Thcolumns: Summertime and the reading is easy
-or-
What is this 'book' you speak of?
Ah, summer! In one week the public schools will be out and the air will be filled with the sounds of children laughing and playing and saying there's nothing to do.
I remember those days.
By the end of August my mind was a smear, pummeled by too many episodes of "Gilligan's Island."
Something that did give my summers meaning was the reading programs held at the public library. One in particular that I remember involved a cave man and woman hunting a dinosaur. (I know, I know. That the library would be guilty of such vile misinformation is nothing less than scandalous.)
A pathway of little circles leading from the troglodytes to their dino prey was the program's focus. See, for each book I read, I got to lick a dot and fill in a circle.
I don't have much of an olfactory memory but sometimes when I'm in the children's section I can still smell those dots. It's one of the great smells of my childhood along with cut hay, steaming asphalt, fresh peas and manure.
Reading programs were part of the reason I read every Hardy Boys book, every Nancy Drew book and all of Thornton W. Burgess's animal books.
But they weren't the only reason.
During the school year, I checked "Mystery of the Dinosaur Graveyard" out of my elementary school's library all the time. I filled both sides of the book's card.
By myself. No one else ever checked it out.
We had reading contests in my elementary classrooms and I always tried to win. But when my balloon was off the chart and headed for the ceiling, many of my classmates were still digits away from a hundred pages.
Why don't kids read more?
I suppose that by complaining in print I'm complaining to the converted, but here's an opinion for you: Kids should read.
The Educational CyberPlayground pessimistically declares that if we have failed to "give children confidence that they can learn to read by the time they are 8 or 9 years old … [we] will have lost them for life."
Each new statistic on adult illiteracy in America is more depressing than the last, so maybe that's true. But I won't believe it.
Now, I am in favor of basketball and swimming and mountain biking and all the other reputable things that fill kids' time, but this summer, let's see them read.
The Tehachapi Library has a reading program (described elsewhere in this week's paper) that can result in kids getting a free book.
But you know what? Free book or not, kids won't read unless their role models read.
You heard me.
If we wonder why Johnny and Suzy get hives from wood pulp, we might also wonder when the last time was they saw their mommy or daddy reading a book.
To get a smarter, better-read generation of kids, kids who can keep America reasonably intelligent, we need some parents that can at least fake liking books.
The library has books for parents too, you know. I hereby encourage parents to pick up a tome or two this summer.
Because the best way to give kids something to do is to give them something to love. And if we as parents only demonstrate a love for "Gilligan's Island" ... well, I suspect God has better things to do than bless the purposefully idiotic.
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