Spreading our "Book Love": Reading and Sharing in a Time of Social Distancing

Even in the midst of social distancing, Gretchen Rumohr, Shelly Shaffer, Steffany Maher and I continue to work on a project. We are in a routine of meeting through Zoom every Monday for an hour or so in the hopes that we will  coordinate our efforts and make some progress. Today, we became acutely aware that we had a different level of stress and we wonder how others are handling the situation. We wondered about "forced" schooling and what that might mean for reading.

Then, like what happens on many Mondays, we had an idea. With praise to Penny Kittle, we borrow the term "Book Love." 

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Reading has Mattered in Our Lives

During the coming weeks, many of us will likely be staying home due to a national pandemic. Many of us--teachers and professors--may be transitioning our content online or making other adjustments in order to meet student learning outcomes. In many ways, we are participating in something we never signed up for nor did we anticipate such a scenario.  In most cases, we are changing the rules of what we promised we’d do when we met our students. It’s jarring, and it feels forced. It begs the question: What does it mean to force educational practices in artificial ways upon our students, our children, and our grandchildren? Alternatively, what does it mean to be authentic in our current struggles and model coping strategies for our students?

Upon reflecting about what it means to be staying at home during a national pandemic, at our core, we recognize the power of reading. We all have childhood memories of reading. We can name books that we read over and over, books that led us to other books, and books that we finally fell in love with after multiple attempts. 

From Steve: I still love my discovery of Berries Goodman by the Newbery Medal winning author Emily Cheney Neville. What? you don’t know this book? No time like the present to take a look. In middle school I fell in love with Louis L’Amour novels. The Sackett Brand is still fun to read, but reading these pulp westerns lead me to the works of A. B. Guthrie his novel of the mountain men--The Big Sky. I was a voracious reader and started checking out Moby Dick from the bookmobile when I was in middle school. Gregory Peck was Captain Ahab for me and not Atticus Finch, but it wasn’t until my early twenties that I got past the first few chapters. Today, it remains one of my favorite books. I had a similar experience with One Hundred Years of Solitude.  ​

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From Steffany: I fell in love with reading as a young girl when my mother would read to my three sisters and me at night before bed. The first book I remember vividly was one from The Sugar Creek Gang series, and when she finished reading it to us, I decided to reread it to myself. Reading books my mother read became a habit, and later in my latchkey-kid life, I would randomly pick up my mother’s novels and begin reading wherever her bookmark was. I’m pretty sure she never knew this, or she may have chosen her books a little more carefully.
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I still remember the excitement of turning the hallway at my elementary school and seeing the RIF (Reading Is Fun) tables set up.  I knew they meant that I would leave school with a brand new book that day. In first grade, it was an Encyclopedia Brown book.  In fifth grade, a Scott O’Dell.  In middle school, I started The Sword of Shannara Trilogy after picking up my mother’s copy one day, and thus began my love for fantasy/sci-fi.  I devoured those books throughout middle school and made the leap to Stephen King’s The Shining in 8th grade.

​I was lucky to have a high school teacher who was ahead of her time and allowed us to read whatever books we chose and write short summaries of them.  While we still read Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, I also steadily made my way through every book Stephen King had written.  It wasn’t until I became a high school teacher and started my graduate work that I began reading young adult literature.  I found myself connecting to books in a whole new way, as I would consider how I might teach them while I was reading.

And then when my own daughters began reading YA, I connected in a new way again.  After my oldest daughter read Winger, she implored me to read it so we could talk about it. It wrecked me, and we cried through our talk. Together, we anxiously awaited Andrew Smith’s sequel, Stand Off. This has become the culture in our home--we find a book we adore, or that makes us so angry we cry, or that causes us to fall in love all over again, and we share it, and we talk about it (and most likely cry), and then we talk about how we can make a difference.  Powerful books like The Hate U Give and I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter and Speak: The Graphic Novel. 
These are the books my girls and I pick up, read, and share with one another. These are the books I share with my preservice teachers, and then they read other YA books that interest them, and we discuss what moves us to empathy and action. These are the books I want to share with the world--books that move readers to tears and to work toward change. 

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From Gretchen: I grew up with a mom that brought me to the library every Saturday.  Will I lose street cred with my fellow YA scholars if I say that I grew up on a steady diet of Sweet Valley High and Christopher Pike?  That while I had an active out-of-school reading life,  I didn’t read anything I was assigned to read in high school (which I’ve detailed in a separate blog post)? At any rate, I will never forget reading The Handmaid’s Tale as a college undergrad. I was so invested in Atwood’s narrative that I thought:  how am I even allowed to drive to the store? to read? to have my own thoughts? I found my thoughts wandering back to Atwood when reading The Nowhere Girls. When I taught high school, I hadn’t yet discovered YA literature for my own use--so I loved “adult” authors like Anita Shreve, Robert Morgan, and Wally Lamb (...what a missed opportunity, I think. But better late to this YA game than never.)  Graduate school brought endless discovery through a graduate-level Harry Potter class: here was a community of readers and writers who were doing legitimate academic work on middle-grade/YA literature. Here was a class that grounded YA in the classics, yet recognized the power of a series to help students learn more about their lives.
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Some of the most inspiring intersections between my love of reading and my teaching have been when my students discover “the” book--the book that turned them into real readers, the book that made them look for similar books or similar authors, the book that they wanted to share with the world.  Books like Ghost and Everyday and Salt to the Sea are easy recommendations for reluctant readers, and the payoff--the joy they radiate upon rediscovering reading--will carry them far into their own teaching lives.

