The Book Whisperer (21 page)

We make it hard on ourselves, that's certain. It's hard to give up the control. After all, if we are not micromanaging every aspect of reading for students, can we call what we are doing teaching? To give up control, you have to change your mind-set about what teaching is, what it can be for you, not just your students. I am still learning how to let go. One realization I have come to is that there is a marked difference between managing a classroom and controlling it. I can manage my classroom without dictating all thought and decision making for my students. My students' self-concept as readers must extend beyond the classroom, even my classroom, or they have gained nothing lasting from me. If teachers control reading, we never give ownership of it to students. Students will not walk out of our classrooms with internal motivation to read if they see reading as an act that takes place only in school under the control of their teachers. Reading ultimately belongs to readers, not schools, and not schoolteachers.

There are too many adults who equate reading with school; some take pride in not having read a book since graduation. This is not just the case for poor readers. This is true of most readers, even those who passed our classes and state assessments year after year. No teacher I know thinks this sorry state is acceptable, yet we fail to take responsibility for it, blaming parents for not encouraging their children to read, and the students themselves for not wanting to.

I want more for my students than this nonreading state. I want them to feel that reading is a pursuit in which they continue to learn and receive solace and joy throughout their life. I want what
English Journal
editor and columnist Chris Crowe wants for his own children when he begs, “I'd like just once, to have one of them stagger into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and late for breakfast, because of staying up all night to finish a novel. I'd love to see them curled up on the couch rereading a favorite book. I would go to my grave a contented old man if once before I die, and before my kids grow up, I could hear one of my children talking excitedly to a friend about a book just finished.” This entreaty was not an admonishment directed toward his children or a missive from an expert; this was a dad pleading with his children's teachers to encourage his kids to read.

My journey with students takes me back to myself and what I have always known about reading. Being a reader is how I choose to spend my life, every aspect of it, inside and outside of the classroom. I often wonder whether my identity as a reader, someone who reads voraciously and always has a book recommendation, is all I have to offer. That may be true, but it is an oversimplification. How can I express the extent to which reading has shaped who I am as a human being?

Although I see myself as kind, I am not a demonstrative person. If I have ever brought you a book unasked for, know that I cared. I said everything to you that I wanted to with that book. I have enough wisdom to acknowledge that an author's words are more eloquent than my own. When we meet and I discover that we have read and loved the same books, we are instant friends. We know a great deal about each other already if we both read. I imagine this is why I strive so hard to get people around me to read. If you don't read, I don't know how to communicate with you. I know this is a shortcoming. Perhaps my mother, who worried that reading would make me socially stunted, was half right. I can never express who I really am in my own words as powerfully as my books can.

This is how I show my students that I love them—by putting books in their hands, by noticing what they are about, and finding books that tell them, “I know. I know. I know how it is. I know who you are, and even though we may never speak of it, read this book, and know that I understand you.” We speak in this language of books passing back and forth, books that say, “You are a dreamer; read this.” “You are hurting inside; read this.” “You need a good laugh; read this.”

The time students spend in my class is fleeting, over too soon or, perhaps, just in time, but the hours we have spent together reading will outlast a school year. Books are immortality for writers, and as the conduit through which books have flowed into the hands of so many children, I feel that books are my immortality, too. If my students remember my class as the year they devoured scores of books, then that has to be enough for me. I cannot control what happens after they leave my class, but I do wonder, is it enough for them? Considering how many of my former students still e-mail me for book recommendations or show up in my doorway years later to talk about books, I would say it's not.

It is Friday afternoon, the book club my students begged me to start has just ended, and I am cleaning up my room. I look up from the desk I am clearing off to see Matthew standing in the doorway. Beaming, he announces, “The smell, I love the smell of this room. I can't describe it; it's like new books and cleaner. How are you, Mrs. Miller?”

I give him a little hug, noticing that he has grown since last spring when he left my class. We spend the next half hour catching up on the books we have read since last summer. He asks, “Did you read
Gregor and the Code of Claw
?” (Spoiler alert: If you haven't read it yet, you might want to skip the next six sentences!)

“Yes I did. The ending suggests that the series might not be over. I still think there is something about that neighbor that Suzanne Collins did not tell us.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I can't believe she killed off Ares. He was one of the best characters! Did you know that
The Battle of the Labyrinth
is coming out soon?”

I interrupt, “May 6! I wonder how Riordan's going to weave the Minotaur myth into this one.”

“Hey, Michael and I signed up to take mythology next year.”

“Matthew, you could teach that class! Think about all of the mythology you read last year.”

