Tag: reading

Only 1 in 10 Black ES and MS Students in 186 Showed ELA Proficiency in 2023

…and that’s just the start.

As our local newspapers’ capacity to cover local news has been greatly reduced, I’ve decided to offer some minimal coverage of our local school board. The plan is simply to offer up things that could go unnoticed for folks who don’t tune in to things like local school board meetings. I’ll likely add context and some commentary where I think it might be helpful.

Education news site The74 reported on the Missouri NAACP filing a federal civil rights complaint based on the disparities between Black and white students’ literacy scores across the state.

In my last post, I pointed to District 186’s 23% ELA proficiency rate in 2023. The story out of Missouri got me wondering a couple things: 1) How does 2023’s proficiency rate compare to years’ past? 2) How have the District’s Black students historically compared to their white peers in ELA proficiency?

Getting that data required a little digging on the District’s State Report Card. First, a historical look at District ELA elementary and middle school proficiency as measured by standardized assessments since 2012.

ELA
YEAR% PROFICIENTASSESSMENT
201267ISAT
201348ISAT
201446ISAT
201529PARCC
201629PARCC
201729PARCC
201827PARCC
201926.9IAR
2020N/AN/A
202121IAR
202221IAR
202323IAR
Source: https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=profile&Districtid=51084186025

Next up, disaggregation of those data to show proficiency rates for Black and white students on those same assessments.

ELA
YEAR% PROFICIENTASSESSMENT
BW
20125278ISAT
20133061ISAT
20142758ISAT
201513.539.9PARCC
201614.140.2PARCC
201714.640.3PARCC
201813.537.5PARCC
201913.638.3IAR
2020N/AN/AN/A
20217.830.6IAR
20229.133.1IAR
20231035.5IAR
Source: https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=profile&Districtid=51084186025

For 2023 Black students represented 44% of the District’s student body while white students made up 36.9%. Those numbers are not tremendously different since 2018 – 40%, 43/6% respectively – the earliest year such data are available on the state report card.

In addition to the obvious racial disparities above, is the fact total proficiency rates were already in decline before the pandemic, which is often blamed for poor student performance.

Still, 9 out of 10 Black elementary and middle school students in the District were unable to show proficiency in reading in 2023, and they were 25.5 percent behind their white peers.

For comparison, the Missouri NAACP complaint was based on 14% of Missouri’s Black third graders showing ELA proficiency compared to 61% of their white peers.

In District 186, 9.5% of Black third graders showed proficiency last year compared to 26.9% of their white peers.

At the Nov. 6, 2023 meeting of the School Board, none of these numbers was discussed and no questions were asked about ELA proficiency. The District’s presentation of the data focused on growth percentiles, and did not give an overview of proficiency data by sub-groups. Board members did not ask for that data.

Nine out of ten…no one asked questions.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=g5Wl-k4sul8%3Fsi%3Dax0D1ArFG_Ef4gud%26start%3D3190

I Bet Killing a Mockingbird Wouldn’t Be So Bad

Why are you teaching To Kill a Mockingbird?

Most of the time, when I ask this question, I get the answer that it is an important text. Students need to read it because of its place in the American canon. If not the canon, the response is the importance of the lessons of the book. After hearing the response, I went back and re-read the text. What I found is much better stated in this piece by Julia Franks writing for the National Council of Teachers of English. Franks points to the central metaphor, the titular mockingbird, and how it applies to people with mental illness and dealing with addiction. Or, Franks points out, it is applied to people of color, most notably Tom Robinson. These groups don’t hurt anyone, readers are told. They simply “make” music to make our lives better. If the argument for TKAM is the lessons it teaches, surely we can do better than a lesson that shows readers people in historically-marginalized groups still in the margins and as passively and flatly as possible.

This is to say nothing of the text’s furthering of the white savior narrative in its positioning of Atticus as so important a figure that his mere passing by requires the African Americans — who have had to function only as bystanders to systemic violence and oppression throughout the story — to stand.

Photo by Katerina Radvanska on Unsplash

Taken separately or together, these issues build an argument that the lessons of TKAM work against its inclusion. They also start to work against the argument for inclusion based around the idea of its status as an “important text.” To consider this claim, I look to Elizabeth Vallance’s 1974 article “Hiding the Hidden Curriculum.” In her introduction, Vallance writes:

Recently we have witnessed the discovery-or, rather, we have heard the allegation, for the issue is cast most often as criticism-that schools are teaching more than they claim to teach, that they are doing it systematically, and doing it well. A pervasive hidden curriculum has been discovered in operation. The functions of this hidden curriculum have been variously identified as the inculcation of values, political socialization, training in obedience and docility, the perpetuation of traditional class structure-functions that may be characterized generally as social control. Critics allege that, although this function of social control is not acknowledged openly, it is performed nevertheless, perhaps more effectively than the deliberate teaching of intellectual content and skill, the function in whose name we explicitly justify schooling.