As I think ahead to reading during the pandemic, here is what I plan to read:  Jumping off Swings, Educated, How to Make Friends with the Dark, Barely Missing Everything, The Walls Around us, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All, and Blood, Water, Paint.  Is this list realistic?  Will it change as I get more recommendations or find that I can’t keep up with my administrative work and doorknob-disinfecting schedule?  Perhaps. But when you fall in love with reading, you always dream about your next date with a book.  ​

Gretchen has an Ambitious List. What does Yours Look Like?

From Shelly: Unlike some of my colleagues (above) that have strong reading memories from their childhood, I remember reading, but I don’t remember specific books. I know that my mom recommended books to me as a child, like The Secret Garden and Heidi. Those were some of my mom’s favorite books growing up, so she shared them with me, but none of the books from my childhood had a lasting impact on my reading identity. I was in school during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, so young adult novels were being published at that time, but I don’t remember having access to these books in my school. 

My strongest reading memories are actually as an adult reader and teacher of young adult readers as a middle school teacher. I remember reading Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson for the first time and being floored that Melinda had to endure her pain alone, without help from her friends or family. I wondered, “How can they all be so blind to her pain?” and “How can they not see the changes in Melinda?” This book really touched me because her silence reminded me of my own. Another book that changed my life was Identical by Ellen Hopkins. That book was one of the first I had read that explored sexual abuse in such a way. Ellen’s book told my story. It made me see myself more clearly than I had before, and I knew that I would never be the same. 

There are books that we can read at certain times in our lives that speak our stories in a way that nothing else can. I have had several other books touch my life at certain times in my life, or that are important to me because they touched a student’s life. Trying to provide books to meet the interests and needs of the students in my classroom was important to me; thus, I began to collect YA books-as many YA books as I could-knowing that I had students in my classroom that needed access to these books. And, as I added books to my classroom library, I read them all. I read my first school shooting book, Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Stasser, while I was still teaching eighth grade in Mesa, AZ. This book was recommended to me by one of my students--who was usually a non-reader. He loved this book, and I had to find out what had attracted him to this book. I was fascinated that there were books that tackled such a difficult topic in our lives. I began reading every book related to school shootings that I could find (See link to my YA Wednesday blog). When I read Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan after my teenage son’s coming out, I learned about his life and imagined what life could be like for him in an ideal world. I read Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, and I learned about my cousin’s anorexia and her personal struggles through the main character, Lia. There are so many more books that have touched my life in important ways. I cannot choose favorites,but rather I remember books because of the experience they provided me at the time when I read that particular book. ​​

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What can We do While We Stay Home?

Can this period of time be an opportunity for “authentic” reading instead of a march through endless worksheets in an attempt to meet a set of standards? What if, as Antero Garcia suggests, we just spend some time healing? We understand that not every child or adolescent we work with will be carbon copies of who we are. They might not relish the time to read that they have been given. However, if the notion of school becomes even more artificial, more routinized--a mandated march through the standards, then haven’t we lost an opportunity to do something different? Something better?  Something that recognizes our common humanity and builds empathy?

Friends, this is an opportunity to model a CHANGE during this new normal. What would happen if we set aside the worksheets, the curriculum, the constant checking of social media, the noise, and simply buried ourselves in books?  What would happen if we encouraged students to do the same, in all subject areas? What would happen if we took Louise Rosenblatt to heart and decided that now was the time to frontload life events through literature?  I can see the emails now: ​

Dear student, please set aside your math homework and read An Abundance of Katherines instead. If you feel like it, let me know what you think of it. Let me know what you thought of the math in the book. Let me know what you learned about love. Or not!  You don’t need to tell me anything about the book. Just keep reading.    

Or: 
 
Dear student, in lieu of gym class, take a well-spaced walk outside and then read Tradition. If you feel like it, let me know how it made you see others differently, or how it made you reflect on your own relationships. Let me know what you learned about athletic culture.  Tell me how often you resonated with a character. Or not! You don’t need to tell me anything about the book. Just keep reading.    

Or:

Dear student, instead of reading Julius Caesar, read Unpresidented.  If you feel like it, let me know what it taught you about our current political system.  Reflect on the meaning of leadership. Share some of your questions about the current administration, and of the upcoming election.  Or not! You don’t need to tell me anything about the book. Just keep reading.    

Our public libraries may be closed, but we know that library cards still work for Libby, Hoopla, and Overdrive.  We can listen to audiobooks while we rake leaves (six feet apart from others), load the dishwasher for the millionth time, and wash our hands.  We can read e-books as we drift to sleep, the glow of the screen not unlike our under-the covers, covert childhood reading by flashlight. We can make popcorn on the stove and watch screen adaptations of our favorite books with our families.  We can harness the healing power of books as we navigate this crisis.

We Want to Hear from You!

So--now we want to hear from you.  Help us generate a list of “must reads” during this time of isolation.  Please share your top three books in each category: Children’s Books, Middle Grade Books, Young Adult Books, and Screen Adaptations of Literary Works.  ​

Click here and share your choices:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeVEdPgUcMeMuDY4EGqCD-yHEEMY1j7H6kJbYfXi9fvwNMCuw/viewform?usp=sf_link 

When you finish, share the link widely. We will leave it open for a week and then share the results as quickly as possible.

​Until next time.