Starting out as a student teacher in Metro Nashville Public Schools in 2003, I was trained in college to acquire my secondary ELA licensure and taught both 7th and 9th grades. During that training, I was given resources and strategies for teaching literature; however, during that student teaching experience, I recognized very quickly that many of my students were not equipped with basic reading skills to be able to not only read the texts I wanted to teach, but perhaps could impact them for the rest of their adult lives.
