Blog 1: Literacy Philosophy

When choosing a teacher to discuss literacy with, only one person came to mind.  Call me biased, but my mom is the best literacy teacher that I have ever met.  Sure, she is my mom and she was my second grade teacher and she is the most amazing literacy teacher I have ever met.  When I asked her about using her as an exemplar for this blog, her answer was “there are people so much better than me”.  

My mom was a teacher in rural Vermont in the late 60’s until she became a principal in the mid 1990’s.  She started what was basically a one room schoolhouse in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.  When we talk about this and the way education is today, she talks a lot about differentiation and how when she taught in Waterford, she had no choice but to differentiate for students.  Her philosophy that all students could and should be successful in reading and writing came from those roots.

She also believes that all children should have access to good literature.  I remember being very angry at her when she took all of my books to school.   She is a huge proponent that teachers need to know their literature and find that book that will hook the reader and drag them into a book.  Fourth grade boys should not be given Junie B Jones books.  She believes that classics are great –but just because they had the legend of being great didn’t make them appropriate or good for all readers.  In fact, she was an avid believer that the wrong books would turn a reader off.   We have had many discussions lately about how my stepsister has insisted on reading both the entire Chronicles of Narnia and L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series to my niece who is 7.  Sure, both are great works of literature but I can’t imagine having to sit through them at that age!

When she became a principal, her commitment to literacy didn’t change.  Up until the day she retired, she still sprinkled reading dust on her students and dared them to read a certain number of books every year in return for her dressing up in a pink tutu and kissing a pig.  She brought in authors to her schools and made sure that children were exposed to as much authentic reading and writing experiences as she could.  I have never met an administrator of the same caliber as my mother.  Yes, I am biased but having worked with 9 different principals now, I realize, she was one in a million.  She got kids.  She had teachers send kids to her office to read to her – not just because they were naughty.  She made reading and discovery a priority in her school – not just the state test.  And because of it, her student’s scores doubled in the time she was a principal – without added seat time or constant remediation.  

My mom knew and understood that in order for kids to excel in reading, they had to find the joy and purpose in it.  I’ll never forget in second grade her reading aloud Bunnicula with all of the lights in our basement classroom turned off and just an overhead projector casting light.  She understood kids and understood that roping them into literature meant making it interesting and irresistible.

I chose my mom because so many teachers I work with have either never had this passion about reading or don’t fully understand what it is to know literature inside and out.  That is a failing of our teacher education system in many ways.  We spend so much time getting teachers prepared to close gaps and teach to the test (a necessary evil in this society) that we forget who our clientele are – children.  We forget to read aloud, and when we do, we don’t use voices.  

Although my mom retired about 6 years ago, her philosophy isn’t out of date.  Every day I try to take a little piece of her energy and enthusiasm for reading with me to school and every day when I talk to her on the phone, I tell her about a student who read to me or had a great a-ha moment that day and finally got something they were struggling with and I hope she knows how much of a role she played in their moments of success.