Dusting Off a Set of Childhood Books

I read an article yesterday in the New York Times about Lorrie McNeill, a Jonesboro, Georgia, English teacher of seventh- and eighth-graders. Last fall, she abandoned “required reading” in her classes and began her courses by inviting students to read a book they loved. Some chose comic books or Harry Potter. A very few chose books by Toni Morrison and Ernest Gaines. As she observed their interests, she suggested books that might pique their interest, books requiring tougher reading skills and offering richer subject matter and literary quality. I loved her method.

I was "educated" in a country school in Ohio in the 50s. There were 16 students in my graduating class and almost all of them were in the third grade with me when I came to that school and for the nine years that followed. We learned parts of "Invictus" and a poem that began "...I meant to do my work today/but a brown bird sang in the apple tree." We read Macbeth, ploddingly, in senior year with no discussion worthy of mention. We wrote exactly one paper in four years. I remember Cotton Mather. I didn't know Shakespeare wrote sonnets until I was a sophomore at Ohio University. Before that, I didn't know what a sonnet was. We had one language, Latin, taught by a woman who didn't love it and whose chief effort to explain why we "had" to study it was that it would help us with spelling. I studied physics with a shy minister I could hardly hear, who didn't believe a word of it. For tests in that class, the boys put their books on the floor and turned the pages with their feet, and the shy minister was scared to say a word. So much for the core curriculum in literature and science.

My mother began reading us Alice in Wonderland before we could talk. My father inadvertently taught me astrophysics over a telescope in the back yard. We went to the library twice a week and came home with piles of books. I read all of the Hardy Boys and The Merryweather Girls at Good Old Rock Hill and the 20-book series of Nurse Sue Barton and even more of Nancy Drew, Detective. I read Little Women so many times that the librarian asked my mother, who was on the library board (of the smallest Carnegie Library in the world, a point of great pride) to buy me my own copy. She did. I still miss it.

When I was in 7th grade I decided to read the adult section of the library alphabetically until I had gone all the way through. I got to Dickens. I actually read every single word of James Fenimore Cooper and loved it. It was the first time I realized what language was all about, that the way a writer put words together could affect the story itself. We all read voraciously. Most nights, Daddy, Mother, and I sat in the living room and read. Before my little sister Lois could read, she sat there, too, with her little books, sometimes holding them upside down if they didn't have pictures in them. When she was five, she demanded that Mother teach her to read. Mother got flash cards and workbooks and taught her to read. I read in the sweet hay in the hayloft, the orchard, the empty corncrib, the bathtub, my bed. When my mother called me to help with the dishes and I didn't hear her, she didn't believe that I was lost in a book.

Most of the kids I went to school with didn't have parents like mine. Few of them were read to as children. They couldn't have chosen a single book they liked in a situation like the one the teacher in the article offered, but many of them would have responded if they'd had a little of the guidance in choosing that she offered her class. One boy graduated with me without knowing how to read. In a little farm town in the early 50s, you didn't fail a lad just because he couldn't read.

Not until my freshman year in honors English at the university did I know that a story could contain more than its surface tale. We had read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” which I found a gruesome tale of an old woman sleeping with the bones of her dead lover. My classmates delved into her symbolic value: the Old South slumbering in its traditions. My life changed that day in Dr. Whan’s English class.

With all the failings of my high school education, I took to it all with passion when I sat in that honors English class at Ohio University, and I made up for lost time. I was with the top students in Ohio because I had gotten 100% on the grammatical sections of the entry exam. That high school Latin teacher, who was also my English teacher for four years, didn't know what to do with me. I was bored silly. So she taught me on the side every bit of English grammar. She did not hand me Jane Austen or Puddin’ Head Wilson (I read that when my editor at my first real editing job in San Francisco sent me to all the vintage bookstores in town to find an original copy so we could do a facsimile). She handed me parts of speech.

That's why I got so excited about the article about learning to read by reading a book you loved. I think that teacher is probably doing more to teach her students to read and offering them the chance to stumble onto Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson in their own good time--because they have learned to love to read. That's what saved me. That's what got me to the point that let me recognize the beauty of what I stumbled on.

That, and a set of books with red pebbly covers called Childcraft, in 12 volumes. One volume held mythology--Greek, Latin, Native American, King Arthur. Another was all poetry. We wore those 12 books ragged, and were I to see that set today in some back corner of a used bookstore, I would buy it. It was where I learned to love to read.