Vallance’s work leads to a questioning of the if-not-hidden-then-implied curriculum at work in the compulsory reading of TKAM in our classrooms. Even if we are calling upon the text for its explicit lessons of choosing to do what is right when it is uncomfortable, or that society is more complex than we may initially understand, these lessons cannot be divested from the text’s implied curriculum. What lessons about expectations of the place of mental illness or addiction are we implicitly teaching through the requirement of TKAM? What systems of hegemony, expected roles for people of color, and implied support of those systems are we passing to our students when we say, “This book must be read?”

Think also, as Franks and others have noted, of the frequency with which our students engage, as readers with characters of color, varying socio-economic statuses, varied genders, or LGBTQIA identities? In a school year, Mayella Ewell may be the only character students see who lives in poverty. Lee’s portrayal of Mayella does nothing to fight against stereotypes of people living in poverty. To the contrary, a shallow reading of the character suggests people in poverty are dishonest. Go deeper, and the dishonesty of poor southern whites is the result of incest. If Calpurnia, Tom Robinson, and the African American audience at Tom’s trial are the only African Americans or people of color with which students interact in a text throughout a year, what are the implied lessons of this essential text? Passivity. Respect for the educated white man. Relegation of people of color to sit and watch while a select group of white people challenge systems of racism on their behalf. The requirement of impossible purity of character to act against injustice.

These are not the lessons we would explicitly teach children. If this is so, then we must be more on guard against implicitly passing these ideas along as truths. What goes unexamined or is understood as condoned through silence shapes how our students understand and interact with one another and the world.

How might we, then, escape these unintended consequences of some of canonical literature’s most pernicious lessons? First, let’s stop teaching books and start teaching children to consider big ideas and essential questions and to use texts of all types as lenses to examine those ideas and questions. Give our students choice of texts. Something along the lines of, “Choose a text with a protagonist with a point of view markedly different from yours,” can be a starting point. If TKAM finds its way into students’ hands via this challenge, all the better, because we will not only be reading the text, but questioning it as well. Rather than deifying a written work, have our classrooms be places of constantly asking, “What does this text get right? What does it get wrong? And, what makes us think that?”

If comedian Hannah Gadsby is correct and “You learn from the part of the story you focus on,” then it is incumbent upon us to be as thoughtful as we can in the stories we choose to tell and have our students read.

To Help Students Read, Be a Reader (23/365)

child reading a book while surrounded by books on a bed
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

At a community event for our school district, a parent raises her hand. She has a question.

“What can we do to know what our kids are supposed to be learning in their classes and help at home?”
The answer in the room is about lessons and unit plans. It includes talking to your child’s teacher about what’s happening in class and taking a look at online profiles.
I raise my hand. I have an answer.
“Please read and talk about what you read with your child.”
From PISA scores and surveys we have evidence that students who come from homes where parents read for pleasure are likely to be better readers than their peers coming from homes where parents don’t read for pleasure. What’s more, there’s some evidence of a positive correlation between students seeing their parents hold books and reading scores.
In the conversation about reading and the reading profiles of our students, we sometimes miss the conversation about reading identities. In my dreams, all students are asked to complete a survey at the beginning of a school year. It would have only two questions:
On a scale of 1-5, how much do you agree with each of the following statements:
  • I am a reader.
  • I like reading.
(I have a few other questions such as whether students read in their spare time, their favorite kinds of books, etc., but I won’t be greedy.)
Midway through the year and at the year’s end, we ask these same questions and we track students’ dispositions as important indicators of their trajectories as both lifelong readers and learners. Simply stated, students are unlikely to keep doing a thing they don’t enjoy and that does not fit with how they see themselves.
We know what this looks like because we have friends and family who say things like, “I’m not a big reader,” or “I don’t really read.” These are not people who say they cannot read, they are saying they do not. Teachers along the course of their educational tenures made sure these people were functionally literate without paying attention to whether they would be literately functioning when they left school.
Yes, comprehension skills are important, and yes, accessing complex texts and tasks is key to preparing students to be engaged and active citizens. We miss the opportunity, though, when we prioritize these and the myriad other standards and skills of reading instructions and leave out considerations of what it means to be a reader and why such an identity is important.
So, when a parent asks what can be done to support students at home, my answer is reading – everyone in the family reading and discussion what they’ve read. To do less than this is to signal reading as something done in school, and given up after.

