Every year, as a teacher, you're guaranteed to get that kid. The one that's only happy when everyone else is utterly miserable. And last year, that student was a young lady named...well, let's call her Joanna. Joanna hated everything about school. Every adult. Every kid. Every subject. No lie, for someone who was weeks out of elementary school, this young lady was terrifying.
But before she got kicked out for coming to school high (at age twelve), not coming to school at all, telling most adults exactly where they could go (and what they could do to themselves when they arrived), and basically trying to fight everyone, I decided we were going to be friends. Best friends. Our bond? It was going to be over books. Good books. And whatever book was her favorite?
I was going to read it. IMMEDIATELY. And we'd have our own little book club.
Yes.
This is something that I did.
Somehow, in my almost forty-something years on the planet, fifteen as a teacher, thirty-five plus as a reader, and all of them as a horror-loving weirdo, I had never read anything by R.L Stine. Welp, turned out ol' Joanna was a fan of the
Goosebumps series, and with 235 books to choose from, she recommended/demanded I start at the beginning with
Welcome to Dead House. And, to my absolute bewilderment, it was actually pretty scary. Not
Joanna during standardized testing scary, but close. *shudder*
For the Halloween season, me and the other residents of the fallout shelter didn't watch all that many scary flicks, but we did manage to crank up (and out) 2015's
Goosebumps flick and it's moderately disappointing follow-up, 2018's
Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween. Though my kids were not super into the idea of watching these spine-tinglers initially, by the end of the double-feature (spread out over weeks, because of course
it was) they'd been converted into fans of all things R.L. Stine. So when I broke their fragile, little hearts with the news that there would
not be a third film, I figured the fact that there are literally
hundreds of books they could choose from would ease their pain. It did not. You have to
read books, with your eyes and your brain, and even my own kids are like,
nah, we're good.
