“My library was dukedom large enough” The Tempest, Shakespeare
“The act of poetry is a rebel act.” Farewell to English, Michael Harnett
Some people are never happy. After writing my last post on how it might be possible to get students to read more, one commentator criticised that there was no mention of school librarians. Well, it was a blog post: the list of things which went unmentioned dwarfed what was written about. This post seeks to rectify that omission.
Changing the culture of a school is a big ask. By the time they reach secondary school, many children are aware that reading isn’t cool. According to the National Literacy Trust, less than a third of students read outside of school and about 20% say they feel embarrassed if their friends saw them reading a book. In far too many schools, it’s not considered cool to be clever. I’m not aware of any surveys of young people’s attitudes towards libraries, but anecdotally, they don’t seem to be particularly positive. But it wasn’t always thus, was it?
As a youngster, I spent a lot of time at my local library. Not possessing a TV and not being keen on team sports, there didn’t seem a lot else to do in the late 1970s. I loved the library. It wasn’t so much a sanctuary as a treasure trove. I read everything and anything. I began with Asterix and Tin Tin before graduating to grown-up fiction. The librarians got used to me borrowing all sorts. None of the library staff stick in my mind as complete personalities – they were a shifting array of shushing, no-nonsense women who either smiled, raised their eye brows or frowned at my eclectic choices. Back then Eric Van Lustbader was quite popular but the librarian wouldn’t let me borrow a copy of Ninja. At the time I was incensed; later I discovered is would have been pretty risque fare for a ten-year-old. I even borrowed audio recordings and found myself quite taken with The Goons, and I owe my understanding of the laws of thermodynamics to Flanders and Swann.
The school library at my secondary school was an extraordinary place (at least in my memory) full of darkened corridors, hidden nooks and the most surprising finds. I read Lord of the Rings in the first term of my first year and Crime and Punishment in the second. I’m still not sure which I prefer.
In my third year of secondary school, I found myself minded to truant. There were, as far as I can remember, almost no consequences for this as long as you turned up for either morning or afternoon registration – they weren’t fussy which. I began by ‘missing the bus’ with a group of similarly disaffected pals but eventually graduated to taking the bus in the opposite direction into Birmingham city centre. I’d head to the central library and read. It’s only in retrospect I realise quite how odd this sort of behaviour actually was, but back then it seemed entirely reasonable to miss out on double physics and supplement my education in the manner of my choosing.
When I did my PGCE at Oxford, I loved swooping past the clusters of American tourists into the domed splendour of the Radcliffe Camera, part of the wonderful Bodleian Library. I loved that a card had to be filled in requesting a book before the librarians went off to search through the stacks for it. I loved that many of the books are stored beneath the streets in labyrinthine tunnels that are occasionally opened to the public. And I loved that I had to swear an oath before being granted access:
I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.
To cut these meanderings short, suffice it to say, I’d always felt at home in libraries. That is, until I became a teacher. While I was off becoming way cooler than I’d ever managed to be as a pupil, libraries had undergone a similar transformation. Suddenly they’d been redesignated Learning Resources Centres and were full of computers. During break and the lunch the geeky children no longer read, they surfed. Or played games. Or did something else utterly incomprehensible on the computers. In one school I worked in the ‘library’ was actually closed during lunch as there were three lunches split over an hour and a half and lessons were scheduled in there. In another school there was no library. The books had been cleared out and redistributed across various classrooms in order to fit even more computers in there! Librarians are now routinely expected to be glorified reprographics technicians and when they’re not laminating stuff, they spend all their time feeding the beast that is Accelerated Reader and producing endless reports on the number of words children have read.
I’m certain there are many excellent school libraries out there as well as ranks of inspirational school librarians. Sad to say, I’ve rarely had the fortune to share a school with them. All the school librarians I’ve known have been excellent people and right-minded lovers of books, but have been shackled by demands so varied and immense that they’ve not been able to do what they most believed in.
