From Arnold Lobel
I hesitate to write these words, feeling superstitious, as if, by naming and announcing this miracle, I will cancel it, banish its reality. But, here it is: Fiona can read. My big girl, a kindergartner, reads. Not perfectly, not all the time, sometimes inconveniently, often with expression, frequently with joy. She reads.
I have been waiting for this development basically since she was born.
On a recent Saturday, she was having a tantrum. Something about pants. It’s usually about pants with that one. Five years old and a fashion diva. God help me. So, she’s having a tantrum. Finally I send her to her room, where she continues in her hysteria. And I told her: why don’t you climb under your covers and read to yourself for awhile until you can calm down?
And she did. She sat in her bed and read her stack of “I can read” books to herself for a solid forty-five minutes. And when she emerged, the pants she wanted were finished in the dryer, and we continued on our day.
It was a miracle. Pure gift. It was a gift to me, surely: I could stop yelling at my beloved child and stop hating myself for yelling at my beloved child. Any new and effective form of conflict resolution with my kid is nothing short of grace. But my expectation, my anticipation for this moment, was not just about me, and I hope it is clear, is not just about my maternal pride in this new accomplishment. I don’t think five is that early to be reading. She’s had plenty of teaching — in preschool and now in kindergarten — and practice at letter recognition and phonics. She’s still not a great writer — she rushes and her spelling is, well, developmentally appropriate, let’s say.
I am so incredibly delighted by this development, though, because reading, books, these are the among the biggest gifts that Josh and I could ever give her. They are a sign and symbol of our love for her, and our desire for her to have access to every advantage, to every joy.
The fight over clothes she and I always have has begin to center on the fact that her wardrobe mostly consists of hand-me-downs (far nicer items, I might add, than the paper thin leggings she desires from Target); she wants “fashion”; she says that she wants things the other girls have. We work on how to help her understand that there are limits to what any one person needs; how many pairs of shoes a still-growing child should have; that economic necessity is a factor that shapes the contents of her wardrobe.
But stories… there are always more stories to be read and told and found. The abundance of words to be encountered and shaped and used is beyond limit. There is so much joy to be found in them — comfort and challenge, new worlds to imagine, new insights to be made.
We didn’t read to her that much when she was a brand new baby, but books at bedtime, stories during periods of waiting, piles of books and magazines all over the house — these have been features of of her life from the beginning. We cannot give her everything in life — there are things that are out of our control, there are ways in which she is different from us. But we could show her our love of books, share with her our love of reading.
(I mostly married Josh, you may know, because he uses words better than anyone I know — he is fast with them, and funny. He makes up songs for these girls, songs that have meter and rhyme. He is so quick. So smart.)
(Josh, for his part, always compares me to the girl in Natalie Merchant’s song “Jealousy,” the one with novels by her bed.)
But there are limits to how much we can tell her about what is so very fabulous about reading. Even we are found lacking in our powers of description. She had to experience it — the power and thrill. The assurance and excitement. Regardless of whether she’s reading “realistic fiction” or fairy tales or the song titles scrolling across the car radio, reading opens a whole other realm of being, a whole new world of experience. And she doesn’t need us to do it for her. She can access that realm herself.
I’m going on and on, I know. But I read three articles this week that all struck me as part and parcel of this story: this devastating one from The New York Times, about how a nation with a rising literacy rate can have a majority population that’s functionally illiterate; and these two, first on MFA programs, and then on gifted and talented programs in urban schools. The first one describes how culture and policy have contributed to a decline in literacy in Mexico; the novelist David Toscano muses, perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity.
The salon article, about a $50 million gift to the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing Program asks if that’s really the best strategy for supporting new writers. Don’t we need more readers, book critic Laura Miller asks.
I’m for supporting young writers, but wouldn’t all writers benefit more from initiatives that encouraged more people to read books? What’s the point of helping a first-time author to finish that novel, if you’re just going to usher them into a world where they can’t get anyone to read it, let alone buy it? The Zell Family Foundation grant furthers a pattern that resembles teaching a man to fish, then dumping him on the shore of lake with only one fish in it. And that fish is playing Angry Birds.
What’s hopeful about Miller’s piece, and about the LA Times Book Blog piece she cites, are that they offer some concrete notions about how to increase the number of adult readers we have — to grow the audience — for contemporary literature.
The slate piece grabbed me because I am the proud product of excellent gifted and talented programs in public schools and the headline pushed my buttons: should these programs be more inclusive? I was so bored in regular reading classes — I would get in trouble for reading ahead, for reading my own books, for reading longer fiction instead of the mandated readers for our grade level. Gifted programs engaged my imagination and made me love school again. But the writer brings up excellent points about the ways in which gifted programs have failed, especially by failing to enroll students from ethnic minorities and lower economic groups. BUT, instead of throwing up her hands, Sarah Garland reports on programs that cities are using to counter the growing educational inequality, to make schools more fair, to find kids with innate talent and help them to develop it, regardless of the hurdles they face.
Reading is the key. Curiosity, creativity are fostered through reading and writing, and these skills — and the joy-filled, continuing developing of these skills — are so critically important to combatting economic, political, and social inequality.
Fiona has so, so many legs up. Her parents are readers, her parents love school, her parents love books. I can’t read to every kid the way I read to her — but as a writer, and as a Christian, I want to. I want to see programs that give this gift to kids — I want them to have it because reading is, in the words of Lauren Child’s young heroine Lola, “my favorite and my best.”
I want this as a writer, so that people will buy books that I write…
But mostly I want this because I want to live in a community, country, world, where writing and reading matters. Where we tell stories and ask questions, where we are curious, and where we dream of what might be. I want us to live in a society where “we” means everybody, and where being taught to read is a democratically guaranteed right, and not merely a gift.