What a Paper Airplane Can Tell a Teacher

I started this school year with two new ninth-grade classes, almost 60 teenagers I was meeting for the first time. Our first week is a special school week in Romania, and before thinking too much about what we would do together this year, I simply wanted to get to know them.

So I chose an activity I have been using for many years: the paper airplane.

I asked each student to write three things on it: a book they remembered fondly, something they enjoyed doing and felt comfortable sharing, and one visible detail about themselves, so that later we could discover who each airplane belonged to.

Then the airplanes flew across the classroom. Everyone picked one up and tried to find its owner. There was laughter, questions, a little confusion and, almost without noticing it, we were already beginning to learn things about one another.

The paper airplane is only a pretext.

Over the years, I have used it in different classes and workshops, changing the questions depending on what I wanted to discover. This time, because they were my new ninth graders, I was particularly curious about the books they remembered.

And there were all kinds of answers: Matilda, The Little Prince, Wonder, The Hobbit, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Robinson Crusoe, Around the World in Eighty Days, Amintiri din copilărie and others. Some surprised me, while others were familiar from previous generations, but together they gave me the first small clues about the readers I had in front of me.

The question about books also connected naturally with what we are about to do in Romanian language and literature. Our new ninth-grade curriculum begins with a module called “Reflections on Literature”, which starts from students' own reading experiences. So we began with something very simple: a book they remembered fondly.

I still don't know what kind of readers these almost 60 teenagers are. I don't know who reads a lot and who reads very little, who reads with pleasure and who reads mostly because they have to, who abandons books, who returns to them, or who needs to talk about what they have read.

But these are things I want to discover.

I won't get to know almost 60 teenagers in one lesson. Of course I won't. But somewhere among those colourful paper airplanes, we began.