Blog by Daphne Chen
Last week, English teacher Nannette McMurtry presented her AP English Literature classes with a new second semester project: the Independent Reading Project, whose objective she summarized as “Read Books, Talk about Books, Share Books with Others.”
Feeling that her students in this advanced class had proven themselves capable of pushing through difficult, complicated novels (such as The Sound and the Fury), McMurtry hopes that these seniors will be able to share their passion for reading and good literature to others in the school.
A major part of this project will be the school library resource system that librarian Lex Anne Seifert calls Destiny, or Follett Destiny. Available at https://destiny.coppellisd.com/ from either home or at school, students can look up books in the library’s online catalog and will begin posting reviews of these books.
Seifert encourages all CHS students to post their reviews on Destiny (Twilight has five) so that other potential readers can see what their peers thought of a certain novel; however, she warned McMurtry’s classes that she will send back reviews (which must be approved by her before she publishes it) with even a single spelling or capitalization mistake. Coppell’s Destiny site, she feels, represents CHS as a school as well as her as a librarian, and she is committed to produce the highest quality Web site she can.
Students who click on the picture of a book on Destiny can often reach a site that will allow them to see summaries of the novel as well as excerpts from the first chapter.
Another feature on Destiny which students should look into is under the “copy categories” tab. There, Seifert has assembled such lists as the American Library Association’s College-Bound book list, Newsweek’s Top 100 Books list (of which our library owns 70) and the Ultimate Teen Reading List (good luck getting through those 273 novels!).
Hopefully, these great resources will become much more publicized and well-known at CHS throughout the second semester of the school year as senior reader leaders embark on their projects to make reading cool again.
