Dear Language Arts and Reading Teachers,
I’m writing to tell you that I have written a novel to engage and entertain those readers who do not enjoy reading. I’m certain you know which of your students fall into this category. Please allow me to briefly share my experience and offer you my book, TOTAL BULLFROG, in the hopes that we can get more of our students finding out that the written word is there for them.
Fifteen years ago, I became an English and Intensive Reading teacher in a public high school near the city. It didn’t take me long to notice that many of my students simply could not connect with any titles they were assigned.
One random gray day during my planning period, while sitting in the English Dept. Office, which was basically a decent-sized closet, lined with shelves of swollen old paperbacks and lean new ones, a man showed up in matching brown shirt and shorts with a hand truck of cardboard boxes. He laughed as my space to grade papers grew smaller and smaller.
“Oh, the books are here,” an older colleague of mine said from beyond the door. “These are the books. These are the ones that are going to help our struggling readers.” I was intrigued. The previous books hadn’t done the trick. Perhaps, these would...
Unfortunately, her enthusiasm was unwarranted, despite our best efforts, our “struggling readers” remained largely uninterested.
Long story short, it was right then and there that I decided to write a book for them.
Few if any of the books, swollen or lean, offered the type of escapism that books had afforded me. And I wanted my students to escape—Escape from their situation, from what they were accustomed to, and, most importantly, whatever it was that was keeping them from the written word. So, I wrote about a kid who escapes from his school, to a field trip, from a field trip to an aviation junkyard, and from there to a parallel universe on the other side of the galaxy, and from there, even further away...
It worked. It wasn’t long until students were coming from all over the school asking for pages. I found out that students in detention would sit and chuckle for the entire hour. Soon other teachers began asking me for pages to give to their students.
Since finishing this book and starting the sequel, I have relocated. I still teach, trading the city for the country. Everything in my life has changed, with the exception of my students. Kids are kids, and so the issues I see with reading remain unchanged. And that’s why the response to my novel has been the same...struggling readers dig TOTAL BULLFROG.
If you’re remotely interested, I hope you’ll contact me. I know what it’s like to try and find titles for students, particularly boys, who “just can’t get into readin’.”
I’m happy to send you a copy or two.
Click here to download the first three chapters. Perhaps give them to your students. I hope you’ll see that the humor is the automatic transmission to keep those pages turning. I hope you’ll see that students will connect with the characters and, most of all, I hope you’ll eventually see more of your students enjoying a book.
TOTAL BULLFROG, the first of the series, is on Amazon where you can also peruse a sample of the work:
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Click here to send me a message.
I also make use of a Vocabulary Building Bookmark that can be downloaded here.
Thank you for your time.
Your Fellow Lang. Arts Teacher,
E.A. Monty
P.S.
Added bonus! They can’t Sparknote it, no summaries online. 🙂