I’M ALL ABOUT THE READING. This is how I’ve chosen to define my final semester as a teacher. Reading is the key to everything. I want my struggling readers to catch up and my good readers get ahead.

Over my career I’ve compiled a now virtual warehouse of reading options and materials. We read around the year, inside and outside of class, often two books going at one time — one for pleasure and one for challenge.

Claiming to read and looking at the words doesn’t count in my class. Students must show completion and comprehension through check-for-reading quizzes. We have over 200 books on our list, and it’s growing all the time. The book selections, quizzes and keys were all made by former students.

My annual project is to read 1,000 pages per school year beyond the classroom novels as homework. When a student is one book away from reaching 1,000 in spring, they are allowed to donate their favorite book and make me a 50-question reading quiz. Instead of take a quiz, they make a quiz. The next year those favorite novels, fresh quizzes and answer keys augment the reading list. It has grown for over 20 years.

I have two student TAs who work with me to collect and correct the endless flow of quizzes that pour in regularly, as every book and every reader is differently paced.

What I’m doing this year that’s different, and intensified, is flipping the quiz making. I still allow over-the-finish-line contributions, but this year students who fall behind must make a 25-question quiz — as a way of taking notes — for their current independent book, adding questions to it regularly on a shared Google document that my TAs and I monitor on a regular basis, and then take my quiz. For their efforts, they earn two grades, a double bonus!

Students who drop further behind are noticed and flagged immediately and I tack on a Home Reading Log that must be signed by parents.

When they finish the book, quiz, and log, they take my quiz. If they pass, which is now far more likely, they will earn three grades instead of just one. Triple credit for home reading, such a deal. It’s my going-out-of-business sale.

On a macro level, my reading theory is this: instill reading at infancy with a nursery full of books, words, letters, posters, the baby’s name in wooden blocks, hanging mobiles. Sing word songs. Follow the storybook words with your fingers between the ages of two and five.

Here’s why. As children grow they reach a stage where they begin making decisions about things they like and things they don’t like. They don’t like Uncle Charlie, split-pea soup, monster movies or winter, that’s OK. Just about everything in their life is up for decision of preference.

The key is to instill a comfort level with reading well before the child begins deciding. Then reading won’t be on the table for decision. Reading will be part and parcel of the child. Reading will be used to make better decisions.

If a child’s exposure to reading is held back until the expected reading is too challenging in nature, like in school, the child is prone to decide “I don’t like reading.”

But one can’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t be able to say, “I don’t like reading!” without a rebuttal. We have to read. Non-readers cut their brains off from food. Might as well say they don’t like eating.

A teacher can’t let that stuff go by. “So, little Billy, you don’t like reading. Tough. What else is new?” We need to stop it in its tracks.

I resort to humorous luring. “So, Billy, you don’t like reading? That’s unbelievable. A smart guy like you? Didn’t you read that report that just came out about money and …? Oh, wait, never mind, I guess you wouldn’t have. Sorry. What else is new?”

What do schools do? Do we make kids read, or do we make kids want to read? Sometimes they are not the same. Some roads to hell are paved with good intentions. If you force someone who doesn’t like onions to eat 180 pounds of onions, I’m not sure you’ll score a convert. They may hate onions even more. You’ve got to put the onions in the stew.

As regards writing, which I obviously hold in high esteem, I consider it second cousin to reading. Not all readers need to write, but all writers need to read.

Reading must come first and frequently. To look at writing as its images synthesize into emotions and notions, is to simultaneously be exposed to correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, word usage, paragraph breaks, dialogue formatting, and margins.

Writing is learned from reading. That’s my slogan. Pushing too much writing on non-readers won’t improve the writing much. Those kids don’t know what words can do or how to use them until they see them in action. It’s a horse and buggy, and writing is the buggy.

Trust the books. That’s my slogan for this paragraph. Let the authors weave their magic. How do we get kids wanting to read? Nurture and assist a child at locating the right books, provide a conducive reading environment, nudge as necessary, be marveled at the retelling, and trust the story’s satisfying finish and the reader’s sense of accomplishment to bring long-term, internal, personal reward.

“I finished a book, and I liked it.” That statement marks the road to recovery.

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.