What I’ve Read: The Hate U Give (13/365)

Cover of the book, The Hate U Give

If we’re connected on Goodreads, you know I’ve set a challenge for myself of 52 books this year. If you follow me in this space, you know I’m all about the importance of educators talking about their reading and lives as literate citizens. As such, I’ll be talking a bit about my completed books as they stack up this year.

The Breakdown

I missed the first wave of The Hate U Give when it first came out because I figured it would be a book that asked for my attention. I wanted to be able to give it. Then, when I was finally able to make that space in my brain, the library’s hold list was full of folks who must have had similar ideas.

Finally, it was my turn last week and I started and finished the book in less than two days. I was worried it would take a lot longer because of the tears that kept coming in the first few chapters. I managed to get myself under control and loved every part of Angie Thomas’s book.

For those coming even later to the party, The Hate U Give is the story of Starr Carter and the aftershocks in her life after she witnesses her friend’s murder by a police officer during a traffic stop.

Thomas creates a world and characters that are consistently fully fleshed out. It’s an important feat for any author, but one all-the-more necessary given the short shrift marginalized characters get across so many popular texts. From Starr to her family to her friends, each character has fullness I wish I didn’t find as surprising in modern fiction, and this helped me feel compassion for nearly everyone in the story. No one is perfect, and everyone is worth knowing.

 

Why

The temptation here is to simply say – #WeNeedDiverseBooks, but I’ll go a bit further than that.

I picked up the book because I felt like I was missing out. I’d tell others to pick it up because of Thomas’s masterful conveyance of Starr’s emotional and intellectual reactions to the shooting, its fallout, and the questions it raises in her world. Even without the shooting, Thomas opens a window into code switching and its possible emotional toll.

Yes, I’d lobby hard to make sure students of all shades have access to this text. It might be just as important to make sure it finds its way into the hands of an equally vivid array of educators.

 

In the End

Sense finishing The Hate U Give I’ve been working to come up with a clear explanation of why I think this book affected me deeply. I think I’ve got it. Thomas’s writing never feels as though she’s writing against a narrative. Instead, from the first page, she says to readers “this is the world.” She does it with honesty as to ever-possible darkness, but also, with hope and belief in the agency of characters she clearly loves.

What Else I’ve Been Reading

  • This post from elementary teacher Jennifer Orr is a wonderful example of why I love reading her and her ability to give us a view into the lives of some of our youngest learners.
  • While Shana White‘s twitter feed is always on point, her blog posts like this one give are consistent gifts, building understanding of experiences much different from my own.
  • Sabrina Stevens’s post about the importance of the #MeTooK12 campaign is something I’d bring to any upcoming faculty meeting, along with the question, “What are we going to do?”

What I’ve Read: All the Pretty Horses (6/365)

Cover of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

If we’re connected on Goodreads, you know I’ve set a challenge for myself of 52 books this year. If you follow me in this space, you know I’m all about the importance of educators talking about their reading and lives as literate citizens. As such, I’ll be talking a bit about my completed books as they stack up this year.

The Breakdown

The first book I’ve completed this year was Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. My only other experience with McCarthy was his Blood Meridian, which I “liked” but which also made me weary going into Horses because Meridian has some pretty intense violence throughout.

Horses is a different sort of western. The tale of John Grady Cole and his decision to set out from his Texas town on horseback for Mexico in 1949. McCarthy’s prose has struck me as powerful and sparse in each of his books I’ve read so far. At one point in Horses I said aloud to myself, “I’m glad he’s read Hemingway.”

My initial description of Horses might be that it’s a coming of age story, but it’s not quite that. At the close of the book, Grady remains who he was at the beginning. Instead, McCarthy adeptly shows us and Grady what it means to be himself across situations and circumstances beyond his small-town upbringing.

Why

I picked up All the Pretty Horses for two reasons. The first is availability. As part of a 40th birthday present, some friends and I gave my friend him all the National Book Award winners in fiction for each of the years she’s been alive. Horses won in 1992. I’d closed out the year with 2017’s winner Sing, Unburied, Sing and had read 2016’s recipient Underground Railroad. Because Sing and Railroad centered around African American protagonists, I was curious to see what through line, if any, I could detect in the Award’s panelists’ tastes across books. Wonderful writing is the answer.

