Thinking About Books: The Book Whisperer

I just finished a book called The Book Whisperer written by a sixth grade teacher who is tired of school making kids hate reading. In her class, therefore, she assigns kids to read forty (40) books in the school year, which basically means they have to be reading constantly to make this requirement. They can choose whatever books they want, but she does have genre requirements to help broaden their perspective. There are kids who come into her class having read maybe one book in their entire life that wasn't forced upon them by a grown up, and most of them leave her class at least not hating reading anymore, at most having had their ideas about reading completely changed. Instead of some evil chore foisted on them by teachers who think it's "good for them," reading becomes a pleasure, something to do in one's own spare time.

Can you guess why this book caught my eye?

I would have killed for a teacher like that. Killed. I have often expressed to my friends that my husband and I are fully planning on homeschooling our kids, and my own middle school experience is one of the reasons I feel so strongly about that. In the seventh grade I had a science teacher who was a nice enough guy, not too boring or strict. The problem was that I already knew everything he was teaching. (I'm not actually sure about this, looking back. Did I already know it, or did he just go so slowly and redundantly that I could skim the textbook and, using my many years of watching Nature and The Magic School Bus, ace the tests?) In any case, the class was not structured for me, and I was bored out of my skull. I was a dutiful student, but there are limits even to the patience of someone who cares about their grade. I tried to pay attention, I really did, but it soon became clear that my brain was going to start melting and oozing out of my ears if I didn't keep myself occupied somehow. So I read a book.

This seems pretty innocent, right? I even kept it hidden so that you couldn't really see it. I was not distracting the other children or being flagrantly disrespectful. And I got good grades. But this teacher was so annoyed that I wasn't listening to him blather that he stopped his lecture (oh, great idea, derail everyone's train of thought all at once) and demanded that I hand over my book. I protested, of course, but in the end he got his way (I was a Good Kid, remember?) and he told me that I could have the book back at the end of the day. Not the end of the period. The end of the day.

I lived in a rural town. Education was not seen as valuable or important to most people around there, and their kids definitely picked up on that attitude. I had moved there a few years prior from a suburban school near a big city, populated mostly by the children of lawyers and doctors. My parents emphasized education so much that it took me years to figure out that college was optional. I had no idea. It was what you did after high school.

I was also an avid reader. (Still am.) I vacuumed up books like they were oxygen and I enjoyed learning. I had made something of a reputation for myself the year before in the sixth grade by beating, mangling and hanging up to dry the previous reading record of the school. My nickname for years was "Bookworm." (These kids were not very imaginative, either.)

For these reasons (and others, I suppose, but mostly these) I stuck out. I had a reputation among the students, but I also had one among the teachers. They knew I was serious about this school thing, and that learning mattered to me. I'm not gonna say I got special treatment- aw heck, why not? I got special treatment. My sixth grade reading teacher had a no-food policy that he conveniently forgot about when I brought a muffin to class (every day). He knew I wasn't gonna be a pig about it, and I was discreet.

I say all this not to boast (well, maybe a little), but to set the scene. When I got my book out to keep myself occupied, I was sort of counting on the teacher to understand and look the other way. Maybe my head was a little swollen by then, but I think it was more than that. I expected my teacher to understand that I valued my education enough to not let him get in the way of it. So when instead I got punished for doing something voluntarily that teachers struggled and prayed and wailed about for years to get my peers to do, I was understandably angry. I slouched down in my desk and doodled, furiously not listening to the rest of the lecture. (Which was such an improvement, right?)

This happened multiple times throughout the year. It got to the point where they got my mother involved. ('Cause I'm such a bad kid 'n all.) And at the time it instilled in me a bad attitude toward that teacher and that class, and school in general, really. (I still blame him for the fact that even today I have a problem with automatically tuning out the voice of someone lecturing. That helped with reading in his class, but it has not served me well since.) But thinking about it now, I do not see how that teacher could have demonstrated more clearly that school was for jumping through academic hoops, not genuinely learning.

My husband would like to make it clear that he thinks I am reading too much into this, and he is probably right. It was a kind of traumatic event that damaged my pride as "the special one," and the teacher was most likely simply concerned with keeping classroom discipline. But how many of you can share an experience even a little like mine, an experience that cut the wind out of your sails and made you realize that school was not a place conducive to learning about things that were important to you? I mean, how many of you came to love reading because a teacher made you read a book for an assignment? How many adults do you know who don't read, or who read trash because no one ever tried or knew how to develop their reading tastes to something more mature than "The Day My Butt Went Crazy"? (Yes, that's a real book.)

What The Book Whisperer calls for is a change in the school system to emphasize real reading, the kind of reading that people actually do. Not reading one chapter a night for six weeks, and doing activities and filling out worksheets, but devouring books one after another, gobbling up literature and letting it digest. Guiding kids through the kind of reading they're already doing, instead of trying to cookie-cutter everyone into compliance with some arbitrary standard. Letting books teach instead of teaching about books. I wish the author well in her quest to make school a friendly place for reading, but I'm more cynical (actually, she is, too). I don't believe this will ever happen until schools are made to be accountable for how they are ruining our children and producing people who can take standardized tests, but have no idea how to live.