It’s Read-In Week here in Edmonton. All sorts of citizens, famous and not-so-famous, are being invited to read in classrooms at Edmonton schools. My daughter is a teacher. “Will you come and read to my class?” she asks. She already knows the answer. Of course I will!
These days my attention is easily turned to thoughts about reading. We are nearing the 200th birthday of Louis Braille, and I am on a committee trying to figure out how to celebrate it. The now-famous inventor of our beloved reading system probably didn’t celebrate his own achievements very much. He was long dead before his ideas gained much support. He lived in a time when literacy and public education for all were ideas societies did not embrace with much enthusiasm. Nevertheless, he spent some time, proposed an idea, and opened up possibilities.
Now, sorting through my collection of Braille books for children, many of which also contain print and pictures, I wonder if there can be any greater privilege than the honour of reading to children. The only question as I prepare is, what shall I read? There was a time when the Braille books in my children’s collection held a prominent position on our shelves. But these days those treasured books are tucked away in Granny’s old wicker trunk. The air is slightly musty when I turn the ancient key to lift its lid, but the books are as fresh as ever. As I flip through them, searching for just the right book to take to Ruth’s class, the years fall away. I am back on the couch in our 67th Street living room with Ruth and her brothers crowding my sides and my lap. They want to see the pictures inserted among the print and Braille words. Their hair is fragrant from a bath. Their attention is absolute. If I should happen to say a wrong word, one of them will surely correct me. If I leave out a word, they will fill it in. The snuggling of their little bodies takes me back yet another generation, to the days of rocking chairs and afternoon snoozes when Dad, Mom, Granny and my sister Sandra used to read to me. Nobody in my family knew Braille, and I didn’t learn it until I was older, but I wanted to learn it so much. I wanted to read like they did.
I choose, for this morning with Ruth’s class, a book of old poems for children, and Judith Viorst’s wonderful story about Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Ruth’s class is a small class, a modern class, a class set aside for children who, in past generations, would have carried strapping scars on their hands and soon have given up the idea of getting an education. . Its youngest member has not yet turned six. Some of the children are in Grade Three. Each of them has a behaviour disorder preventing them from integrating easily with other children. Some live in comfortable homes, some in group homes, some in foster homes, some in houses unimaginable in their barrenness of spirit. Amid the confusion of their behaviours, it is still too soon to tell which of them have learning disabilities. On certain days, sitting still can be as hard for them as climbing Mount Everest.
Sitting still doesn’t usually seem quite so hard when people read to them. As I begin the story of Alexander, they quickly pick up the rhythm and wait for the parts of the story where they will be able to chime in with me when I say, “Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.“ They get into the words and they get into Alexander’s skin. Their sympathies are entirely with him. They know how it feels to get gum in your hair, to forget that you are not allowed to move the papers on a desk, to get in trouble for punching the person who made fun of you when the adults were out of the room. As we finish with Alexander, they are ready to take on the poems, guessing at the rhyming words when I remember to stop before the end of a line.
It would have been satisfying enough just to come in, read and leave, but I am not in a big hurry to get to work. I can spend half an hour doing something worth doing, so Ruth singles out one of the loneliest from her flock and sends him to my chair with a book about fire fighters. She tells him to read it to me while the others finish up some work at their desks. He is a good reader, and he is done in only a moment. Back he goes to his desk and returns with a heavy book from the library, a hundred-year history of policing in Edmonton. He tells me he got the book because he wants to be a policeman when he grows up. The book is filled with photographs. Finding his way around the inconvenience posed by my blindness, he shows me the pictures by reading the captions to me.
How can you measure the impact of a moment? How do you evaluate the outcome of the time you spend reading with children? Reading time is quality time. It is intimate. It is fun. This child currently lives in a group home. The staff are great. Still it must be lonely to live with people who come and go. Since we won’t be together for a long time, we will make this a good time. Together we polish his dream of being a police officer and bring it to life right here in this book.
Reading opens up so many worlds that would otherwise stay beyond our reach. It is a long time since I learned Braille, but I can still remember how passionate I was. I had dreams for how things would be. I saw it as my future freedom, my ticket for reading to myself instead of relying on others to read to me. Never one to accurately predict the future, I don’t recall imagining that so much joy in adult life would come while reading to others. Later I came to understand how reading serves a purpose that extends well beyond the bounds of simple pleasure and the provision of information. Being read to, reading to myself, reading to others, being read to again. Reading is the key to a privileged sequence in the unfolding of a full life, a benefit of being human.
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