readaloud ruminations

I love to read aloud.  In fact, most of the people who have spent any time with me have probably heard me read to them--"Listen to this," I'll say, and read a bit from whatever I'm in the middle of.  I read to my students; I read to my children every night: Sharon Creech's Ruby Holler, Beverly Cleary's Ramona series, Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, and all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

On many occasions I've read aloud to D. as well, like when we read all of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series or when we finished Neil Gaiman's Stardust on the edge of Lake Isabel in Glacier National Park, pausing in between paragraphs to bang our sticks together to keep the bears on the other side of the lake from wandering over to sample our peanut butter tortillas.

I read on road trips--the hour between home and the grandparents' place is  frequently filled with the sounds of Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord and Inkspell or Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.  I even read aloud when I'm all by myself--either from my own works in progress or from published authors, especially poetry.  All poetry gets read aloud.

I read to my students--delivering Old Major's dream speech from Orwell's Animal Farm and Jacques' "All the world's a stage" speech from Shakespeare's As You Like It.  Some of my favorite moments in homeroom are the times I have read to them: for my sixth graders the light and whimsical prose of Katherine Hannigan's Ida B. and the endearingly earnest voice of Addie from Leslie Connor's Waiting for Normal, and my eighth graders enjoyed the heavier themes of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak.

Maybe I just like the sound of my own voice--it's certainly possible.  But what I love about reading the words of a wonderful author aloud is the music of it, the way the words fall into a beautiful rhythm.  I love to capture that music, or at least to try, to embrace the beauty of dialogue, of a well-placed pause.  And, okay.  I like to have an audience. It's the drama geek in me.

In college, I studied Spanish, and I read almost all of the assigned readings aloud, practicing my accent, enjoying the musicalidad of the words, the way the phrases would almost dance with each other on my tongue.  I think reading aloud not only improved my Spanish-speaking skills, but also my "ear" for the language, and the same can be said for reading aloud in English.

Reading the words of great writers influences my own writing, and hearing them spoken--paying attention to the sound of the words as well as their meanings--inspires me to work toward that same sense of rhythm and...even pitch, it seems, that my favorite authors achieve.


Another thing I love about reading aloud, especially with my kids, is that sense of being able to share what I'm reading with someone else, to hear and see and share their reactions.  When Jabber and I read Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie, we read the last four chapters with our arms wrapped tightly around each other, squeezing tight so we could feel the story together.  I love encountering new words, learning about different times, and places, and the great discussions we get into (even when they're silly, like my sons' fits of giggles that resulted from reading about how Margi Preus' protagonist has to try to drink his own urine to survive on Bird Island, in her Newbery Honor book, Heart of the Samurai, which we're in the middle of reading right now.)

What about you?  Do you have favorite readaloud books, or memories of reading aloud from childhood (yours, or a child you have read to)?  Do you read your own writing aloud to hear the rhythm of the prose, and if so, do you think it helps?

Teacher of the Year, Foiled Again!

Jabberwock is full of questions. Some of them are annoying, some of them are completely bizarre, and a good deal of them are about trying to figure out the way things work in this world. I try to answer him.

The last couple of weeks, we have been going for short hikes at a river near our home, and the questions have tended toward the scientific. In just the last week, we have had pretty in-depth conversations about evaporation/condensation (and the three states of matter), erosion, and then yesterday it was all about animal classification. Now I have always enjoyed biology--from the microscopic level right up to the cat dissection we did in advanced bio in high school. But this was the subject that stumped me, that made me say, "Gosh, Jabber, I just don't know. I guess we'll have to look that up."

OK, so from an educational standpoint, I know it's actually better for us to explore resources and learn the answers together, rather than a sort of Biology 101 lecture from the voice of Mom. Still, it irks me that I couldn't pull the answer out of my brain.

So we're sitting in the sandbox, and he asks me, "Mom, humans are mammals, right? So what makes us mammals?"

Yes! Easy question! I rattle off a bunch of characteristics of mammals, excited beyond all normal parameters that just yesterday we had been talking about animals being warm or cold-blooded. We chat for a while about animals giving birth to live young and then move on to discuss how mammals all feed their babies "nummies." Monkey joins the discussion at this point, lifting two sandy hands from his mud pie to caress my breasts.

"Nummie-nummie-nummie-num," he says solemnly. My shirt will never be the same.

"So, Jabber, can you think of any animals besides humans that would fit those characteristics? What other mammals are there?" I must be getting ready for school after all, hopping into Bloom's Taxonomy Mode while hanging out in the sandbox with a four-year-old.

