Darius the Great is Not Okay, but Building a School Reading Community Is by Kate Youngblood

Kate was an undergraduate student of mine at LSU. She was part of a large group of student and, even more important, it was a smart group. It was one of those cohorts that after just a few meetings you knew most of them were smarter than you. It was going to take some fancy foot work to keep ahead of them and provide them appropriate guidance.  

Through a set of unique opportunities Kate and I were able to work on a project surrounding The Catcher and the Rye and its influence on YA literature. It eventually end up in a paper published in English in Education. You can read it here. There is also a summary of what we were doing and the books we reference from and early blog post way back in 2014.

Kate is more than making her way in the world in her home town of New Orleans. She is also the current 2021 Louisiana High School Teacher of the Year. Congrats Kate! I was thrilled to learn so much by working with you. 

Darius the Great is Not Okay, but Building a School Reading Community Is 
​by Kate Youngblood

“Mrs. Youngblood -- I saw on our survey that you like books with heartbreaking protagonists. I think you should read Darius the Great is Not Okay.”

I received this message from a student in my AP English class on Zoom one morning in early August. I had just finished reading Felix Ever After by Karen Callender, and I was looking for a new YA novel to dig into. The year had just begun, and I was already feeling overwhelmed, unsure of how to build, let alone maintain, community with my students, most of whom I was meeting for the first time on Zoom. This message from Zoe K. felt like the ticket in.

I downloaded Adib Khorram’s novel and got started. Immediately, I fell in love with Darius, lover of Star Trek and tea, a good big brother, and a son struggling to make his dad happy. He had hints of Miles Halter in him (Looking for Alaska), but the setting, mostly in Iran, was completely new. For a year where we’ve been quarantined and homebound, traveling with Darius and visiting his family members felt like going on the adventure I’d been craving. Khorram wrote openly about Darius’s (and his father’s) struggles with depression, about his therapy and medication. Again, in a year where almost everyone I knew was turning to therapy (or turning back to it) this novel and its characters felt familiar and relevant.

The book was wonderful, but, even more exciting to me was the way that I was able to use the novel to get to know a few of my students more. Earlier in the year, I -- along with most of the English department -- had changed my email signature to reflect what we were reading. My ever-evolving signature looks like this:

Currently reading: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Currently listening to: Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
English Department Chair 
Student Council Advocacy Sponsor 
​Benjamin Franklin High School

I switch out the links whenever I start a new novel or audiobook. This change, combined with the massive uptick in the amount of emails my students (and parents and co-workers) are exchanging this year, has resulted in building a richer reading community. 
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When I was reading Darius, another student, Anita, reached out to me and said, “I saw you’re reading a book with a Persian protagonist! I need to read it -- you know my research this year is on helping with food insecurity in Iran.”

Similar student engagement happened each time my signature shifted. When I changed my signature to say I was reading Song of Achilles, Anderson, Annabel, and Tierney all separately let me know that they too were reading the novel. We checked in with each other for emotional support as we tore through Miller’s latest re-imagining.

When I changed my signature to say I was reading Homegoing, Liyah sent me this email: “When you responded to my mom's email she told me ‘Liyah, I know what your teacher is currently reading! It makes me want to read it too.’”

I’ve picked up new books from my students in this way too. When they see in my signature that I’m reading something they’ve read or heard of, they feel more comfortable making recommendations to me. That’s how Maya got me into the Red Queen series this year, and how Amy let me know that I needed to check out The Water Dancer. ​

This small change (which is so easy to do -- I just go into my Gmail settings and update my signature by adding links from goodreads.com) has made all the difference for me in building community in what has largely felt like a groundless year. In Darius the Great is Not Okay, Darius thinks to himself that he doesn’t quite fit into his world, doesn’t quite belong. This year, I think everyone experienced that feeling of loss. Not quite knowing how to connect, not quite sure if who they’d been in the past (both students and teachers alike) fit with who we needed to be this year. But by making the tiny choice to include our reading picks in our email signatures, my department and I have carved out a space for students to feel more connected to us, and us to them. Our signatures now serve as signals to our students. When we’re reading Felix Ever After, our students see that we value nonbinary and transgender voices. When we’re reading All American Boys, our students see that we care about social justice. When we’re reading Darius the Great is Not Okay, our students see that we empathize with trying to find your place. 

I hope so many things about this year end, but I hope I never stop taking the thirty seconds every two weeks or so to update my signature. My hope is that this change even extends as we go back to school, maybe with every teacher posting what they’re reading and listening to outside of their doors. I hope that I never stop feeling that little thrill when a student says to me “Hey I read that too!” or “OMG, I see that you’re reading what I recommended!” ​

Kate Youngblood is in her 7th year of teaching high school English. She currently teaches 9th and 11th graders at Ben Franklin High School in New Orleans, where she also serves as the department chair and student council sponsor. She is the Louisiana 2021 High School Teacher of the Year. The book that changed her trajectory in college was The Catcher in the Rye, but her favorite YA book has always been The Perks of Being a Wallflower. 

Until next week