Matthew helps me stack chairs and pick up trash while we talk and talk about books. It is nice that we can fall back into talking about books so easily when we have not seen each other for eight months, further proof that Matthew and I are connected as readers long after my role as his teacher passes. We catch up on all of the series we are following and rehash our impressions of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
. I tell Matt about the movies based on
Inkheart
and
Uglies
that are coming out soon. I show him the new feline-fantasy Warriors books that I snagged from a book sale. (Ally, Hanna, and Matt had begged me to buy the books the spring before.) Matt reveals, “I buy books all of the time. I spend all of my money at Barnes & Noble.” Our conversation starts to reveal more disturbing facts about the health of reading beyond my classroom.

“Matthew, why don't you go to the school library?”

“My teacher never takes us to the library. The only way I can go is before or after school, and I am always rushing. Whenever I find a book I like there, it is the third in a series or something, and they never have the first one. They don't promote reading over there [at the middle school] the way that you did.” He sighs, “Well, no one promotes reading like you.”

I wind up digging through the class library to find Matthew some books to read that I know he did not read last year, teasing him, “Well, I guess it's manipulative of me, but if I loan you some books to read, you will have to come back and see me to return them.”

Matthew's dramatic declaration that “no one” promotes reading the way I do may not be completely accurate, but he only has the
eight teachers
he's had since kindergarten to go on. Providing students with piles of books to choose from and giving them time to read them seems too easy, but it works, and I am not the only adult invested in motivating children to read who knows it. A sampling of comments on my blog entries bears this out.

Why we should validate students' interests when recommending books and using them in class:

How spending more time assessing students and less time reading beats all the joy for reading out of them:

Why the best reading program is still the first reading program most children encounter while sitting on a parent's lap—connecting with books and spending time reading:

Why reading is about the children and the books, not the programs and the teacher:

These pockets of reading zealotry are not enough, and we all know that these teachers are not in the majority. We should not have to become underground teachers. Something has to change. Students should not have to suffer. Every time they pick up a book, we punish them with overused worksheets and unending analysis and discussions. Why would they ever choose to read on their own? There needs to be more of us, and we need to get a lot louder about telling our administrators, colleagues, and parents what we believe. Of course, we have to believe that students need to read more and have more control over their reading in the first place.

Until that happens, I will still get e-mails like this one from Kelsey's mother:

Yes, the same Kelsey who triumphantly passed the TAKS in sixth grade, the year I taught her. Her mother is worried about the TAKS again, and has to contact me to get advice? Am I the last teacher who reached her, two years ago?

The students trickle back to me in pairs, and send me e-mails begging for lists or to find someone, anyone, who cares about the latest installment in the Clique series. It is touching, and I miss them all. It is gratifying to know that I have had an impact on them to such a degree, and that they are still reading. They shouldn't have to struggle so much to remain readers, though. It is heartbreaking that their reading communities have not expanded or evolved since sixth grade. I know that without dedicated class time to read or a community of reading peers to support them, some stop reading. The experiences with reading that I share with my students are that fragile.

Read all of the books on teaching you want, even this one, but my most recent e-mail from Ally, who spent all of seventh grade in a teacher-controlled reading environment, says it all:

It took seven months for Ally's classroom to get back to the first day of sixth grade. Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books to become readers, they may choose never to read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them.

READING IS FUNDAMENTAL. Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I heard these words on a public-service television spot, squeezed between my favorite TV shows,
Bonanza
and
The Big Valley
. Spoken by a young boy of ten or eleven—someone close to my age—those words were a call to action. I got the message that if I ever expected to know more about the world around me, I would need to read. Living in rural Oklahoma, my access to books was limited to the small local library and the picked-over shelves of my school's classrooms. The encouragement and necessity that lived within this boy's voice stayed with me. His was a message that reading could offer me the opportunity of knowing about other people and places. And I never forgot it.

At the time, America was experiencing roiling political change—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the resignation of a president. I saw reading as social engagement, a path to understanding this revolution—the ideas, the challenges, and the people. Reading was instrumental for me in exploring life far from my rural Oklahoma childhood. I was fortunate. I believed that I could be a part of something greater by reading. As a practicing school principal today, it is my duty to create an atmosphere that sends that same message to students. I must find teachers who believe that reading is a vehicle that allows students to travel beyond their classroom walls.

Yet how clearly are we sending the “reading is fundamental” message to our young people today? Are the students in our public school classrooms experiencing reading as a means to reflect on the world? I hope so, but I am also skeptical. Our national discussion of reading has been reduced to a talking point, a measurement score. How can we get our students to open books and start reading when, in many classrooms, the focus is on test performance? I believe in and support the idea that teachers and schools should be accountable for students' performance, but I fear that we on the inside, who work in public schools, are misrepresenting the fundamental idea of reading. Reading is more than a number. It is a civic responsibility—one that should live in and outside the classroom. And teachers and schools play a critical role in keeping this message on track.