The following excerpt is taken from an essay an editor from MacMillan Publishing asked me to write for Andrea Lunsford‘s How to Use Lunsford’s Handbooks–an instructional text specifically for teachers & professors who adopt Lunsford’s composition handbooks in their English courses. Because Houston’s Independent School District is closing school libraries to create disciplinary centers mirroring systems of mass incarceration (read about it here), I thought my essay, which begins with my narrating my at-home & in-school reading practices, appropriate to the times.

Listen, I be tellin my nieces–one a recent college graduate, the other an incoming first year highschooler–as well as the students I teach, to build their at-home libraries cause these American terrorists are insisting on our blind consent; ridding us of access to books via libraries & book banning is a tactic. & real talk, keepin ur texts on digital devices alone ain’t the move. What you gone do when the government controls ur access to it–to the technologies you think will always be streamin for you?

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“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

—Ray Bradbury

I grew up in a two-parent household in one of Miami’s middle-class Black neighborhoods. Our house sat near a dead end, half a mile away from the county’s library. Our neighboring family with whom we exchanged Christmas gifts was white—the wife, a college professor. My mother was an elementary school teacher—she has a master’s degree; and, my father, a social worker. Together, they reared my sisters and me in a home that included a small library of Encyclopedia Britannica, Childcraft books, and Danielle Steele novels. Under those shelves, hiding in cabinets my sisters and I dreaded opening, were Southwestern Bell’s Yellow Pages, an American Heritage Dictionary, an atlas, a thesaurus, as well as stored texts like Alex Haley’s Roots, Northwestern and FAMU yearbooks, and Ebony magazines my mother kept—an unrealized archiving practice. The weekly TV guide was always thrown across the family room’s couch or rolled up in Daddy’s recliner. The entire family read and scoured it—that weekly TV guide by which each of us arranged our schedules. In addition to it, Daddy regularly read the Miami Herald newspaper; my mother, like many Black women in the 90s, often read Terry McMillan and E. Lynn Harris (along with Steele); and my older sister read the Archie Comics. My twin sister adamantly opposed reading; however, even she had her own magazine subscription, Ranger Rick. I subscribed to 3-2-1 Contact.

Apparently, my parents made reading visible, accessible, and significant—a reflection of the elementary school I attended, where the D.E.A.R.[1] acronym was just as common as AIDS; Scholastic Book Fairs were just as popular as the county’s; and sustained silent reading was just as regular as reciting the national pledge. I attended Miami Lakes Elementary School, a predominantly white school my mother integrated, where Mr. Philip Goldman, the school’s librarian, walked each elementary school class through the logistics of the library’s Dewey Decimal System: how to find a book using the card catalogue, how to check out a book, and to where books were to be returned as well as the penalties for late returns. Mr. Goldman’s required library orientation also familiarized students with the library’s book.

With sample text in hand, Mr. Goldman explicated the parts of a book—from its copy right pages to its index. He also explained the differences between reference books and trade books, ensuring, too, we understood the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction texts. By the time children were dismissed from what was then termed, “the media center,” we knew how to navigate a table of contents, were encouraged to read front matter, including epigraphs and forewords, and was expected to check out books for both our reading pleasure and academic endeavors. Mr. Goldman, undoubtedly, mirrored Roald Dahl’s “passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted.”

According to Dahl, British novelist renowned for having penned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; James and the Giant Peach; and my favorite, Matilda, “Learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage”—assumingly over those who do not read or into a knowing that makes cultural sustainment possible. Alas, in a 21^st century whose technological advances have birthed a cohort of learners tagged with terms defining their behaviors, such as “the microwave generation,” “the Google generation,” and “iGen,” I am afraid more students than not are not afforded this “terrific advantage.”

Seemingly, majority 21^st century student “microwave” learners neither have the patience nor stamina reading requires; their “googling” habits prohibit them from engaging long stretches of concentrated, quiet time, wherein metacognition is practiced; and their attachments to smart phones and tablets increase their disinterest with traditional desk copy books thus limiting their knowledge of book parts. iPads, Kindles, and Fire tablets don’t require students know the parts of a book; instead, they need only know where the search bar is.

Inarguably, rearing millennial readers is a difficult task for teachers born prior to the 21^st century—especially those whose home and elementary school lives mirror mine. We are challenged to compete with communications technologies that do more to curtail students’ cognitive abilities, reduce their patience level, and limit their aptitude for deep thinking, than not—all the while trying to hold space for students confronted with social inequities prohibiting them from receiving and being prepared for basic school education.

Although we have not started to burn books (yet), we figuratively burn them—insisting on technological communications and social platforms that blister our learners’ curiosity for what can be discovered by flipping through a book’s pages. Undeniably, very few of our 21^st century learners will grow to be bibliophiles; yet we teachers are expected to engage—and assess—students in activities that don’t mirror their daily happenings. And so, how does an English teacher inspire reading practice in their young adult learners who enter the academy not already having an interest in reading traditional text? (And how will students build “themselves for tomorrow, free within themselves,” said Langston Hughes, when K-12 schools are being refashioned to condition them towards labor and bondage?)

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You may request full access to my essay as it appears in How to Use Lunsford’s Handbook through the contact link. 

[1] Drop everything and read.