What’s worse, as a young English teacher I came to dread library lessons. Otherwise mild-mannered children would turn into truculent oafs at the mention of the library. The majority would sit and quietly chat, a few would actually read and some – I see now that it was those for whom reading was a constant reminder of their inadequacies – would spend most lessons ‘choosing’ books or pretending to read them whilst engaged in some more nefarious pursuit. My role was to be the Reading Police. I would march around crossly spotting books being held upside down and ensuring that no one saw reading as a pleasure. I’ve come to believe that while silent reading is what we should aim for, it doesn’t necessarily make for a great school experience. Since those early days I’ve tried hard to make more of library lessons than this and have met some small success, but rarely have I been able to pass on the magical appeal, the irresistible tug I felt for libraries.
One librarian I worked with stands out. Toby Dyer was an incongruous figure. For one he was young – in his late twenties – and for another he was cool. Much cooler than any librarian has a right to be. He had a tattoo which read, “Reading Is A Rebel Act”, a sentiment that rang deep within – this was how reading always felt to me as a teenager! He made it his business to imbue books with edginess and danger. He engaged in what he called ‘reading terrorism’ – bursting unannounced into classrooms, reading a passage of prose or poetry and then dashing off, cackling maniacally. His library was chaotic: he had a rather timid assistant who seemed to do all the actual work while Toby made his rebellious way through the school. His approach was not uniformly appreciated. He got a lot of complaints and a fair few reprimands. Regrettably, he moved on rather rapidly.
I met up with Toby last year. During our reminiscences, he told me about a reading assembly he’d given one World Book Day. He took the stage, his face a thunderclap, wielding a copy of Kevin Brooks’ The Bunker Diary. Although this book won the Carnegie Award in 2014, it’s probably one of the most controversial children’s books ever written. Anyway, Toby told his audience that he’d caught a year 8 boy reading the book and had confiscated it. He told them some of the more salacious details and said that the school absolutely could not endorse such filth. He said he’d heard there were other illicit copies floating around the school and that he was running an amnesty in the library: if copies were handed in before the end of the week no further action would be taken. Apparently he got the deputy head to go along with him. Anyway, he left his ‘amnesty’ pile lying around, unsupervised in the library and by the end of the day, every copy had been borrowed. The book became the most talked about reading phenomena since Harry Potter first hit the shelves.
Now, I’m not advocating Toby’s methods or suggesting this is how school libraries should be run – he’d probably have terrified me as an eleven-year-old – but I do think that in ever so many schools, libraries have become sad, neglected places. I’m really keen to hear about any examples of great practice of running school libraries or of making reading lessons come alive to share and pass on to other schools.
NB – I should point out that I am not nor have I ever been a school librarian. Anything I say in the post should be seen purely as a product of my own rather narrow experience.
These two posts reminded me of Reads Like A Novel by Daniel Pennac (1994), later republished as The Rights of the Reader. Wholly recommended and containing the simple advice: read to the students.
Thanks for the recommendation – sounds like ideal holiday reading.
I went to a posh public school with a library housed in the most beautiful domed building in the town. Then to Cambridge, where the library is a Tate Modern-style redbrick fortress of books. Both fitting responses to the power of books and the greatness of libraries, I think.
Toby sounds brilliant. I will steal some of those moves.
Whether Toby was brilliant or a knob (see comment below) was very much a matter of personal taste. He was very much a Marmite character but to me he was a breath of fresh air. I’d be interested to hear how his shenanigans go down in your school.
Toby sounds as though he was behaving like a knob. Of course schools should try to inspire all children to read but some people will love reading, some will not. The same can be said of music which has similar research claiming various educational benefit; though I note you appear to have hung this post on the same kind of research you were so dismissive of in your previous post.
Hi JD
Not sure what you’re on about. What research was I dismissive of and what research have I ‘hung’ this post on?
I was referencing your previous comments: “4. Ha! I’ve seen a good bit of this ‘evidence’ and have to say it’s mostly shockingly bad. At very best it’s correlational. If you think I’ve missed something worthwhile please let me have the links.”
and…
“And crap isn’t really fair – it’s just not worth all that much. I like the NLT surveys: they provide some nice correlational statistics, but because we’re such natural pattern seekers it’s hard to avoid ‘seeing’ the meaning we’re being pointed towards. And there’s always an alternative interpretation!”
