The reading competition posed by Ms. Rachel Copeland, was for the whole month of May, had Carson panther time’s counting their minutes to be the one winner of their grade, the prize: doughnuts. The winning classes: Ms. Karen Schmidt for seventh-grade, and for eighth-grade, Ms. Barbara Marshall. 

The reading competition at Carson had sparked different Panther times to become rivals with each other. It began at the start of May, and ended on the last Panther Time in May. 

“I love it, I think it’s a great way for students to get engaged in healthy competition,” said Ms. Jessy Hale, part of the All Stars team as an English teacher. Ms. Hale had been big on reading in even seventh grade, her favorite book then being the Twilight series. But now she loves reading “The Outsiders,” a book that all seventh-graders read, and had just finished “Tattoo Artist of Auschwitz.” 

Ms. Copeland, a school counselor, had been admiring all the posters, the competition building community in Carson she said while smiling. As the weeks piled on people start making their guesses for who will take the cake, or doughnuts in this case.  

“Seventh grade my guess would be about 500 minutes per student,” said Ms. Copeland.

Making her guess on how high the minutes would be for the winners of the competition.

“Eighth grade I think will be more, so I would say I would expect 1,000 minutes per student.” 

For seventh grade, the winning class had a whopping 7, 539.60 minutes, and for eighth grade it had 4, 260.41 minutes.

But this competition didn’t just happen at our school, last year when Ms. Copeland was split between two schools, Carson and Cooper middle school. She had introduced that competition there, but they did not continue it this year. 

”The winning class last year had an average of 3000 per student and it was a normal student class,” said Ms. Copeland, our school completely beating the score last year.   

But with counting everything, like the competition had said. It had sparked some disagreements with what should be counted online.

Ms. Hale said, “If a student opens up an Instagram and there’s a link to a news article then I think that counts but I had a kid ask me if reading TikTok comments counts as reading.” She expressed her dislike for counting things like TikTok and Instagram, but Ms. Copeland saw it as a great way for kids to realize how much reading they are doing when they aren’t thinking they are. 

“Someone even asked me if you could read subtitles on a movie,” she said.

The reading competition had some disagreement but most are happy about the fun competition. It was fun seeing how everyone counted their minutes. Classes that were neighbors turning into rivals for the month to win. Our school even got over a half of a million minutes!

 Ms. Copland said, “I love creative fun contests and if anyone has any ideas it won’t be this year, but for planning next year I would love to have more.”