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I was fortunate to grow up in a house full of books. From birth, my parents read to me and my siblings, read on their own, and even did the most cringe things to encourage reading, like the day when I was fourteen — fourteen — and they announced in front of my friend Adam, whose primary hobby was making fun of me, that we were going to start doing FAMILY READING NIGHT once a week.
My point is, I didn’t really need school to support my love of reading. But growing up in the 70s and 80s, I did get that support. There were lots of library visits and SSR periods and book reports and so on. I don’t think we were assigned a ton of whole books, but we were definitely reading real writing, written by people who had stories to tell and things to say.
Years later, as a middle school ELA teacher, I got to share that experience with my students. I have especially fond memories of our school book room, where we stored class sets of novels. I can still picture them: Tuck Everlasting; Holes; Freak the Mighty; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; and of course, The Outsiders. About 150 copies of each, stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, waiting for us to choose them. It was a delicious feeling, moving them into crates, bringing them into my classroom, then signing out one copy per student, knowing we’d be going on a little journey together.
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