Children's Book Week

It’s Children’s Book Week, something we don’t celebrate in academia, but the kind of thing that helps to build the scholars of the future, even the guitar hero scholars. We’re librarians, we all know the importance not just of literacy, but of lots of active reading.

This recalls my family’s struggles with our child’s reading ability. Last year my daughter Libby was in first grade at a private Catholic girls school that was supposed to focus on academics. We decided on an all girls school to avoid the distraction boys sometimes bring to the classroom and the occasional occurrence in later grades of girls paying more attention to boys than to studies.

She had gotten along okay in kindergarten, but the first grade teacher had a serious problem with my daughter’s reading habits. The problem? Libby read too many books at too high a level, which meant she was ahead of most of the other children in a lot of subjects and also meant she was bored out of her mind during classes that seemed to her to still be teaching kindergarten skills. In the Fall before her 7th birthday (she was born on Epiphany), she read, both with her mother and on her own, the entire Harry Potter series up to that point. She hasn’t met a book series from Captain Underpants to Harry Potter that she hasn’t devoured. (Current obsession: Edgar and Ellen).

Incredibly, the teacher was opposed to Libby’s reading so much, though, and by extension to the reading habits we’ve instilled in her mostly through example. Finally, when the teacher more or less told us that Libby should stop reading so many books, we came to a crisis. Imagine, too much reading causing a classroom crisis. Since the school wouldn’t give her extra work or promote her, we finally pulled her out 3/4 of the way through the year and put her in a school with a more rigorous curriculum. She also skipped a grade.

Now she’s in the 3rd grade at the Princeton Latin Academy, where her current third grade report card lists the following graded subjects: Latin, Greek, World History, Arithmetic, Literature, Writing, Syntax, Science, Spelling, Geography, and Art. Music isn’t graded, but they have that as well. They have a poetry recitation day, and every spring the lower school students write and perform an opera based on a classic work of literature. They start learning rhetoric and philosophy in the 7th grade. Lest it sounds too much of a grind, the school is also in the middle of the woods on a summer campground that isn’t used during the year. So they also spend a lot of time playing in the woods where they get quasi property deeds that they then trade and combine, and make houses and things on the “props.” Now all the kids are like her, so she’s not such a freak because she reads a lot, as avid readers were in the previous school. (She’s good at other things, and is tall and athletic as well. I’d show you a picture, but you’d just get jealous that your own children weren’t as attractive.)

Still, I think the reading begins at home. I just can’t understand parents who claim to worry that their children aren’t reading or reading poorly, but then never read anything themselves. The format varies from print to electronic, but reading is a frequent occurrence at our house. Libby has even picked up her parent’s and grandparent’s habit of reading over meals. Every day I find the piles of books and magazines consumed with the daily breakfast. If we didn’t consciously have family dinners every night, we’d probably all three sit at the dinner table reading to ourselves while eating.

My parents were avid readers, but not of anything worth remembering, just whatever paperbacks might come their way. Avid, but not discriminatory. But the substance doesn’t matter for children so much as the habit. I now read all sorts of scholarly books and articles for enjoyment that my parents would have balked at, but it’s because the long habit has made them relatively easy. It helps, though, to have books around. I missed out on that as a child, since my parents weren’t particularly well educated and didn’t value books as such. While they bought me books and took me to the library, books weren’t much of a presence in the house. The paperbacks came and went. I decided I would change that for my daughter. Here’s a view of most of my home library and some of hers next to her little workspace. (The home library used to be larger, but I sold a couple thousand books last time I moved. I got tired of having books stuffed into every nook at cranny of my house.) I like Children’s Book Week and similar projects because they promote the presence of books.

The sheer physicality of the books helps against the other distractions. We also spend a lot of time on our computers, reading and playing games. My daughter spends a lot of time on our desktop computer, mostly either reading Garfield comics or playing on a sort of junior games and social networking site called Webkinz. I can’t say I particularly like her playing games like “Supermodel,” where the point is to pick the most fashionable outfit, which seems to be the one with the most Webkinz logos, but it’s safe. We don’t allow Barbies in the house, so she has to get her gender oppression kick somewhere, I suppose. The computer presence is bound to increase when she gets her “One Laptop per Child” laptop for Christmas. Add to that all the DVDs and other games and the distractions mount up. Having books around and frequently reading shows that these things are enjoyable, too. DVDs and Internet games complement the traditional, not just replace it.

It’s too bad every week isn’t children’s book week. I think we need an adult book week as well.

By the way, I got a few minutes to write this because my wife’s reading The Wright 3 to Libby. Now it’s time for me to do daddy duty, which goes on even during Children’s Book Week.