A
A
s a teacher at Dundee Alternative 
High School, Daria 
Plumb has heard the comments 
dozens of times before, 
and with school about to start for the 
year, she knows she’s going to hear them 
again. 
“Why should I read a book?” 
“I’m just not a reader.” 
“I hate to read.” 


As if imagining the scenario sure to 
play out in her classroom, Daria, herself 
a 1990 graduate of Dundee High School, 
closes her eyes, smiles and shakes her 
head. 

“They don’t realize they’ve just challenged 
me,” she said. “I tell them they 
just haven’t found the right book yet, 
and I will find that book for them.” 

Books, and reading in general, are a 
passion for Daria. As an English teacher, 
she has made it her life’s work to get 
more at-risk students reading – and she 
has come up with some very special approaches 
to doing just that, approaches 
that are being lauded not only by students 
and parents, but by other professional 
educators as well. 

“When I started, I got a lot of freedom 
to develop my own curriculum,” she 
said. “That’s scary to a point, but it’s 
good. You have to do a lot of learning as 
you go.” 

When she started in 1994, the alternative 
high school program was meeting in 
the basement of the Monroe County Library 
System’s Dundee branch. In an effort 
to help her students make a connection 
with literature, Daria went upstairs 
to the library and got two books: “The 
Giver” by Lois Lowry and “Hatchet” by 
Gary Paulsen. Rather than assign them 
for her students to read, though, she read 

the books aloud to them. 

That is still a big part of her curriculum 
today. 

“My students were not able to get that 
‘movie in the mind’ when they read,” 
Daria said. “They didn’t know that was 
supposed to happen.” 

While she still teaches many of the 
classics of literature, she relies heavily 
on more modern Young Author pieces, 
many written in the last five to 10 years. 
She also is heavily involved in several 
professional organizations, including a 

position on the board of directors for the 
Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. 

Several years ago, she was fi rst asked 
to speak at conferences about her approach 
to reaching “reluctant readers.” 
The huge response she got from those 
speeches led her to create www.getemreading.
com, a Web site for parents 
and educators. On the site, she includes 
everything from popular new Young Author 
titles, books and articles for other 
professionals and lessons she has used to 
teach British literature, world literature 
and William Shakespeare. 

One of the most popular pages on the 
site, though, is what Daria calls “Commando 
Classics.” 

As the name implies, she said, “You 
have to get in quick, hit them hard and 
get out.” She wrote an article on the 
subject for Education Leadership Quarterly 
in 1997 and has been promoting 

it ever since. The idea is that students 
are hit with a number of different plots, 
characters and so on. Over time, they 
will begin to make the connection be


tween stories, and it is that internalizing 
that helps them to become better readers. 

To do that, Daria uses a number of 
nontraditional approaches, including 


STORY BY MARK RUTKOWSKI ¦ PHOTO BY KIM BRENT 

MONROE| AUTUMN 2009 31