Jeff Kubiak shared the following provocation on Twitter:
Name the person that brought reading to life for you- GO! @PrincipalTrots @A_Klein09 @mrbgilson @_AndyJacks @michelelkelly @BethHouf @burgessdave @alienearbud @casas_jimmy @jcorippo @RickJetter @JCasaTodd @RebeccaCoda @alicekeeler @tsschmidty pic.twitter.com/IJ7wKToqVC
— Jeff Kubiak (@jeffreykubiak) July 27, 2018
In that thread there are so many responses reflecting on early memories of mom or dad reading or an early childhood teacher. My experience is a little different which is why I need more than 280 characters to share and reflect on this.
My parents immigrated to Canada from Italy. My mom learned how to speak English by watching soap operas which was a staple in our household. We grew up know the intricacies of Jack Abbott and Victor Newman on the Young and the Restless. From noon to 4:30 pm every day we would watch a string of soaps and in the evenings game shows. I never saw my parents read, either in their native Italian or English, unless it was trying to decipher a utility or tax bill.
In my early years, I was raised by my Nonna (grandmother) who only spoke Sicilian (which is a dialect of Italian). In kindergarten, I could not speak a word of English. When they called in a translator to assess my language, the Italian translator could scarcely understand a word I said. As a result, I was assessed as having learning and language disabilities.
In grade one, our teacher assigned “colours” to reading groups. We were reading levelled readers and although the red group wasn’t called the slow readers or loser group, that is what I felt and this is how it was treated. There was little expectation of my academic success or that I would ever move up to the other reading groups. I worked hard to understand the words, the phonetic sounds. I don’t ever remember being transfixed by a story, but I remember Mr. Muggs and his various adventures. In and around grade 6, reading just clicked for me. It was then that I realized that I could escape the bullying, the loneliness, and the sheer monotony of my life by being transported into a novel.
At home, I had to hide my reading. My mother, who didn’t value reading, would yell at me for wasting my life away with a book. I would smuggle books into bed and would read until the wee hours of the night, after I was sure that my parents’ lights were out.
We never went to the public library together. When I learned that the public and school libraries were places where I could get books, I took full advantage, but the librarians are faceless to me. I revelled in lots of “frivolous reading”: every Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Judy Blume book and then moved onto Romances. It wasn’t until Mr. James Stewart, my grade 11 English teacher got me interested in more classical texts. His passion for literature was infectious. He inspired me to become an English teacher and to pass on that passion to students.
But for a long time, I became mired in a life of reading logs, quotation analysis, and literary essays.
If I’ve learned one thing when I reflected on my English teaching career, is that the best way to kill students’ love of reading is to assign them reading logs (But that is a whole other blog post!)
When my own children were born, I made sure our house was full of books of every genre and I read to them every night. My firstborn became an avid reader, but my younger daughter, no matter how much I modelled reading or read to her was not in any way interested. Seriously! We would go to the local bookstore and Sydney would come out with a bag full of books, and Kelsey would come out with a few stickers and a ruler. One of the stories I share in Social LEADia is my youngest daughter, Kelsey challenging me when my husband and I are reading a physical copy of the newspaper that she too was reading on her phone. This, in part, is what has made me rethink how we define literacy.
As a Teacher-Librarian, I feel it is my job to help students find the perfect book that will help them love reading; but it’s also to honour and show kids the various literate behaviours they do not necessarily associate with reading. I continue to harbour the hope that one day, Kelsey will find a genre or author she loves; in the meantime, I am careful not to judge kids on their reading or non-reading behaviours and for kids who do not have supportive parents at home, I want to be the teacher they remember as having ignited a spark for reading.
