What’s on your night table? Joel Ceausu Bolduc eats his words. No biggie the way I see it, a minister trying to make a point in inelegant fashion. “Outrage!” “He has to go!” yell the critics. Really? If anyone needs to step up it’s probably the spin machine that surrounds every cabinet minister, for not doing their job. “No child has ever died” from fewer library books. Yes it’s oafish, even slightly cafone-ish, certainly not what one expects from an education minister, and a physician to boot. Let’s look at the point. Ask your school librarian what he/she thinks…if you have one. If you are in a public school at least anywhere on the island of Montreal, chances are you don’t; public school librarian sightings are getting rarer these days, but still more common than the vanishing school nurse (for a later story). Most public schools have learned to deal with a lack of resources, namely, a staffed library for one or two days a week, the rest filled in by teachers and eager parent volunteers. The system works this way, evolving much like the printed word itself. At our own school library, you can pick everything from Dork Diaries to the Koran, Jane Austen to Kite building. And yes, most kids love perusing the shelves and taking a book home. And yes, it takes no more than a minute or two to show a kid how the library is organized before they tear off in search of pirates, planets and princesses. But Newsflash: It’s not in the school library where you should be looking. In school, kids still love to order from book clubs. Remember the thrill of a teacher reaching into a box and calling you up front to pick up your book? I recall a Harry Houdini biography in elementary school, a great read enjoyed after a seemingly interminable wait – even more exciting. In the classroom, where earnest teachers hope their charges will crack a few books a year with alacrity. Mr. Bolduc shouldn’t be shamed into stocking libraries, but instead try and make sure that books get into the classroom, because you see, those are two different places. Consider the book report. Those books, 30 copies of same? Usually from a teacher’s private collection, having dished out their own cash to pick up hundreds of books and lending them out. Figure two or three times a year, and teachers are spending big bucks, school boards and Bolduc be damned (with nary a tax break in sight, thanks for nothing). That’s why teachers fume when books come back without covers, torn pages, and peppered with crumbs, dog hair and a range of aromas from mild curries to skunky marijuana. Just thank a teacher that you don’t have to dish out $6-$10 three times a year for obligatory reads in grade school. And if you really care about books, stories and creativity, then point your outrage not to clumsy statements by Quebec politicians, but to a system that doesn’t value reading, reflecting our society, which WE are creating. Don’t wait for news reports of outraged educators tsk–tsking the notion of fewer books. I watched one local news report with interest from a Montreal-area primary school condemning cuts; the very same school where some 50 parents discovered a teacher had students watch a movie rather than read a book to write a ‘book report,’ and where a French teacher screened French TV shows – almost daily – to teach them Quebec culture.) No, ask yourself how much time and space in your world is devoted to the written word, and if you’re not satisfied with the answer, change it. Do you read at home? Do you have ceiling to floor shelves of weighty tomes, or a teetering colossus of pulp on the bedroom floor? Magazines stacked on the bathroom scale? Evanovich or Achebe? Lovecraft or Lehane? Kellerman or Kipling? It doesn’t really matter…what matters is that kids see a normative relationship between themselves and the printed word…a medium that defies the instant gratification jones and forces them to put their atrophied imaginations to work. If your kid reads from a reader or tablet, that’s great too, although if that’s all they’ve ever known, they will probably come to view it as just another distraction along with whatever candy-smashing thingamajig is making the rounds these days. Just sit up, turn off the bloody TV, get off the smartphone and ask yourself….What’s on your night table?
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 16:20:33 +0000
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