My second reason was one of my best friend’s esteem for the book. He’s one of the best writers I know, and so I trust his tastes. I’ve also had a lifelong curiosity with the writers read by writers I read.

In the End

Several nights last week saw me awake much later than I’d intended because I was wrapped in the voice of this book. Not only is Grady a character I enjoyed following, but McCarthy creates a narrator at once removed and invested in his protagonist. This mix of care and every-possible demise made Horses difficult to put down and satisfying to finish.

What Else I’ve Been Reading

The One Question I Ask Everyone (4/365)

question marks painted on tree trunks in a forest
Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

Just before I started my new job last year, I tried to think about what kind of signature I might want to add to conversations. I was about to meet many more teachers in our district than I’d ever had the chance to interact with before, and I wanted to be conscious of the impression I was making – using it to someone start to shift culture.

The question I settled on, “What are you reading?” As a language arts coordinator, it made sense.

When I would meet with grade-level teams, start a professional development workshop, engage in a coaching conversation it was the same question. From k to 12 I’d ask the room, “What are you reading?”

A few days after a meeting with a team of elementary teachers whom I’d worked with several times across the year, their principal told me one of the teachers had confided he was upset following our time together. I was understandably worried. Not only do I take my job to support teachers seriously, I’m a Midwesterner. “No, no,” the principal said, “He thought the conversation and work were great. He was upset because he made sure he had an answer for when you asked what he was reading and then you didn’t ask.”

I hadn’t.

It was the end of the year, I was working with a team of teachers with whom I’d established a rapport, and I hadn’t felt a need to break the ice. What had initially been meant as a seemingly innocuous question that could start to chip away at culture had been repositioned in my mind as a convenient ice breaker. The thing was, this exchange was evidence the culture was changing. The same teacher who was upset I hadn’t asked was one of the many many many teachers throughout the year who had needed to take a beat on my first asking of the question.

“I’m not really a reader,” many teachers would say before we dove into the work of helping students build identities as lifelong readers. To a person, though, they were able to list several texts when I would push, “So you didn’t read anything yesterday?”

“Well, not a book,” they’d say, and I’d point out that I hadn’t asked what book they were reading. From there, teachers would talk about magazines, news sites, blogs, and any other medium you can think of. By the end of the conversation, I’d usually jotted down a few new places I was interested in reading.

Then, I would point out, “If this is the longest conversation you’ve ever had in this building about yourself as a reader, then we’re missing an amazing opportunity to connect with our students.” If the kids in our care only see us as people who make them read the things you’re “supposed” to read in school, and not actual daily readers ourselves, then we’re missing myriad opportunities to be powerful role models of literacy.

After this conversation at one of our middle schools, the school’s librarian polled the faculty on their favorite books and then took pictures of each person holding the book. She pulled the titles from the library shelves and displayed them alongside the pictures at the top of the stacks. Within days, each of the teacher-preferred titles was checked out.

Another teacher of elementary students took to posting a printed photo of the cover of whatever book she was currently reading outside her door. Alongside it was a paragraph explaining what the text was about and another recounting how she had come to choose the book.

One principal posted photos of what she was reading on her office door – a teacher book and a juvenile title. When students found themselves in the office as a result of a poor choice, situations were diffused when conversations started with questions of whether they’d ever heard of either of the titles.

In my own office, where only adults ever come to visit me, I have two printed pictures hanging, the book I’m reading as part of professional learning and the book I’m staying up too late each night reading (Chris Emdin’s For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, respectively).

The folks I meet with know me pretty well now or know what I do in the district before we sit down. As a result, I’ve shirked asking the question. I plan to bring it back. I miss the expectation of it. I miss the positive assumption that the people with whom I work, people charged with fostering learning daily, are readers. I also missed the sometimes overwhelming lists of recommendations the question elicited like when I asked the question in a meeting of librarians and we ran dangerously close of scrapping the whole meeting agenda while we shared our newest favorites. You know what, though, we captured every title and everyone in the room asked if we would share the list in the meeting notes. Building an expectation of reading means building a culture of reading. And that means giving people space to talk about their reading.

What are you reading?

What If Students Read More Books? (3/365)

Photo by Eli Francis on UnsplashI struggle mightily every day not to scream, “Stop making everyone read the same damned book!”

Yes, there is a beauty in a shared reading and examining of a text, but there is a perverse ugliness in the shared pretending to read and examine a text.

Yes, strive to have democratic classrooms honoring all voices, but do not pretend texts assigned by edict or the false choice of 4 titles equals democracy.

