I’m at work but I felt the need to share yet another reason I love banned books. I intentionally didn’t mention book titles because it could have been anything.
I am a library media specialist in a middle school. We have about 500 seventh and eighth grade students. I love my job. It’s perfect for me. An eighth grade boy gave me yet another reason today.
He’s always been a nice kid but never really one to come in the LMC for books. He would come in with his class and check out a book and maybe come in to use the computers. I wouldn’t say that he was a reader but he wasn’t an “I hate reading” kid either. At the beginning of the year he picked up a book I recommended during book talks. He read it and enjoyed it. He enjoyed it so much that he told a friend about it and they swapped books. He liked that book too so he came in to get another one. I recommended a different book and it’s companion. He checked them both out and brought them back today. Right away he came to me for a recommendation. I asked him what he thought about the books he just returned. I was expecting a simple answer about whether or not he liked them but he blew me away. Remember, this is a kid who MAYBE read two books outside of assigned reading last year. We’ve been in school less than two months and he has read FOUR books just for fun. Best of all, he was THINKING about them. He started to tell me about the books and what he liked and didn’t like. He ended by saying something along the lines of, “I know this author has other books but I think I’d like to try someone new. I felt like he just ended the books in a hurry… like maybe he just got sick of writing them or something.”
I was so pleasantly surprised. It’s not that his answer was super in-depth. It’s more that he was really getting in to what he was reading. He was thinking about what was happening and what the author may have been feeling. He chose to engage himself in a book when nobody told him he had to. I know students do this all the time. They are intelligent and more capable than most people give them credit for. It’s just exciting to see a student who hadn’t done that in the past, who probably would have said he didn’t like to read, engage in a book.
We walked along the stacks together and I pulled out books I thought he might like. We talked about them and he told me more about what he was interested in. He settled on two books with a big smile on his face saying “I’m gonna take two because I’ve read more this year than ever before.” As he went to the front to check out his books the LMC aide asked if he had found some good ones. He said he thought so and I said I hoped so. He turned and looked at me and said, “You’ve never let me down.” And I melted.
The point to my rambling… that first book he checked out? The one I book talked? The one he read that sparked an interest? The book that showed him reading can be enjoyable? The book he liked so much he swapped it with a friend? Some people would say it shouldn’t be in my library… it should be “banned.” If I listened to that the only thing that would have been banned would have been that eighth grade boys discovery of books.
I understand that some books are more appropriate for older readers and that parents are “concerned” about what their children have access to. Please, talk to you kids. Go to the library with them and discuss book choices. Look at sites online and decide what is appropriate for your family together. Don’t make choices for other people. Don’t judge people and their parenting by what they allow or don’t allow their children to read. If you have a problem with something READ IT and then talk to the teacher or librarian. The fastest way to get a student to read a book is to ban it. I’m all for getting them to read but I think I’ll take the more informed road.
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