You then use National Literacy Trust research at the beginning of this post to illustrate that (supposedly) children don’t find reading cool.
As it happens I think the ‘research’ by those bodies has questionable value given they issue very similar headlines each year to inevitably reinforce their own interests.
Libraries should never have been places of tedium in the first place. Reading can be enjoyed in noisy places too.
1. Rosen said “There are already a variety of charities which spend a good deal of their energy figuring out how to sponsor and encourage reading for pleasure and have packs and vast amounts of research to back it up.” I stand by my comment in relation to that.
2. I cited a finding by the NLT which suggests children don’t find reading cool. This is reporting what children have actually said in response to a question. I have faith that pretty much anyone is capable of adding up these responses correctly. Even so, that statistic is neither here nor there as far as my post on libraries goes.
Just testing as wrote comment from work and it has not appeared. Wondering whether to start all over again.
Whoops, just noticed the autocorrect typo – should of course be ‘reading for pleasure’ in the last sentence.
My amendment to my comment has appeared before the comment itself which is a bit weird! Oh well, it will make sense then.
Thought I’d send you this after the first post, but never got time, so here you are!
For a short period, many years ago I was a school librarian. I trained as a primary teacher and as my first teaching job I took over a 1:st grade (7 year olds in Sweden) in one of the more disadvantaged areas of town, right after the X-mas holidays.
I met the former teacher briefly once and she hinted that there were some troubles, but nothing specific and then she was gone, emmigrated to Canada.
I’ll not go into what the ‘some trouble’ was in any detail, you would probably not believe me anyway, but that poor woman had struggled for four month in a complete chaos without asking for help. After a couple of months, when I spent the days preventing anyone from getting badly hurt, two of the boys finally went into social care where they should have been all along and after the summer the last disturbance to my relief had left for somewhere else.
So there I was with a calm, still slightly in chock, but more or less illiterate class. They knew the letters and their phonems. They could do simple, one digit addition without really knowing what they did. But that was it. And I had two years before I should hand them over to a middle school teacher in fourth grade.
So I decided a few things:
From now on school would have to be fun and wonderful, I had to make up for that horrid first year.
I would make them love reading, how else would they be able to know of something else or get out of those surroundings?
I would make sure their math was more or less incorporated in their backbones before fourth grade and I would have to find as many and entertaining ways to do that as possible.
All other things kids are supposed to learn during those first three years would have to come second.
And I decided to take over the long neglected library. I sorted up the sad remains left after 4:th – 6:th took what they considered was their half when they moved out a few years back. I visited the School Library Center, talked to the curator and filled a couple of boxes with books from closed down schools and we also decided that when I got the lists of possible new books to order, I could also get the lists for the previous half year. Most librarians picked just a few books each month. But I ordered every book on the lists. Every month. And the class and I unpacked the boxes and it was like getting presents..
That atumn we used a reader, but only part of the time. For the first time it was possible to read to them, something made impossible by the havocs the year before, and I picked the funniest and most exciting books I could find, texts that made them laugh and smile, and we started each day that way. They also learned songs to sing together or I sung to them and they learned rhymes and we played games with words. And I must say they were easily entertained, many of them experiencing the joy of texts and language for the first time. By X-mas we invited in the parents and the kids proudly sung to them and read verses by heart. And by X-mas all of them could read and write full sentences, short, but still and with some struggle in a few cases, but they read and understood.
Next term we kind of forgot the reader all together and used only library books, each getting a text that was easy enough not to take away the joy. As soon as a kid reached some fluency I’d help pick a book and put him or her in pair with someone at the same level and they would sit in pairs and take turns to read to each other, tucked away in a corner or in the corridor or some other place where they were not disturbed.
The last year I started the project of widening their concept of the world. I got the parents to give me one pack of tram tickets for each child and every Friday we went for study visits. Some had never gone by tram and to start with they had absolutley no idea about what the town the lived in looked like or how to find their way outside the nearest surroundings. The first Friday they were so excited that I went and sat in the other end of the carriage, but already next week they sat calmly and orderly talking to each other.
