Full Circle

—Jennifer Olson— TEACHER EDUCATOR

Jennifer has been a classroom teacher in Baltimore County, Maryland, and in Williamsburg, Virginia. She spent five years in each district, and all her years were with second- or third-grade students. Now, she is a graduate student who works with preservice teachers in the Elementary Education Program at the University of Georgia. Jennifer jumped on the chance to take a seminar that would allow her to read whatever she chose. She thought that freedom would be a good way to break into being a full-time graduate student slowly. What she learned about herself as a reader and as a developing teacher educator surprised her. The seminar discussions brought her right back to what had always been important to her as a reader—talking about what she read. Jennifer’s favorite reading from the Readers as Teachers and Teachers as Readers seminar was TAKING LOTTIE HOME by Terry Kay (2000) because she has always enjoyed Kay’s writing, and she continues to be interested in reading books by local authors. Kay is an author from Athens, Georgia, whose appearance at a local library prompted Jennifer to pick more than one of his books for reading, and TAKING LOTTIE HOME was his most recent book at the time.

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CHAPTER 6

Full Circle Jennifer Olson

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t is our family ritual—bath, books, bed, in that order. As Livia and I snuggle up, ready for our nightly reading, my mind runs through the list of things I need to read for graduate school, but quickly the comfort of her bed and her warm toes bring me back to reality. For the moment, I enjoy being with my daughter as we share books, laughs, words, and stories. Tonight we read If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff (1998). The book is one of my favorites for its predictable nature and because Livia can join in the reading; she is only 3. On a night that a long list of articles to read for graduate school is not far from my mind, I am glad for her choice. As I listen to my own voice and as Livia’s voice chimes in, I think about how my own reading life has come full circle. During class time for the seminar, facilitator Michelle Commeyras always allowed time for us participants to write about our reading and how it enhances our teaching lives. Fresh in my mind at one seminar meeting were Livia’s warm toes and the rhythm of If You Give a Pig a Pancake. I made a connection between the circular nature of the book and my own reading life, regarding how simply being given the chance to read and being given time and permission to follow my own reading wishes brought me back to where I had been before I tried to force my reading habits in another direction. I wrote the following poem: Full Circle If you give a teacher a book… Chances are she will find a person to share it with. If she finds a person to share it with… She may even join a book group…

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Or take a college course. Chances are she will make some connections to her own life… So she’ll want to explore those connections… She may even study teaching and what it means to teach teachers. She may even become a doctoral graduate student… And begin to explore her own subjectivities… Or try to frame a research question. What is it that she wants to learn about? Chances are she will read many journals and research articles… Trying to find her theoretical framework Trying to find her place in the big picture of teacher education. When she talks about teaching she gets excited… And wants to talk about what it means to her… Chances are she will take many classes on teaching and learning. She may even find some on teaching reading… Or on teaching learners to be readers… And why teaching students to be learners is so important. And somewhere along the way… She will remember that reading is a key to learning. And someone will recommend a book they just read… And chances are that if you give a teacher a book… She’ll start reading again.

I enrolled in the Readers as Teachers and Teachers as Readers seminar to explore other teachers’ reading. I ended up discovering more about myself as a reader. While reading If You Give a Pig a Pancake to my daughter, I realized that I had come full circle. I wonder about how easy it was to lose touch with myself as a reader. As I looked back on my own reading history, I realized how I had lost my reader self, and this seminar helped me find it again. Terry Kay’s words in Taking Lottie Home (2000) brought home to me 72

