One of my first memories is sitting in my mother's lap while she read to me. This one-on-one connection could not have lasted for long, because I have five younger sisters, but a seed of joy, contentment, and wonder was planted then, and I have been a reader ever since.

From childhood I remember The Five Little Peppers, Little Women, Little Men (I loved Little Men, probably because there were so many females in our house), and The Bobbsey Twins. When I was old enough to baby-sit I was addicted to Nancy Drew books. I made $.75 an hour, so I would sit and count on the hour (75, 1.50, 2.25, 3.00...) to calculate how much money I was making so I could figure out how many new Nancy Drew mysteries I could buy. I hated finishing one without a proper backup. As an adult, I still read just about anything I can get my hands on, but I can always count on Pat Conroy, Anne Lamott, Tom Robbins, and I can read J.D. Salinger over and over.

Reading in Pre-GED
One of the reasons I love teaching a pre-GED class is that I can incorporate my love of literature into my teaching. I teach pre-GED at the Adult Collaborative of Cape Cod for Educational Support Services (ACCCESS) program. Pre-GED covers the same basic material that the GED program covers, but we move at a slower and more thorough pace. Each student has a different educational background, has different strengths and challenges, and learns at a different rate. While the core lesson of the day is the same for all, the students work with the material at a level that they are able to handle. We also have tutors in the classroom to assist with this type of divergence.

My time with students in class is limited to two times per week, three hours per session, and most of my students have so many family and work obligations that I cannot assign any substantial homework. Therefore, I have a very small window of opportunity to share my passion, expose my class to different forms of literature, and prepare for the GED examination. Further, some students find the Literature and Arts section very difficult. Recently, though, I have found some interesting ways to bring my own reading into my pre-GED class and still make it meaningful for my students.

Grammar and Literature
As I was reading Beach Music by Pat Conroy, I noticed that I was laughing at the dialogue. In class, we had just covered the use of the comma to separate dialogue from the tag line, and using the dialogue in this book seemed to be a wonderful way to illustrate what we had just studied. I also hoped, of course, that examining the dialogue would spark their curiosity about the rest of the book.

I copied a particularly funny section of dialogue to illustrate the grammar rule, and brought at least two copies of the book in case any of the students wanted to borrow it. They enjoyed the passage (a dialogue between a father and his three daughters), the grammar made a little more sense, and more important, two of the students left with a copy of the book.

The next comma rule we studied was the interrupter and the appositive. I wasn't sure how I was going to illustrate this point until I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It is almost impossible for Dave Eggers to write a sentence without an interrupter, which illustrates the point beautifully. I began reading with an eye for content that coincided with what we were studying in class.

Reading Between the Lines
The first page of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier fit beautifully into our class for reading comprehension. After reading the first page, I asked the students questions like "When did the story take place?" "Did the man in the hospital grow up in the country or the city?"

The students were a bit skeptical about finding all this information from just one page of the novel, but then they really got into reading between the lines. I told the class that we can tell a lot about a novel by just reading the first page, so we tried to extract as much information as we could. When we examine the first page of a novel, we look for tone, time, word choice, and foreshadowing techniques.

In a similar vein, I used the first couple of pages from Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts. This novel of a young, pregnant woman who has no money, no family, and no way to take care of herself, reflects themes of community, friendship, family, and personal growth. Letts's novel worked well to teach foreshadowing techniques.

After reading a description of Novalee Nation and Willy Jack Pickens, characters from the novel, I asked the class to predict what would happen to the characters. Students also had to support their ideas with examples from the text. To my delight, the class elected to read this book together, and all of them loved it. They were exceptionally proud when they saw the movie that was made from this book and were able to conduct a discussion of the merits of reading or seeing a work of literature.

Tina Toran has worked on shrimp boats in Key West, supply boats in Louisiana, and boat deliveries to the Caribbean. She is working on her master's degree in literature and writing as she teaches pre-GED. She can be reached at ttoran@cs.com