He thinks for a minute. "A polar bear!" he shouts. "And a deer!"

We all applaud. It is quite exciting, let me tell you. I feel like science teacher of the year. And then.

"Are worms mammals?"

No. No, they are not. I am sure of that. He doesn't ask the next question: well, then, what ARE they? But I do. Come on, Science Teacher of the Freaking Year, what is a worm? My brain starts throwing words around, like Kingdom Phylum Class Order, or...damn, was it Order Class? Yeah, yeah. I dredge up an idea about five different groups of animals, but my brain can't fit worms into any of them.

Even though I don't have any idea how to fit a worm into my classification system, I start talking, trusting my Intro to Bio knowledge to show up when it really counts. "There are other groups of animals, too, besides Mammals," I say. "Like reptiles." Yeah, I am absolutely sure that's one of the groups. Is it a Kingdom? A Phylum? A Class, no Order?

"Dinosaurs were reptiles," says Jabber, full of wisdom.

"Yes, they were, but there are other animals that are reptiles, too, like turtles and snakes." Oh, I can feel that Best Teacher Tiara settling back onto my head now.

"Snakes?" asks Jabber.

"Nakes?" asks Monkey.

"Well, that's kind of like a worm," says Jabberwock. "So is a worm a reptile?"

Damn! "What is with you and worms?" No, I don't think I actually said that. "Well, there's Birds," I continue. I'm sure of birds. Mammals, Reptiles, Birds, and..."And amphibians, like frogs, that live on both water and land." Yep, I know that's one. I search through my brain for the fifth category. I know there's five; that number is clear in my memory, although I still can't remember what level of the taxonomy I am babbling about. I mean, one category can't include insects, worms, fish, and oh! there's a category that's like things with shells...crustaceans! Shit, this is too many categories. Suddenly, in my head, two Latin words compete: Annelida and Arthropoda. Annelids? Worms are Annelids! But...what about fish? What about the five categories?

"What is a worm?" He is pretty insistent at this point.

"Wom?" asks Monkey.

I sigh. "I don't know." I am defeated, vanquished by the natural sciences.

Come on, kid, ask me about poetry, plot structure, a vocabulary word?

Right, Mama? Right? Right?? RIGHT???

In my quest to become a better and better mother (I'm not looking for perfect, but I am kind of vying for the most improved award sometime in the next twenty years...), I think the principle that is most important to me when raising children is to treat them at all times with the same respect I would treat another adult. In short, treat them like real people.

I am amazed and awed by those who take this principle to the farthest extreme and practice non-coercive parenting all the way, those mothers who will simply not go anywhere if their toddler doesn't want to get into the carseat or who will let their kids choose what to eat and when from some kind of all-you-can-eat, always-available snack tray that the mother has painstakingly prepared and miraculously kept fully stocked. Seriously, there's gotta be some real harmony in those families.

I can't quite take it that far. For one thing, I am honestly somewhat of a control freak. I'm laid-back about things like the kids not needing to have a bath every single night and encouraging free exploratory play and (usually) not having too big of a hissy fit when the kids make huge messes. I do a great job of speaking to the kids in a way that isn't condescending, asking their opinions and letting them make decisions. (Granted, the 17-month-old does make some pretty questionable ones, like repeatedly eating handfuls of the sandbox dirt, but that's a whole 'nother blog entry, there!)

However, this evening as I was shoe shopping yet again, this time much more successfully with only The Jabberwock along, I realized that I seriously need to work on my listening skills. To be fair, he often asks about seven gazillion questions in a row, not leaving nearly enough time in between for adequate responding. And often, the questions are just plain bizarre. But there were about four times during our trip this evening where I noticed that Jabber was saying something like, "Right, Mama? Right? Right?" and finally he actually sighed in an exasperated imitation of me and said, "Are you even listening to me, Mama?"

I thought, good grief, would I treat an adult this way?

If my neighbor or a parent of one of my students or even my husband were asking me a question, no matter how inane and well, let's face it, boring, would I ever just tune that voice out simply because I'm entertaining a more interesting thought inside my head? Or because I was trying to listen to something really intriguing on NPR, for that matter? I have my social failings, but no, I'm pretty sure I would not.

David said once that something he liked about me was that there was always a whole lot going on inside my head, and it's true that it's pretty crazy in there. In this busy balancing act of mother, wife, teacher, accountant, housekeeper, and wishful writer, I do struggle with finding that time, that space to really enjoy my thoughts and reflections. But I need to remember that my children are people, too, and deserving of my attention. After all, better to answer a couple of questions (fifty million times in a row even) now than to face whatever they come up with later to get that attention another way.