Growing up, education was always important to Mom, and ultimately became her profession for over forty years.
An oft-mentioned teaching job that Mom desired was Reading Teacher, running a full-time reading program in her school which, as far as I know, never occurred. She did run the occasional summer school reading program and probably informally – and unofficially – did so during the school year, but never full-time. She also envisioned teaching at the nearby juvenile prison, which I assume would focus on reading.
[At the time of her death, she was helping adults prepare to take GED tests and get their high school degree. Do you see a pattern here? Oh, and her mother was also a junior high English teacher.]
Her focus on reading predated her teaching career. Our school regularly participated in book sales where a publisher/distributor/whatever would distribute an order form with available books, broken out by grade level. The books were the standard, de rigueur children books at discounted prices.
I brought home my first order form in second or third grade, and Mom proceeded – with our input – to select at least a dozen books for me and my younger siblings. I expect she also picked books that interested her, put aside until we were older. Despite money always being tight, reading and education was prioritized and miraculously the necessary funds were made available.
The books finally arrived and I given a rather large stack of books. That was when I learned (no pun intended) that reading was perhaps not as emphasized in other families as classmates who did order – and not everyone did – had only one or two books. And, typical of school children, I was teased for our order. Mom didn’t care, she knew that reading was a step to being successful as an adult.
[This is an overly-broad stereotype, as there are classmates whose families understood that education opens doors, classmates whom went to college or received other professional training and achieved much far from rural Iowa. That said, one teasing came from a classmate who subsequently spent their entire career in secondary education. So go figure ….]
Though never the fastest reader, I do regularly read and constantly purchase books: I still prefer physical over digital books, despite profession (software engineer) where I’m in front of a monitor for hours on end. As I write this, I realized I never asked Mom whether students’ reading comprehension differed based on medium. Perhaps it depends on what you started with, though my wife contradicts that by reading books incessantly on an iPad).
Unfortunately, I’ll never get to ask that question.
Image Credit
“Picture Books” by Enokson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
