Catboy Read Online Free PDF

treated us. He was an adult and we were just kids, but he treated us with respect.
    â€œOkay, before we begin,” he said, “I want everybody to repeat after me.”
    I knew what was coming next. Everybody knew. He always did the same thing before silent reading.
    â€œThe more you read,” he called out.
    â€œThe more you read!” we all said back.
    â€œThe more you know,” he said.
    â€œThe more you know,” we repeated.
    â€œThe more you know,” he said. His voice got louder with each phrase.
    â€œThe more you know!” we yelled back.
    â€œThe further you go!”
    â€œThe further you go!” we yelled out.
    â€œSo read, read, read!”
    â€œSo read, read, read!” we screamed.
    â€œThat’s what I love!” he said. “Now get reading!”
    I’d never known a teacher who was so excited about reading or who got students so excited about it. It was as if we were preparing for the reading Olympics. Mr. Spence had a running total of the books we’d read. The list ran around the walls of our classroom.
    He wanted us to love reading because he loved reading too. While we read, he read as well. He would sit up front, his feet up on his desk, and read. Sometimes it was a newspaper, or Sports Illustrated , which he said was about the best thing in the world. He also read novels— some were adult books but others were kids’ novels. Sometimes he read books that students recommended to him. He also read poetry and short stories and technical sorts of journals, comic books and graphic novels. He said reading was reading; all we had to do was find something we liked.
    I knew he was a teacher and trying to be a good role model for us. But I could also tell Mr. Spence simply loved to read. Then again, who didn’t?
    My eyes strayed up to the big posters on the bulletin board behind his desk that displayed the words for Hello in fifteen different languages, the same fifteen languages spoken by the kids in our class. Some were easy for me to make out, but others were written with letters or symbols that were like little pictures or strange marks. I knew one was Korean and another Chinese— no, not Chinese—Mandarin or Cantonese. There was also Cambodian, Arabic and Russian.
    I tried to imagine how hard it would have been for those kids to come to this country and not speak or read English. It would have been so hard. Amazingly, they all seemed to pick it up fast. There was a kid in our class who had been in the country for less than a year, and he read almost as well as I did.
    I took French, so I understood a little bit about learning a different language. But there were words that were the same in French as in English. Not just the letters of the alphabet, but words that we had borrowed from each other like croissant , auto , café and pizza . No, pizza was Italian.
    Looking up at the words on the posters—those squiggles and symbols and little drawings—I had no idea whatsoever what some meant. It really would have been hard for kids who came from places that didn’t share the same alphabet as we used.
    â€œTaylor,” Mr. Spence said.
    I’d been so lost in thought, I hadn’t noticed him coming over to my desk.
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œIt’s time for silent reading, not silent staring into space.”
    â€œI was reading,” I said. “I was reading the posters on the wall. I was trying to figure out which languages are which.”
    He looked up at the posters. “That’s right. We didn’t say what languages they are. It should be written below. We need to fix that.” He walked to the front of the class. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Taylor has pointed out something we need to correct.” He gestured to the posters. “We have proudly displayed the languages of our class, but we have failed to proudly write which languages they are. Let’s take them down, one by