A House Full Of Books

A big part of teacher education at Saint Ben's is the idea of the reflective teacher, one who examines her own experiences in the classroom as a teacher and as a student and determines what it is that worked and didn't work. So it happens that my assignment for Pedagogy this week is an autobiography of myself as a reader.
If any of you have been to my house, you will know immediately the wall to which I am referring in the introduction. As it was in my youth, it is full of books that have always dared me to build my own library.


A House Full of Books

My earliest memory of reading does not actually involve reading at all. It involves books. A whole, wall-wide bookshelf's worth of books. They weren't even interesting looking books, either; Mostly they were religious texts and the remnants of my parents' personal college libraries. But the wall of books intrigued me, and when I was old enough to reach, I pulled down a volume whose title I recognized (the Complete Sherlock Holmes) and began reading it. A heavy task for a girl of twelve, and one that thoroughly confused me. But I'd made some assumption early on in childhood about reading and what it does for people -- I'd made the connection that if you read certain books, people give you a certain kind of power. It didn't matter that I hadn't understood most of Sherlock Holmes; merely by saying I had read it people gave me a look of almost awed appreciation. (I re-read Sherlock Holmes several summers ago: I still didn't understand it.) It's a lesson I've carried into adulthood. Have I read Moby Dick, Vanity Fair, War and Peace? Yup. Now, ask me if I enjoyed them. Whole different story there.

I mark time in my elementary school memories by the books we were reading. In first grade I realized what I didn't want to read -- the  PeeWee Scouts books by Judy Delton. In every book Molly came up with a stupid plan and got into a lot of trouble trying to implement it. And don't even start me on Henry and Mudge or Amber Brown. I hated reading about people getting into trouble in first grade. The idea confused and annoyed me. I wanted to read about successful people.

Second grade was Stone Fox -- I remember reading the book in one sitting and sitting down to sharing time realizing that everyone else had only read the first chapter. I began to hate reading for school. Everyone else read too slowly.  If I finished my book I could start another one, right? No, Mercury. We have to discuss this one first. (Insert annoyed sigh from one small second grader.)

Third grade was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I loved it, but we watched the BBC miniseries version and I remembered thinking "Man, I wish someone would make a better version of this." During my freshman year of college, Walden Media finally obliged me. Third Grade was also The Giver, and Fourth grade was Number the Stars and a confusing book called The Silver Crown, a text I went back to in middle school and still didn't understand.

But fifth grade...Fifth grade created a monster. In fifth grade we read the first Harry Potter book. And what's more, we read it aloud. (I'm twenty one years old and I still love reading Harry Potter out loud.) To get another chapter of Harry Potter was a privilege, a treasure, a new adventure before we had to leave Challenge class and go back to normal fifth grade stuff. Harry Potter was my hero, my savior...my friend. He fought dragons and his ugly cousin and had really cool friends that did really cool stuff. (I didn't start seeing myself as Hermione until middle school.) As Harry grew, I grew, too. His final book is being made into a movie and I'm graduating college this year. By the time he's done growing, so am I.

In sixth grade I remember being angry. This movie that had been adapted from some old fantasy book from way back when was stealing Harry's thunder. Budge up, Frodo Baggins, let the new kid through. In sixth grade I wanted nothing to do with Lord of the Rings. My friend (and sometime nemesis) Luke had already read Lord of the Rings and really enjoyed it. I didn't want to read it if Luke had. It wasn't until 8th grade that Tolkien caught up with me. Finally I gave the hobbit a chance...and fell in love again. Eighth grade I discovered that writing could have immensity, that stories didn't all have to take place here, with human concerns. I also read Dune that year and loved it, devouring the rest of Frank Herbert with the relish of a devoted biblogastronome.

A strong current throughout my childhood was the library. Every week during the summer, the worn maroon library bag was hauled across town to be filled with every kind of book you could imagine. As a kid I made a summer's study of every Cinderella adaptation I could find, or all the Irish myths in the children's section, or the entire works of Lloyd Alexander. Those were good summers. Filling the summer reading program timesheets was easy--  if you remembered to mark your hours down. It wasn't ever that I hadn't spent fourty to sixty hours reading that summer, because the chance was good that I had. I just didn't enjoy filling in the fifteen minute marks. Who sat down and read for fifteen minutes at a time? It didn't occur to me then, as it sometimes does not occur to me now, that most people take more than a day or two to read a book.

I took the library seriously because my mother took the library seriously. It was important to her that her children read, and at least with my sister and I, she succeeded. With my brothers it was a different story, but there are still some books that will tease them out of their computer chairs. Now that I'm old enough to drive I take our family minivan and the same maroon library bag across town to our newly remodeled library building, and sometimes, just for laughs, I'll descend down into the children's section and park myself in one of their big comfy chairs to treat myself to a picture book.

A lot of my memories of elementary and middle school reading have stuck with me as a reader because they highlight what and why I didn't like to read -- to answer questions on a test, to keep pace with the rest of the class, to address 'age appropriate' issues, or to inch through it a chapter at a time.  I had to read books deemed 'age appropriate' at a time when I was reading at an 8th grade level in a K-5 library and there weren't too many books to chose from with that wonderful little reader's rating in the front cover. And all this ties into the idea of CHOICE and SPEED. In my classroom, I will make every effort to make sure that there some choice involved in reading and the discussion of that reading. I'm going to work to find some system that works for slow readers and fast ones. I'm going to build a house full of books in my classroom, and I'm going to try my hardest to make sure that everyone finds one book that says "Wow, that character's my hero."