Yes, helping students gain the keys they’ll need to unlock cultural doors through understanding the ideas of canonical literature gives a leg up, but the leg up means little if that canon leads to a belief those are the only stories worth reading and telling.

Yes, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, and their ilk are masterfully written, but we were having conversations about humanity’s darkness, political inequality, and race in America long before each was written (and perhaps we’ve gotten better at it since).

There is an oppression in forcing someone to read a book long after they’ve realized they hate it. What might the effects of that oppression be on how students think about reading after they’ve left our care?

There is a disrespect in only asking students to read a single novel in a quarter or semester when conservative estimates put the number of new books each year at 600,000. What stories will they never see or see themselves in?

There is a shutting of our minds when we say, “These are the books I teach. What might we learn if realize we teach students and help them learn from as many texts as possible?

There is an hypocrisy in decrying the effects of text-impoverished homes on students’ literacy and then pretending we support and frame our school libraries as spaces students own. What if we allowed student access to these spaces in the same way we access bookstores, coffee shops, and the kindle store?

If literacy is key to democracy, if one in four American adults hadn’t read a book in whole or part in 2016, and if more than 90% of those adults were products of American public schools; then maybe we should stop making everyone ready the same damned book.

As a literate adult, how did you come to read the last book you read?

How Do We Begin to Create a Culture of Reading and Writing?

Boy reading book on the floor of a book store.“Do me a favor,” I say, “and close your eyes. I’m going to ask you to visualize something. If I told you you’re visiting a school with a healthy culture of reading and writing, I want to you visit it in your imagination. Start with the lobby or entryway. Notice everything you see and hear as you walk through.”

The exercise goes on for about thirty seconds. I ask the assembled room of teachers to walk the halls, look in on classrooms, listen in on the conversations in common spaces and between the folks they pass in hallways.

I ask them to pay attention to the adults and to the students equally. “Everyone is responsible for creating and sustaining culture, so make sure to observe and listen in on everyone.”

When each teacher has finished their tour, it’s tie to write. “Take five minutes and put it all out in writing. Capture as much of the detail as possible. If you draw a blank, keep writing, ‘and, and, and, and,’ until your brain fills in the holes. Trust that it will.” And, the room takes five minutes to write.

Next, I ask them to share with someone else in the room, not reading the writing verbatim, but distilling to key ideas. I limit the time to talk because conversations at this point are fully-fed and reproducing like tribbles.

The final step, jumping into a shared and open google doc where they answer one question as many times as they can, “What would it take to create the kind of culture you envisioned in your school?”

Again, the activity is timed. Most of the time, I’m having this conversation as a drop-in to a larger meeting. There are other atomized conversations about literacy on the agenda.

I’ve run this conversation several times in the last few months. As the language arts coordinator, it’s one of my favorites. The creativity and joy it elicits each time can be unfamiliar for your average professional meeting.

All of that said, we need to be having this conversation or some variant thereof as much as possible in schools of every level. From pK to 12, we need a picture of the kind of culture of reading and writing we’re hoping to inspire and establish if we want the people in our care to see themselves as readers and writers who aspire to ask and answer better questions.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed in each iteration of this conversation:

  • No one – no matter their subject area – has ever said, “I don’t know” at any point of the process.
  • No one has argued with the assumption what they’re being asked to envision is not important, worth their time, helpful to students, or a better version of what learning and teaching can be.
  • Once they get started with the writing and the talking and the coming up with ideas of how to make it work, the conversations are difficult to curtail or contain.
  • Almost every single idea these teachers generate for how to shift the culture of their schools is free to implement. When it’s not free, it’s low-cost or an idea any PTO would be thrilled to help realize these ideas.

So, let’s do it. Let us build a context around the atomized skills we’re all-too-clear our students need help building and then make it the norm that every person in our care instinctually knows our schools are places where our implied shared identity is one of curious readers and writers.

No, You’re On Grade Level!

level

Are you doing particle physics at grade level? How about your saxophone playing? Is it on par with your age group? Your ballet? Chemistry? Calculus?

My best guess is your answer to most, if not all, of these question was somewhere between “huh?” and “nope.” That’s to be expected.

Let me take one from my own learning – particle physics. First, look at your thumbnail. Turn it so you’re looking along its ridge. If all of space is what is known about particle physics, then one percent of the width of your thumbnail represents what I know about the subject.

