It’s late Saturday night and I need to go to bed. I’m thankful for my blog tonight, because I can talk even when everyone else is asleep.
In 1978, I started first grade. I wrote my name on my paper “ILUJ”. The L and the J were backwards when I would write them. Thank goodness that at least the I and U couldn’t be flipped. My reading group was the “blue jays”. I was in that group from first grade to fourth grade. The name changed, but the kids in the group always stayed the same. I hated to read. I wasn’t good at it. I saw the words backwards and froze when it was my turn to read in front of the class. The teachers I had over the years would call my parents in for conferences. “Maybe she’s dyslexic”, they would say. So, they would test. I never knew the results. I just knew I stayed with the same group of kids who couldn’t read and I hated reading! I had friends who would read mysteries and other tales. I would go to the library and checkout the same books as them and carry them around and pretend to read them. I hated to read though. I could read, but I wasn’t good at it and my self esteem was in the bottom of a deep pit from four years of the “blue birds” gang. The spring of my fourth grade year, my mother knew something had to change. She setup a meeting with the administrators and counselor at my school and got permission to “home school” me all summer in the area of reading. She brought home the reading book that I would be starting next and all summer we worked like dogs getting through each dull and long story. At the end of the summer, I was brought up to the school to take end of unit tests that should have been given all along during the summer, but my mother was prohibited from giving them to me. So, I tested and tested for what seems like a week. Needless to say, a lot of what I needed to know was no longer in my eleven year old head after all summer. We’d know the results when fifth grade started.
Fifth grade was going to be my new start. I would no longer be in the “blue birds”. By then, the name felt like “old buzzards”. I was called by my new teacher along with some other students to her reading table and what do you know, it was all my old buddies. You guessed it, same group as always. The book I had worked all summer to get through sat right in front of me on the table. I had worked and worked to improve and all I had done was gotten a ticket to start, not on page one of the reading book, but about half way through the book. All the others who had not taken all summer to advance themselves got a free ticket right along with me. I was devastated!
Why do I tell this story? It’s not an easy one to tell. Not many people know this about me. I couldn’t read well and I hated to read. Thanks to how I was being taught and how I was being treated. I didn’t see books as an escape from reality, a place to go and have an adventure for a little while. I saw it as a punishment and a mountain I couldn’t get over.
I tell this story because I am a media specialist! I love books! I love to read! I had to make that decision many years ago. I got better because I was determined to do so. Some of what I did was out of determination to prove to others that a slightly dyslexic girl who wrote her name backwards on her paper made it in spite of it all.
For years I have worked to make sure my own children learned to read early and learned to love reading by reading to them as babies and small boys. I encourage them to read books that I know they will like because I’ve read them. I’ve bribed them with going to movies based on books if they will just read the book first. We have read as a family many series together and had wonderful discussions about them. I have never cared about any reading program that their school had in place. My kids love to read, but they hate to take quizzes on what they read. I never cared if they took a quiz and I would tell their teachers that at conferences if the subject came up. They see the quizzing as a deterrent to reading. So, I took that off the table and they read. As their parent, I could do that for them. 🙂
It isn’t about a reading program or a reading book. It isn’t about a quiz to see if you understand what you’ve read. No program taught me to read. I learned despite those things. They were my adversaries.
We are putting those same obstacles in the way of students still today. Labeling books and limiting students to just those with the their “color” inhibits reading. I’m guilty of this at my own school. It’s a system that was there long before me and I have been the color dot police for many years knowing all along that this isn’t the way, but afraid that I didn’t have the right to change it.
I do have the right and the responsibility to change it. There are too many students out there who aren’t reading because we aren’t letting them. Pick a book because you love it, not because the dot is the right color for you. Read it and love it and then love another and another.
All my love for reading,
From one former Non-reader ~ Juli Gilbert, Media Specialist
(I have 25,000 books, come and read ’em)
For a little extra reading….Here’s what got me fired up tonight. Thanks Dr. Hardin 🙂
http://thereadingzone.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/more-reading-more-writing-more-engaged-citizens-of-the-world/