Albion Middle Community Unites Through Shared Reading of Popular Book

We all know reading is fundamental to learning. But did you know it also reduces stress?  Or that it can help you sleep better, keep your mind sharp, and improve your relationships?

Imagine, then, the benefits of an entire school community reading together, from every student and teacher to the custodians, Main Office staff, and principals — even the parents.

“I’ve never had such an immersive experience,” said Daniel Nayeri whose Newbery Honor-winning novel, “The Many Assassinations of Samir, Seller of Dreams” was the subject of an all-community read experiment at Albion Middle School. “To have the opportunity to speak with the students personally and work with them…I’m really thankful for that.”

Albion’s schoolwide book club was the brainchild of English teachers Stephanie Nasser and Stephanie Kourianos. They encountered Nayeri at a summer conference, and after listening to him talk about his tale of a young monk’s journey along the Silk Road, they knew they had found the right author and book to see their vision through.

“We wanted to choose a book that all of our students could relate to and this just checked all the boxes,” Nasser said.

The teaching duo applied for and won an $8,000 grant from the Canyons Education Foundation, which helped them arrange to have Nayeri travel to Utah to visit with students for two full days. Albion purchased enough copies of Nayeri’s book for faculty, staff, and students. Every student in every grade read the book as part of a classroom assignment. The school even held a book club for interested parents.

“We wanted to build a community of readers, and not have this limited to something we teach in our English classes. It was about the entire building doing this and helping everyone learn about literacy through different content, from the arts to cooking class and STEM,” Nasser said.

Teachers from all disciplines, from history to science, collaborated on lesson plans tied to the book. The orchestra and choir learned songs based on the setting of the story, which they performed for Nayeri. Science classes mapped the Silk Road and art classes worked on massive batiks depicting Nayeri’s larger-than-life characters.  

“One of our main goals was to show reading it not an isolated activity,” Kourianos said. “A story you read about in English class can pertain to something you learn in math or science. Learning really isn’t isolated. It is something that all connects us to the world and with each other.”

After a year of engagement with the twists and turns of Nayeri’s picaresque adventure, the students were understandably eager to meet the author.

Nayeri headlined an assembly at Albion and visited more than a dozen classes, taking part in art and shop projects and a cooking demo where he showed students how to make his favorite Silk Road snack. When he wasn’t visiting classrooms or working with aspiring writers in a workshop, he was signing students’ books, snapping selfies and being peppered him with endless questions.

     “Did you base any of your characters on someone in real life?”
     “How did you become an author.”
     “How long did it take you to write your book?”

One student even made Nayeri a scarf in the colors of the cover of his book.

Nayeri said he knew he wanted to write for a living when he realized he liked tinkering with language. “I have friends who are engineers who say they would take apart the family toaster over and over again. I felt like, as a young kid, that was what I did with stories,” he told students.

A native of Iran who immigrated to the United States as a young boy, Nayeri would often be asked about life in Iran. “I ended up telling my story again and again to people I would meet,” he said, “and sometimes I wanted the tale to be funny, or at other times, I wanted it to be a big, sprawling epic.”

Of course, having an affinity for and interest in writing is just the start. Publishing a book takes hard work. But Nayeri encouraged students to stick with it.

“Samir” was a novel that took years to complete. At one point in the publishing process, an editor urged Nayeri to rewrite the entire book from the point of view of one of the characters, which was discouraging at the time. Looking back now, he said, he can’t imagine the book any other way.

Albion Middle Principal Eric Gardner wants to make these “community reads” a tradition. He and his faculty are already on the hunt for next year’s page-turner.

For his part, Nayeri says it is an experience he’ll never forget.

“For two days I got to go into every part of the school and be a part of it, which I have always wanted to do,” he said. “The highest achievement any writer can have is to be an inspiration to other people. To be an epigraph in someone else’s novel, that’s a very powerful thing.”