from chapter one. Each class period, as I read that chapter aloud to my little 14 and 15 year olds, I noticed the same subtleties happening in my room:

There was no typical teenage fidgeting. 

There were no hands shooting up to ask for the bathroom pass.

There were no eyes wandering in daydreams toward the windows or the cute kid a few rows over.

And unlike sometimes when as I read aloud and as I turn the page and begin the top line of the next page I can hear pages ruffling as students realize they had zoned and fallen behind, this time I could hear pages shuffling as I was reading the last line of a page–they were ready for more, raring to read on.

And then, when I read the last line and I closed the book and looked up, in each class period a handful of kids were discretely wiping an eye. Then the silence would settle on us all for a few moments…not the kind of silence in a classroom where kids are afraid to talk or waiting for that one kid with all the answers to speak, but the kind of silence where you can really tell that everyone is truly thinking.

No, that last chapter is not the most profound in all of American literature. It is not sad. But as one student–an admitted "non-reader"–wrote in a journal entry, "it was simple and beautiful." 

No matter how many of my kids pass the HSPE, no matter how many ace the common assessments, no matter how much data I gather or is gathered about me, nothing in my professional life will ever be as important to me as this kind of thing… it is in these moments that I finally have hope that I have actually made a difference.