NOTE: I wrote this back when a hot topic on campus was whether our issuing a laptop to every student had been a good idea.
We made a big decision a few years ago. We gave every single one of our students a library card. We have the most incredible library in the world here on campus; there is very little the students can't read. We allow them to make their own choices about what to read, and if they choose, they can write their own books to be included in the library for other students to check out.
I passed a student just this morning. He was sitting on a bench reading. The thought of it filled me with anxiety. Why wasn't he writing, or reading something related to school? He wasn't reading anything professionally done. It looked like he was reading something from our amateur section of the library, where anyone can write anything they want, and publish it for anyone else to read. Some of this work is sloppy, some of it is just bad writing, but it's very immediate and popular books spread like wildfire.
Walking around campus, I see kids sitting in groups, all with their heads buried in books. Almost all of them are reading. Many are reading comic books, others are doing games like crossword puzzles and word searches. It's a little jarring. You'd think that kids sitting in groups would be talking face to face. Sometimes I wonder if issuing library cards to everybody was a bad thing. How are books affecting our kids' ability to socialize? How is it affecting their choices of what to do with their free time?
I think that our biggest goal should be to engage our kids more in the act of writing and sharing their own work. Of course, as they say, "You are what you eat," so we also need to raise the quality of what our kids are reading. Then, get them to create better stuff than what they consume.
Don't get me wrong. There is nothing bad about reading. In fact, you have read a variety of things, from comics to novels, from non-fiction to plays, from bestsellers to pulp fiction, if you are going to be able to be a flexible and imaginative writer. We adults probably need to choose to read more YA and comic books, just as our kids may need to choose to read more novels and biographies.
In fact, as teachers who wish to inspire a love of writing, we ourselves need to be passionate about reading, and of writing. We ourselves need to be publishing, and critiquing, and dreaming, and creating, in ways as large or as small as our dreams allow. Then we need to share our work with the world, maybe by adding to one of the shelves in that public section of the library so many of our kids frequent.
I think the cat is out of the bag, as they say. Now that our students have gotten a taste of the library card, they're going to make their own choices about what, where, and when they read. Taking the card away, or banning reading, is not a solution. Being passionate about creating, collaborating, and sharing original work, informed by good choices about what we consume, should be right at the top of all of our reading lists.
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