If I Were in Charge of the World

If I were in charge of the world

I’d cancel facilitators,

Friday spellings,

Pizza bribes, and also

Questions at the end of the story.

If I were in charge of the world

You could read Charlotte’s Web and Flat Stanley

In any grade you wanted.

You could even read them twice.

If I were in charge of the world

There’s be a million million

Pages of delight,

Instead of thirty-two novels

Somebody else chose.

If I were in charge of the world

Nobody under age 40 would be badgered to read Moby Dick.

By then you might appreciate, even like, it.

No books would come by decree,

And a person who said knock-knock riddle books with pop-up pages are a quintessential part of a reading program

Would still be allowed to be

In charge of the world.

A Plea for More Disorderliness

After 12 years teaching 7th and 8th grade Remedial Readers, I found myself in a classroom with twenty-two children who had been identified as the worst readers in third grade. They also suffered from a lot of physical and emotional difficulties. They assured me every day that they “hated reading.”

Jennifer discovered Amelia Bedelia in December. By then, the required period of independent silent reading that started each day had extended from the initial torturous time of five minutes to a fairly willing forty minutes.

Yes, we started each day by reading our separate books for forty minutes. Yes, I read too: no figuring out lunch money or correcting papers. Most children have never seen an adult engaged in a book.

I knew the instant Jennifer discovered something startling in Amelia Bedelia. Her eyes opened wide; she turned back a page and read it again, mouthing each word. Then she giggled and looked up at me. I nodded and winked. She grinned and nudged Sophie, showing her the page. Then David demanded to see what was so funny, and before he realized what was happening, David the boy who whined the loudest every single morning, “I hate reading!” was enjoying a book. Before long, twenty rotten readers were scrambling to get their names on a waiting list for, of all things, a book. And then Jesse discovered that there were more Amelias.

More Amelias! We had an Amelia celebration.

But please note: This was a celebration of reading. We didn’t use the book as an excuse to do something else. I didn’t interrogate them about main idea; they didn’t make puppets. We used each book as inspiration to read another book. I don’t recall ever asking a single question about an Amelia book. I was appalled a few years later, in the course of doing some research on a basal program, to discover Amelia in a basal. The good news is that it is printed pretty much as the author wrote it. the bad news is that the teacher’s manual carefully lists the objectives to be taught with the story, including:

decode words base on the spelling pattern generalization that a vowel letter followed by a consonant and final e represents a glided (or long) vowel sound.

Never mind that research shows that the final e rule is true no more than 53 percent of the time. Even if the rule were 99 and 44/100 percent pure, one has to be fuzzy-headed, any perhaps sadistic, to ruin children’s pleasure this way. And there’s more:

*Spelling Demons from the story: “laughed: the gh has an f sound here.”

*Problem Solving Skills: Pretend you were Mrs. Rogers. What would you have done when you came home and found the towels ruined?

*Higher Order Thinking Skills: Write a new ending for the story.

*Projects: Make puppets and put on a play/

*Eating: Make a cake with a surprise (such as gumdrops) in it.

On and on it goes.

Amazing as it seems, even rotten readers, kids repeating the grade, kids mainstreamed from special class, kids from one-parent, kids on probation, bilingual minimally brain-damaged, deaf, one-eyed kids (this lists summarizes the label of these third graders in my care) will read read willingly and with enthusiasm–when given the chance. School rarely gives them this chance. I tell teachers that by February my third graders were moaning and groaning when I called a halt to sustained silent reading at the end of one hour, and those teachers are amazed, shocked, and mystified. “When did you find time to teach skills?” they ask. Honest. It’s the first question I’m always asked when I emphasize that this silent reading hour was every day, not just on Reading Thursday.

The skills are in the books. After all, the writers use adjectives and apostrophes. But to rigorously plumb the books for these discrete skills is to miss the point of reading. If we are going to invite children to read Charlotte’s Web so we can milk it for every “sequencing activity,” “summarizing main idea,” “understanding vocabulary in context”–then for all the wonder the kids will get from the book, E. B. White might have done better to spend his time feeding the chickens.

A well-meaning teacher sent me a list of sixty-four projects kids can do on Sarah, Plain and Tall. If this doesn’t make one weep, what will?

Leaving a child along to savor a book, to get from it what he will, and then holding one’s tongue when that child closes the book, requires a tremendous act of faith–faith in children and faith in books, School systems have never been designed to easily accommodate acts of faith, and today society’s horrendous divisions and vigilante attacks on libraries just make this fact more telling..

Make no mistake: trusting teachers and books is a revolutionary act. Books are, after all, dangerous stuff. Leave a child alone with a book and you don’t know what might happen. But to the teacher who feels she must be in control–control of the skills, the books, and the children, I commend Arnold Lobel’s lovely little fable, “The Crocodile in the Bedroom,” found in his Fables. There. we find that a crocodile who loved the neat and tidy rows of the flowers on the wallpaper in his bedroom was coaxed outside into the garden by his wife, who invited him to smell the roses and the lilies of the valley.

“Great heavens!” cried the crocodile. “The flowers and leaves in this garden are growing in a terrible tangle! They are all scattered! They are messy and entwined!”

Whereupon he went back to his room, seldom leaving his bed. He stared at the neat and tidy rows of flowers on the wallpaper and “he turned a very pale and sickly of green.

I would ask teachers everywhere to remember that Lobel’s moral, Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order, applies as much to school reading programs as it does to wallpaper.

Note: this is adapted from Who’s In Charge: A Teacher Speaks Her Mind (Heinemann)