One More For Our Side!

As you probably already know, I work for Scholastic Book Fairs, and every season we have a Season Kick Off meeting at which we discuss the previous season, customer surveys, new books, etc.  Today was the Spring SKO, and as usual, we ended up discussing, what else, but our own individual reading. :-) A coworker, one who admittedly never liked reading  before, talked about picking up one of the Bluford High series (No Way Out, I think) to read for our Stop, Drop, and Read program.  In it, he found for the first time a story to which he could connect.  The characters and situations reflected his community and life, and as a result, he came to love the book.  It seems to have sparked a genuine interest in reading, and I'm pretty sure he'll be reading the rest of the series.  Hopefully, this will lead to even more reading of lots of different titles and kinds of books.

What's your point, Dawn?  This is cool, but really, what are you trying to say?  This coworker is in his early 20's, 23 I think.  He is just now, as a result of a random book picked up because he "had" to read for 15 minutes every workday, finding a love of reading.  What could it have done for him to have found this love 10 years ago? 15 years ago?  What if some librarian or teacher had put a book in his hands then that reflected him, and as a result, he started reading more and more at age 8 or 13 as opposed to 23?  Now, don't get me wrong here...starting to read every day at ANY age is awesome, and I love that he did.  I just wonder about the kids who grow up to be the 23 and 30 year olds who never find that book.  Once a child is out of school, there is no guarantee that he or she will visit the library or read at all.  Once he or she is out of that age range where school is mandatory and the library is visited at least some for schoolwork, we've lost our golden chance.  Luckily, this coworker came to work for a company that values literacy and created an opportunity for him to find this new interest, but there are a lot of people who don't like to read or never read out there and only a few jobs open at Scholastic.  So what to do?

Every time you have the opportunity to put a book in a child's hands, DO IT.  Take your kids to the library.  Buy books for nieces and nephews and cousins and friends.  Read in front of kids.  Get excited about whatever you're reading, and when you read something amazing, talk it up like you've got the cure for cancer. While reading may not actually cure cancer or AIDS or anything else in and of itself, if you get a child to read a lot now, who's to say that he or she won't find a love of science in that reading and grow up to cure these things.  There's no way to gauge just how much impact the simple act of handing a book to a kid can have, but I promise you, it is huge.

Read Every Day...

As I said before, I work for Scholastic, and last year we got t-shirts at the beginning of the fall season.  On  the front is a small square that says "Read Every Day, Lead a Better Life"; on the back, it reads "Let's Raise Readers!"  I love this shirt.  Aside from being awesomely blue tye-dye, it's a book geek shirt, so I wear it out a lot--not just to work. Anyway, I wore it on Saturday while we were out paying bills and running errands.  As I was turning to leave from paying one bill, the guy behind the counter asked me what my shirt said.  I told him and explained the whole thing...including our stop, drop, and read program at work.  He asked me if reading every day really made your life better, and of course, I told him it does.  Then he asked if anything counted--newspapers, instructions on how to put chairs together, etc.  "But of course!"  He answered that he'd try it.

What's the point?  The point is that all I did was wear a shirt.  All I did was spend a couple of minutes talking about reading to someone, and in that couple of minutes, I may have impacted the rest of his life.  Maybe he will just read chair instructions at first, but then he may move on to reading the news or magazines everyday. After that, who knows?  And this is an adult.  People claim you can't teach old dogs new tricks, but I may have done just that.  If it was that easy to get an adult who might not come into contact with reading stimuli every day to consider reading more, how much easier would it be to get a kid to do it?  

Reading Like a 5-year-old

For those of you who don't know (i.e. you didn't read the first post), I have been employed at the Tallahassee Scholastic Book Fairs Warehouse since last August. It isn't nearly as fun as it sounds, as I'm one of the grunts who fills and totes boxes all day in the cold/heat of the warehouse, but it is a rockin' company to work for nonetheless. Not to mention, I end up feeling like I've done something decent at the end of the day. After all, I'm sending books to kids; can't be all bad, right? I mean, think about it...especially if you grew up in a rural area pre-internet (yep, old) like I did. Book Fair week was like Christmas morning! Suddenly, where there had been only Wal-Mart to feed your book buying cravings, there were these shiny silver cases sitting in your school library! (And let me note that this was pre-Wal-Mart Supercenter. All we had was a very dinky regular WM with a very dinky book aisle. And yes, I practically lived at the city library, but there's something about owning your own books, you know?) Anyway, I digress...It was like Christmas and your birthday all rolled into one...well, it was for me anyway. I never failed to get in trouble during book fair week. In junior high, they would let us go down to the library a couple at a time during English class to shop everyday. The teachers soon learned to make me wait before sending me, because I would spend the WHOLE class wandering down there. As a poor kid, I only had a very limited amount to spend, and by God, I was going to get the most out of every dollar. Screw those posters! Hand me Sweet Valley High, bitches!