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how I couldn’t walk away from something as important as reading: “Son, once you been somewhere, you don’t never leave it out of sight behind you, you just drag it along with you, like a cranky old dog on a leash” (p. 215). As I remember my childhood, reading was part of my life. When we were kids, my sister made up a game called Monkey. The rules were simple. It could involve two or more players, but she always was the big monkey and everyone else was a little monkey. In the game, the little I wonder about how monkeys bothered the big monkey when the easy it was to lose touch with myself as big monkey was reading. The game ended a reader. when the big monkey said, “Go away, I am reading.” My sister devised this game as a way to keep me from bothering her when she was reading! As a child, she always was reading, and I always wanted her to play with me. I was somewhat jealous of her ability to lose herself in her book so much that she did not even want to play. I did not understand that. I enjoyed reading, but I think what I enjoyed more about reading was the sense of accomplishment that came with checking a book off my list or putting it in my done pile. There is a difference to me. She was reading because she was absorbed in the story, and I was reading because I wanted to say I had read something. I was always a good reader in elementary school. I got good grades and enjoyed reading class. My fourth-grade teacher was the first teacher that challenged me with reading. She required us to keep a reading log, so I carefully kept track of every book I read. The first time I turned it in, I was so proud. I had the longest list of books of anyone in the class. When the teacher returned the reading log, her comment said she was unable to tell if I had really read the book. I did not understand her comment, so after school I asked her about it. I told her that I had indeed read the books on my list. She said she knew I had read the words, but that I had not told her anything about what I had read. I think that was when I began to understand more about reading. Reading was more than just the words in books. Reading was about me and words and books.

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My models for reading as a youth were my parents and my sister. My sister would read anything she could get her hands on: Harlequin romances, or books by J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, and Stephen King. She had multiple books, each bookmarked where she left off reading. Just as I never understood my sister’s reading, I didn’t understand my parents’, either. They read incessantly. They both liked Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, and my mother liked Phyllis Whitney. But they read books over and over again. I never understood that. I still don’t reread books very often, but I have done it a few times and been glad I did. I reread Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1955) as an adult and discovered things I had never understood as a teenager. I reread Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1978) and was awed by the language she used. After reading Anne McCrary Sullivan’s 1991 article about “schools separating students from the pleasure of reading” (p. 40), I can see where I experienced some of the same things as a young reader. My reading life in school was quite different from my reading life at home. My summers and vacations were quite full of reading; we had no television when I was growing up. I depended on losing myself in those stories. It was my imaginative entertainment. At school, my reading was different. I remember the first time I was required to write a paper on something that I had read in school. It was seventh grade, when I still thought essay was spelled SA (as if there was some code behind the letters S and A). The book that I had read was Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945). I remember really liking the characters and enjoying reading the book, but my teacher did not like my essay on the book. Similar to my fourth-grade teacher, she was expecting more than a “superficial” response. Reading in school then became a burden. I was supposed to search for something beyond the story and my reaction to it, but no one would tell me what that was. So I read at home without telling, without sharing. This hidden reading life stayed with me until college, even through college. I was scared of all the literature classes, yet I was drawn to reading books that were valued by others. I never did find all the metaphors and symbols in T.S. Eliot’s poetry. I never did understand exactly what the “Buried 74

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Child” is in Sam Shepard’s 1971 play. But I did enjoy reading both Eliot’s poetry and Shepherd’s play. Since finishing college, I have openly immersed myself in books. I read trashy novels, suspense novels, and even some nonfiction. A week at the beach is seven books for me—a book a day. While I was a public school teacher, summers off from school meant I was free to read again—no papers to grade and no lesson plans to write. Sometimes I would read through my classroom library, sometimes I would go to This hidden reading the library and pick a book because of the book life stayed with me until college, even jacket, and sometimes I would go to a bookstore through college. and pick a new novel. Now I depend heavily on peer recommendations, but occasionally I indulge in a spontaneous purchase of a book that sparked some spur-of-the-moment interest. One day, the reading specialist at my school encouraged me to join a teacher book group at our school. The incentive was free books. You see, I really did like books, and who could turn down free books? I thought that we would be discussing children’s literature in light of how we could use the books in our own classrooms. To my delight and surprise, we just talked. Here were teachers that I admired, talking about books and what they meant to them personally, not what the books meant to them professionally. We did not read to find some symbolism or hidden theme. We read to find our own meaning. I still remember every book we read: Shiloh (Naylor, 1991), Lyddie (Paterson, 1991), The Big Book of Peace (Durrell & Sachs, 1990), and The Place My Words Are Looking For (Janeczka, 1990). The fact that I can remember the title of each book without looking on a shelf lets me know what value I placed on that teachers’ reading group. When I moved to Athens, Georgia, a lot changed in my life. I was no longer a teacher but a full-time mother of two. I obviously missed the day-to-day challenge of teaching. I found my way into a neighborhood book club. What did we do? We chose books we wanted to share with others, and then we talked about them. Through the book club, I was exposed to some southern authors such as Terry Kay and his amazing book To Dance With a White 75

