How Reading is Helping Me Hold It Together.

The library is keeping me sane.

No, really, it's true. As I sit here, typing my latest blog post in I don't even want to think how long, I would like to thank the library for this one small moment of sane thought. There are no screaming sixth graders here. No one is off-task (and if they are Facebooking or something, they'll go back to particle physics orTom Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles or the meaning of life in a moment) and everyone is blissfully silent. The only sound is the cheerful  hum of monitors and the well-timed tapping of computer keyboards. No touch-typing in this establishment, no sir!

But more than the calm of the storm, it is the contents of the library that are keeping me tethered in this world rather than letting my mind flee to the next. In the first several weeks of teaching, I had nothing to call my own except facebook, and while mindless banter and endless acres in Farmville can be relaxing to a point, they are by no means helpful towards maintaining an even keel.

It was only after going to the library for a 'big kid book' (Clan of the Cave Bear, an excellent big kid book if I do say so myself) and reading a little bit before going to bed every night, as well as a little bit in the morning that I returned to my usual, cheerful self. I was a much happier person. It was not all school, all the time, and I didn't feel like there was a big, empty hole in my chest. I imagine this is becuase my students are expected to complete reading one book every two weeks. How was I supposed to expect that of them when even I wasn't reading every night?

About a month ago, one of my favorite professors posted on his own blog about the importance of having personal time while student teaching. Our first concern while teaching, he wrote, was to take care of ourselves first. 

But if you don’t make time for yourself and insist on taking that time, then you’ll never have it, because the responsibilities of a teacher are endless.You can always devote more time to students, always make more of an effort to prepare for class, always learn more about your subject, always spend more time on students’ papers, always devote more time to your colleagues and the community around your school. It can feel overwhelming sometimes, and the giving of yourself to others can be exhausting. (Theory Teacher's Blog, 1/30/2011)

 As a teacher, I was giving myself to everyone else, for six hours a day, five days a week. Only after I'd done that 'giving of myself back to myself,' so to speak, could I begin taking care of my students and then taking care of my curriculum. The reason for this was simple -- when we take care of ourselves, we become better mannered, better functioning human beings that students want to interact with. When we are happy, our students have a better chance of being happy. We will want to teach, and they will want to learn. After that, the subject matter follows.

Today I had a pretty rotten day. I wasn't nearly as prepared as I should have been, and while lots of learning went on, my co-operating teacher wasn't very...impressed with me, shall we say. That, however, is the past; nothing I can do will change it. Tomorrow, my students will come in with their rough drafts and that will be the end of it. We will edit them and on Wednesday we will be in the computer lab working. I can't change any of that now any more than I change the way the sunrise will look tomorrow. Tonight, I can only worry about tonight and the first few hours of tomorrow. I will go home, eat a very late dinner and read my next book. (Juliet, by Anne Fortier, which I am super excited for because I am an English major, and I miss Shakespeare.)

After that I'll go to bed and wake up ready for tomorrow.

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."

Hello, Universe Speaking

I love and hate going back to college. I love seeing everyone and having things to read and discuss with people and sharing everything you did over your summer. I hate remembering what it feels like to be overwhelmed. Two days of class and already I have a whole novel to read, 6 articles to digest and three chapters in a textbook to prepare for discussion.

A note -- that's only for one class. It's my night class and only meets on Thursdays, but still. This is a little excessive.

But there's another thing I like about back to school -- there's a strange way the Universe seems to speak to you in the people it throws across your path. In the library, for instance, this transfer student came into the stacks where I was looking for a book and very nicely asked if I could help her find a book. Your lucky day, I said. You picked the one person out here right now who works here!

The Universe must also be trying to tell me something through my homework -- in three of my classes I've been asked to write what amounts to a short summary of my reading life. Since I've only finished with the one due today (and I rather like it) I'm going to share it here. I was given on the title as a prompt; it is called "Of Books, Reading, and Me: a Personal Essay."



When my family re-painted my room several summers ago, my parents asked me (in between moving out every single piece of furniture I owned and painting my walls Sherwood Green) if there was anything I needed to add to my room before moving back in. My answer was simple -- a bigger bookshelf. Two little shelves would suffice no longer. Already shelved two books deep, my book collection was growing and there was no place for it to go except the floor, an idea my mother wasn't particularly keen on. So in the new, taller bookshelf came, quickly filled and just as quickly crowded.


I might be a child of the digital age, but I still haven't given up on the analog version of my favorite pastime. New books are added to the shelves all the time, and with far more reward than watching space on a hard drive slowly fill with files. A full hard drive is annoying -- a full bookshelf is an accomplishment, a challenge, even. When I open a physical book, I'm opening up the culmination of four thousand years of human story-telling and -sharing technology. When I read, I owe that experience to all the people who made books possible, the men who spent hours cutting type forms and the women who slaved over paper presses and mills and the printer's children, somewhere in time, who had to put away all the size ten font in those tiny type trays, and I owe it to them to respect the house for the story.


Maybe setting a little bit of type myself has made me more aware of the physical presence of the book. After spending six hours filling three by three inch pages with my own words, and another ten hours printing them, I have a great deal more respect for men like Ben Franklin, who spent their days setting tiny pieces of type for ideas that weren't even their own. The physical presence of a book will make or break my experience of it -- Over the past summer I gave up on what was probably a very engaging story because the type was too small and too closely set for me to read it easily.


But not all my books are on my shelf, and not all my reading is done 'the old fashioned way.' Some of the short stories I read will never find themselves inside a codex, or even on the shiny screen of an e-reader. Some of the news stories or observations on life are not on the path to becoming 'blooks', or books from blogs. And I like it that way. Just as there's something magically permanent about holding a book, there's something wonderfully transitive about reading and sharing thoughts online. Unlike a book, which requires resources and much physical space and contact to manufacture and share, the internet has created a space where stories of all kinds can be shared spur-of-the-moment, without the boundaries imposed by printing off the material to be shared. I might enjoy reading analog, but I enjoy writing digital. My blog broadcasts my thoughts on reading to the whole internet-using world twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It’s immediate, boots-on-the-ground writing; I can be as elegant or as mindless as I chose. Without a publisher to please or a specific public to satisfy, the entire world is open to my critique.

I’m a child of the Twilight generation. Not just because of Stephanie Meyer’s breakout bestseller, but because people my age are at a crossroads, not quite in the light of the vanishing Day of the Printed book nor fully immersed in the e-reader illuminated Night yet. Wherever it is I stand on the debate between whether the print book is dead or still very much living, at the point where books, reading, and my life converge there’s a single objective in mind – sharing a story in whatever way seems best. Sometimes that’s a book and sometimes that’s the internet and sometimes it’s the oldest story-sharing method of all – the human voice. When I sit down to read to my sister, it doesn’t matter to her whether I’m reading from a computer screen or a printed page; her only concern is that the story being told is a good one.