That isn’t to say I know nothing about particle physics. I have certain facts and concepts catalogued in my brain and connected to the rest of the knowledge and experiences I’ve got up there. A secret? I’ve never taken a class on particle physics. Heck, I’ve never even taken a class on physics.

Yet, there’s the knowledge – one thumbnail deep. I learned it because I was curious. Something I’d run up against in the world inspired a question, and I was motivated to learn.

Given all of this, would you say my knowledge of particle physics is on grade level?

My answer would be yes. My ability to speak to the topic is aligned with any intrinsic needs I have to understand it better to accomplish any external goals I might feel. It has nothing to do with my age or how many years I have or have not been in school.

Somehow, though, we let the phrase “on grade level” determine not only the value we place on a child’s learning in a given subject, but the approach we take to helping that child advance his learning in that subject.

Reading is the most frustrating example in this conversation (with math not lagging too far behind). When a measure of a student’s ability to read is not commensurate with his “born on date” (to borrow from Sir Ken), we react as though all brains develop at exactly the same speed and that reading is intrinsically-driven by a person’s genetics. I say this as an English teacher and one who decided to spend four years of college reading and talking about it, there is nothing about reading that is biologically inherent to the human experience.

I learned to read because I was curious, and thank goodness I did. It meant I was dubbed on-level from the beginning and thus allowed free choice in the books I selected inside and outside of school. I knew how to read, and according to my teachers, this meant I was allowed to read.

My classmates who weren’t grade-level curious or weren’t interested in reading early enough were not so lucky. Because they were destined to wonder too late, they were also destined to be forced into (s)lower reading groups. We all knew it. Whether coded by bird species or color, my classmates and I knew that some of us were welcome to pick up whatever book we wanted and others were relegated to only specific shelves.

Walk into most reading classes today and things have gone further south. Students can tell you their reading level by reciting a number to you attached to nothing other than their knowledge that the bigger the number, the more worth they have as a reader. Reading capitalism.

I’ve taught these students when they’ve arrived at middle and high school. “I don’t read,” the tell me early in the school year. When I ask why, they tell me they aren’t good at it. That makes me sad. Delving more deeply into their histories of being schooled into reading, they explain they never liked the books their teachers made them read in earlier grades. Many of them simply didn’t read and figured out how to passably appear as though they had.

This realization is what convinced me of the need to open my classroom to student choice. I didn’t care what students were reading so long as they always were and could show consistent growth in their ability to talk and write about it. Sure, we read some shared texts so I could understand students’ progress at grasping key concepts of the discipline. When it came to grade-level reading, though, all I was working toward was disabusing my students of the idea that reading was something people did so they could reach a certain level for a certain grade.

What I’d like to see, and what holding tightly to the idea of “on grade level” prevents, is not students who see their worth as readers, scientists, mathematicians, or musicians, but who see worth in those activities and are members of communities that foster their curiosity to know and do more.

A History of a Thing I Lost

Light Reading

Are there books you can read more than once? I’m talking outside of the fervor with which you approached Harold and the Purple Crayon or Dr. Seuss as a child. Are there books that keep bringing you back to their pages for more?

For me, the list is incredibly few. At its top sits The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. I won’t pretend that an 18th Century book by Samuel Johnson first published in serial form fits my go-to profile for favorite books. This one, though, is an example of the right book at the right time.

Rasselas and I first became acquainted during Fall semester of freshman year in college. The prof who taught my required Foundations of Inquiry course was also an 18th Century Brit Lit scholar, and he used a quotation from Rasselas at the top of his syllabus.

Our discussion of that quotation on the first day of class influenced a line of thinking for me that was something like, “College. Okay, yeah. I see how I could like it here.” And, I did.

I found Rasselas on the shelves of the local used book store and devoured it over winter break (a tradition I kept for many years after). The book became my gift of choice when friends faced major life choices and changes. I have no knowledge of whether or not any of them read the book, but handing it to them was an act of saying, “This was a flashlight when I needed it. I hope it can be the same for you.”

While I compulsively searched every used bookstore I encountered for more copies to add to my stock, one version, a small, light green edition stayed on my shelves with my notes in the margins. While not the, this was my first edition. We’d been on the journey together. We’d conversed about the importance of making your choice and being content.

Then, I gave it away. At a moment of realizing someone else needed it more than I did, I handed that edition off, hoping the combination of Johnson’s words and my margin notes might offer more than a clean copy could.

I miss that book. Since handing it over, I’ve not found another edition of Rasselas. We haven’t spent this much time apart since we met in college. Until we meet again, I’m trying my best to remember the lessons we learned together.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.