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Dog (1991). We all laughed over Rick Bragg’s stories in All Over But the Shoutin’ (1998). I read historical novels such as Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy (1987). We also ventured into the mind of Richard Feynman in “Surely You’re Joking Mister Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character (1997). I know I would not have chosen to read the Feynman book on my own. The group made a difference. We read aloud sections, we discussed characters, and we shared our own reactions to the book. Now, as a graduate assistant in the Elementary Education Program at the University of Georgia, I hear many of the preservice teachers’ conversations about teaching reading. They are scared of exactly how to teach reading, and they are worried about balancing whole language and phonics. Yet the preservice teachers crave discussions about using children’s literature in their classrooms. I began to see that one of my roles as a teacher educator is to allow those discussions in my college classroom. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I was hoping and wishing that the preservice teachers would remember this sharing of ideas and note how important the discussions were to their own learning. Maybe they would incorporate the same kinds of discussions into their own classrooms one day. As a student myself, I have felt the tension between what I want to read and what I should read. My life has become more academic since beginning graduate school, and I feel my reading should follow suit. I still have the same features of who I am, but now the leisure time is gone. I feel the constraints of being pulled in many directions, so how can I make time to find a theme in my books and reading? Are these the same tensions other teachers feel in the classroom or the same tensions preservice teachers feel as they learn about I have found myself teaching? I have found myself wondering how I wondering how I can can help my aspiring teachers hang on to their help my aspiring teachers hang on own reading lives. to their own Imagine my surprise as I walked into room reading lives. 319 on August 21, 2001, for READ 9010: Readers as Teachers and Teachers as Readers. We wrote quotes on the whiteboard, we talked, we discussed, we 76

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listened, and we shared what we had been reading. One of the quotes that I wrote on the board was, “Do you ever let your mind wander, or do you always steer it? I find steering more productive. Well, I recommend a good wander” (Malarkey, 2000, p. 266). The quote was from one of the first books I read as I allowed myself to read for me again. I allowed myself to wander. So now, I still walk the balance between academic reading and personal reading. But each day, I try to find a place for reading for me. Within that time are the release, solitude, escape, and entertainment I know I need. This is my journey. As I travel the road of graduate student, mother, and educator, I read and I still want to put myself into the words I read. You see, now I feel that I belong with those words and books. I need to keep that connection. As I teach future educators, I want them also to see how reading connects to their lives and mine. REFERENCES Sullivan, A. (1991). The natural reading life: A high-school anomaly. English Journal, 80, 40–46.

LITERATURE CITED Bragg, R. (1998). All over but the shoutin’. New York: Vintage Books. Durrell, A., & Sachs, M. (Eds.) (1990). The big book of peace. New York: Dutton. Feynman, R. (1997). “Surely you’re joking Mister Feynman”: Adventures of a curious character. New York: W.W. Norton. Heller, J. (1955). Catch-22. New York: Dell. Hurston, Z.N. (1978). Their eyes were watching God. Urbana, IL: Illini Books. Janeczka, P. (1990). The place my words are looking for. New York: Bradbury Press. Kay, T. (1991). To dance with a white dog. New York: Washington Square Press. Kay, T. (2000). Taking Lottie home. New York: HarperCollins. Malarkey, T. (2000). An obvious enchantment. New York: Random House. Naylor, P. (1991). Shiloh. New York: Atheneum. Numeroff, L. (1998). If you give a pig a pancake. New York: HarperCollins. Paterson, K. (1991). Lyddie. New York: Lodestar. Piercy, M. (1987). Gone to soldiers. New York: Fawcett Crest. Shephard, S. (1971). Buried child. In Seven plays (pp. 61–132). Toronto: Bantam Books. Wright, R. (1945). Black boy. New York: Harper & Brothers.

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