staff reader of the month

How wonderful it is to stay at school and teach young and curious students! However, being a teacher also means that your life involves turning up to school every day to plan, teach,, create and conduct assessments, and finally to mark endless piles of students’ compositions. The life of a teacher seems horribly uneventful, but a recent interview with one of our staff members, Miss Aquilina, reveals that teachers do use their time for leisure activities, no matter how big or small. Teachers are able to come up with practical solutions in order to create some recreation time for themselves.

Miss Aquilina is extremely fond of reading. She enjoys reading a variety of genres such as historical fiction, realistic crime, romance even if they are cheesy and cliche, and “sophisticated old school texts”. She, however, dislikes those written in the third person point of view “because they’re hard to relate to”.

Although she has a strong fondness for reading today, this isn’t always the case, as a child Miss says that she “used to hate reading” that she used to “stutter a lot in front of people” but as time passed, her feelings towards reading changed. When she got to Year 7, her stuttering ceased and she became articulate and fluent.

Despite her strong passion for reading Miss Aquilina claims (like many adults) that she just couldn't find the time to read “since I’m working I don’t have enough time to read”. She says she felt the constant urge “to curl up in my pyjamas and just read”. Miss Aquilina says that she was introduced to audiobooks by a colleague and that she thought to herself that since she didn’t have the time to read she would entertain the concept of audiobooks. After testing the Overdrive app and trialling a few audiobooks, Miss Aquilina’s said “this is awesome! ” She found it incredibly practical to incorporate audiobooks into her own everyday routine. She shared, “I put it on when I’m washing the dishes, I put it on when I’m in the shower or I’ll put it on when I’m driving to work... I’ll read at the beach or at the gym”.

After our enlightening interview with Miss Aquilina, we certainly got to know and understand her passion for reading and she also left us with the following thoughts;

• “Students should look more into audiobooks”
• “I read because I love it but I listen to audiobooks for convenience”

Miss reckons we should get more students exploring audiobooks, especially those who are challenged during novel studies. They should be encouraged to listen to audiobooks and see if doing so will benefit them. Not many students get the opportunity to have one-on-one talks with teachers about topics other than their bad grades or “lack of concentration during class” and it was a pleasant experience, thank you to Miss Aquilina for giving up her time and congratulations to her for being Staff Reader of the Month.

-A Chahal and K Randall, Year 10

1 May 2019