We’d meet at school in the morning and bringing lunch from home we visited every possible museum or monument and quite a few workplaces that offered to recieve us. Monday they wrote about their Friday and also thank you letters to those we had visited.
That last year there was at least some time left over for all the things we had ignored so far, some history, some geography, some natural science, and by then they could also use the library to read more about things they found interesting.
Not once in those two and a half years did I force any child to read something they did not like, and when we parted after that third year they all loved reading and they did very well in the years to come, in all subjects.
@Sara – just fab 🙂
Thank you!
Sarah, this is brilliant. If only teachers had the freedom to do this sort of thing in the UK. Sadly it seems that education is not meant to be something children actually enjoy!
Thank you! Actually I’m not so sure they still have that freedom. It would depend very much on the head and so it did back then too. Mercifully the Swedish school inspectorate does not assess teachers. They look more on results and schools
Thank you for that lovely story Sara – I’m intrigued to know more about the ‘trouble’…
You are welcome! Didn’t see until now that my answer slipped away. I should have added that the school head was brilliant. He contacted social service office right away when I went to see him after a couple of weeks. And the curator at the Central Library Center sent a person who spent two weeks sorting the card-index (this was before such things were digital). 4:th to 6:th grade had of course only grabbed the better half of the books and never bothered about the cards.
I do not think Toby is a knob. He sounds like a hero to me.
This is no surprise. The issue is whether he would be a hero to kids with a disinterest in reading. I doubt many would much care.
You do seem to have been unlucky in your experience of school libraries ‘never having shared a school with an inspirational school librarian’. Your school librarians seem to have been even more unfortunate in being shackled to photocopiers and laminators. It is a sad fact that there are SLTs who don’t understand what librarians do and don’t give them the time, money and backing to encourage reading, to provide relevant resources to support the curriculum and to help students learn how to research effectively. Fortunately, there are lots that do. If you’d like to find out more about what school librarians do then look at a couple of websites such as Heart of the School http://heartoftheschool.edublogs.org or The School Library Association http://www.sla.org.uk/index.php or follow some school librarians and authors on Twitter.
I really liked your idea of reading aloud to students in secondary school. Whilst I don’t read whole stories aloud, I do read excerpts when I do book talks in classrooms, as do lots of secondary school librarians. I also run book clubs and author visits, World Book Day events and loads of other things that, although you class them as ‘shallow’, do contribute to a general culture of reading in a school. You say that reading aloud needs to be given ‘prestige’ within a school. I agree. I don’t think it is just one thing that is key to get children reading for enjoyment, it is lots of contributing factors that build a culture of reading and that make reading the norm rather than the preserve of geeks. It needs a concerted effort from teachers, and their natural allies school librarians, to create this and hopefully we do not all need to be super-cool young men talking about The Bunker Diary to do it. There were a few mentions of that tired stereotype the glasses-wearing shusher in your piece, which is about as accurate as the pipe-smoking teacher with leather elbow-patches.
Hi Lesley – of course it’s more complicated that simply rerading aloud. And as I said in the post, I’m sure there are tons of excellent school librarians out there who do a fab job. But isn’t telling that in 17 years I’ve never worked in a school where they’ve been allowed to be great?
And for the record, I never said that librarians wore glasses. The shushing is an abiding childhood memory though.
David, sorry, you didn’t say your librarians wore glasses. I clearly need to be wearing them.
“But isn’t [it] telling that in 17 years I’ve never worked in a school where they’ve been allowed to be great?”
This is sad and it’s good that people recognise that librarians, just like lots of other staff in schools, can be prevented from doing their best work by the sheer weight of admin and everyday tasks. Being responsible for providing a service for hundreds, or even thousands, of students and staff and managing thousands of resources, is a big show to keep on the road and just how big, is frequently misunderstood and under-estimated. School librarians often work alone on part-time hours with small budgets at their disposal. However, if SLTs don’t understand what librarians are capable of, then librarians need to shout about it themselves. But, the other crucial thing is that individual teachers can play their part and make an enormous difference. For every librarian jumping up and down saying ‘Me, me, I can do that!’ It needs a teacher to collaborate with them, to work on a project with them, to invite them into the classroom to talk about books or research, to organise an event, to create reading lists, to invite them to meetings. Then perhaps they can be allowed to be great and students and staff can reap the benefit.