With all that said, working at the warehouse plus taking a children's lit class has screwed with my reading list somewhat. Between the gift certificates we got during the winter sale and random things along the way, probably half of the  books I've read since January 1 have been classified as YA or children's literature--some old classics I'm rereading and some new and interesting discoveries. No, I have not quit reading "adult" literature (sounds like porn, huh?), but reading all this kids' lit has made me think about a few things. When we were little, there were a lot of people who viewed book fair day or library day as a revelation, as a beautiful, exciting thing, but as they get older, they lose the fascination they had so easily as a kid. Books lose that spark. Now, for me they never have. I can be just as excited wandering into a bookstore now as I did going to the book fair or library then, but I am a super book geek of the highest caliber. So I don't count. Take some of the people I work with for example. Scholastic implemented a "Stop, Drop, and Read!" initiative last season for all its branches. For 15 minutes a day, we stop 
working and read. For me, this is fucking amazing! Pay me to sit and read? Yes, please! But for others there, it seems to be a chore...just one more thing that must be done before going home for the day. Some even seemed horrified by the idea, which I just don't get. I've noticed a couple of people, however, that have started reading during breaks or bring their own book now instead of just grabbing one of the ones from the warehouse since we've been doing this. It made me smile before, but now that I've been reading so much kids' lit, I think I understand it even better.

Reading children's literature is unlike reading any other genre. The stories are meant to be engaging at all times and to slip teaching moments in when possible, almost covertly. That way, kids are entertained and find themselves understanding new things without a lecture, and that makes a child feel amazing--to feel like they have figured something out without an adult leaning over their shoulder, regardless of what it is. I'm not saying these co-workers necessarily learned anything from reading the books at the warehouse, though I'm sure they did. What I am saying is that, just like I have been the past few weeks, they are being reminded of what it felt like to read as a kid, when every page felt like an actual door opening and we weren't so hard to impress. In turn, this is making them want to read more outside those 15 minutes.

I bitch and moan all the time about grown ups who claim to hate reading. I'm of the mind that no one can truly hate reading; it's just that they haven't found that one book that will just blow their minds. Maybe the problem isn't even that they haven't found the magic book. Maybe they just need to be handed a copy of Bridge to Terabithia or A Wrinkle in Time or Little House on the Prairie to remind them how awesome reading and books are. In short, they need to read like a 5-year-old. But you don't have to take my word for it...go find a kids' book you loved. Read it again, and I guarantee you, you'll see what I mean.

I Am the Dinosaur in the Library.

Greetings and welcome! If you have wandered in, the truth is you probably know me irl...but if by some chance you don't, let me give you a bit of an introduction.  I'm Dawn, 33, current Master's student in Florida State's Library Science program, and one of the biggest book geeks you will ever meet.  In addition to all this, I work for Scholastic Book Fairs, whose primary purpose (aside from profits) is to promote children's literacy.  After gathering Bachelor's like flowers (3 total--in Religion, Women's Studies, and Creative Writing with minors in Women's Studies, Religion, and Latin), I ended up studying to be a librarian, with a focus in children's and youth service.  The long term plan is to get my Master's and Ph.D and be a librarian in a public library setting, possibly a kid's librarian.  Ideally, I would like to work in a rural area or in other areas where I could assist low SES patrons...that's the official academic plan.  The "What I Wanna Do When I Grow Up" answer is: be some kid's superhero the way my town librarians were mine; also, to be the Pagemaster.

Hey, you don't know! It could be a thing!

...which brings me to this blog.  Despite my love of my laptop, phone, and most things fabulous and technological, I am hopelessly in love with real, paper books.  I unapologetically miss the card catalog.  Though I've read a few, I think e-books are a thing of evil.  Just the other day, I told my wife how much easier an assignment would have been if I'd used a regular old encyclopedia rather than digging through government information websites.  Bad person? Nah, just the dinosaur in the stacks.  Page dog-earers beware!