I would also be interested to hear about Learning Centres/Libraries from others. The minute you have bookable computers for lessons, it changes the dynamic. Break time and lunches easily attract the more vulnerable students, but not to read. One small group are Manga artists, another chess competitors. A few students grab a book off the shelves and pretend to read so they don’t get thrown out.
Reading for pleasure is not just fiction in the form of a codex any more. The New KS3 English Curriculum unfortunately positions the school library as an adjunct to that Department solely concerned with reading for pleasure rather than embracing the wider cross curricular role in teaching & learning in the essential life skills of information and digital literacy. With non statutory status in England (unlike prison libraries) heads are free to recruit as they wish, often choosing the cheapest option or worse still replacing the library with a reading scheme. The CBI and University admissions departments are crying out for students to have the skills that librarians as experts in information handling can disseminate and yet we are being excluded from the conversation rapidly – small wonder – it is easier and cheaper to push us back into our fusty musty boxes and let us play with our twin set and pearls, buns, specs etc What a missed opportunity for education and an example of how schools contribute to the burdens faced by HE and employers.
Not sure what you mean by ‘codex’ – are you talking about printed books? I’m largely uninterested in the teaching of ‘digital literacy’ I’m afraid. Sorry.
Sorry yes Codex = printed book – I’m a scientist as well as a librarian I tend to use minimal words! So if you are largely uninterested in digital literacy presumably your students do not get taught how to evaluate online content and are uncertain as to how they might choose the wider reading material they find on the internet with care – that is rather narrow minded IMHO in this day and age. A very good example of why reading for pleasure and information should be placed firmly in the care of an information professional with a cross curricular remit and not solely as part of English schemes of work
I’m no longer teaching so fortunately no children are forced to endure such a fate 😉
I’m happy for IT teachers and “information professionals ” to teach children about this stuff but this is not, I maintain, the province of English teachers.
…and welcome to the 21st century. If you’re reading on a Kindle kids you’re not really reading – that looks like way too much fun. Oh but listen to the screaming librarian, there ya go that’s some proper rebellious learning for you. I don’t care if you’re trying to read on your iPad, put it down and pay attention to me, me, me, me, you can be cool like… oh..
All teachers are responsible for literacy and all teachers have a responsibility to understand widely used technology and communication mediums. Literacy in this century is about a great deal more than Shakespeare.
I *really* don’t mind if children read on kindles or iPads. You know what a straw man argument is, right?
And if everything is literacy then nothing is. Digital literacy is such an awful misuse of terminology – almost as bad as emotional literacy, but I suppose you’s have lessons on that too?
‘physical literacy’ is a far worse term. ‘Digital literacy’ is relevant mostly to challenge those who refuse to recognise how important it is to get a grip on ‘new’ technologies. If (as should be the case) all teachers recognised the value (and were competent using it) there would be no need for the term as general literacy would encompass all forms.
Your ‘all or nothing’ approach lacks sense.
I don’t have an “all or nothing approach”. But thanks. 🙂
That’s a small crowd of your straw men now 🙂 I can’t comment further because each time I do the little box to reply gets smaller & smaller on my phone. But maybe that’s good design 😉
Even if I don’t agree with them all, more ideas are better than none, so good luck.
Sadly IT teachers are now mostly teaching coding – not these skills and many people in school library jobs don’t have the time because they are bogged down in routine admin and reading for pleasure.as directed by the Curriculum. Others have been appointed, through no fault of their own, to a library job where the Headteacher has no expectations for them to be involved in teaching and learning and often they do not have the experience or qualifications. They may lack the fundamentals of information literacy themselves so how can they impart this knowledge to students? Maybe this is why you place the term Information professionals in parentheses? Information and digital literacy is not a fate children are forced to endure, they encompass essential life skills for a modern world and if students do not master these skills then the research giants of the future,upon whose shoulders we stand in order to further our communal knowledge, will be very wobbly indeed.