On the heels of her recent Global Teacher Prize win, we're sharing an essay Nancie Atwell wrote for our Open a World of Possible campaign. A teacher since 1973, Nancie Atwell is the author of several books, including The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers. Atwell is the founder of the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K-8 demonstration school in Edgecomb, Maine, and is the first classroom teacher to receive the major research awards in English language arts, the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, and the NCTE David H. Russell Award. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of New Hampshire and was named the River of Words Poetry Teacher of the Year. Her below Open a World of Possible essay reflects on her early experiences as a reader—enjoy!
My father was a postal carrier. My mother waitressed. Except for the World Book Encyclopedia, which my parents purchased one volume at a time, ours was a house without books. The turning point in my life as a reader came in fifth grade, when my sore throat and achy joints were diagnosed as rheumatic fever. I spent most of the school year off my feet and secluded in my bedroom. Books, the library, and my mother saved me.
She began to scour the shelves of the local library in search of anything she could imagine I might like. At first, I read out of boredom. No child in 1961 had a television, let alone a computer or telephone in her bedroom. But then I began to fall in love—with Ellen Tibbetts, Henry Huggins, Beezus and Ramona, the March sisters, and the heroes and heroines in the Landmark biography series. I escaped my room in the company of Lotta Crabtree, Jenny Lind, Clara Barton, Sam Adams, and Francis Marion the Swamp Fox, and vicariously experienced their perseverance and courage.
When my mother brought home The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, I wrinkled my nose at its musty cover and put it at the bottom of the pile. When I ran out of books and was desperate, I finally gave in and cracked it open. I read it straight through. It was my story but not my story. I was Mary; I was Colin. I remember calling downstairs to my mother and thanking her over and over again for the best book I ever read. “Can you get me some more like this one?” I begged. My poor mother tried, but there is only one Secret Garden. She renewed it four times for me that winter and spring.
All that quiet time reading stories chosen for me by an adult who loved me changed me forever—and granted me a passion for stories and the ability to read fast and with feeling. The novelist Graham Greene wrote, “There is always one moment in childhood when a door opens and lets the future in.” This was my moment. I became an English major and an English teacher because I was—I am—crazy about books and reading.
Today at my school, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the faculty does for every child what my mother did for me. We show students we love them by looking after them as readers. We give them time every day to curl up with intriguing stories. We scour the shelves of bookstores and pore over reviews in search of titles that will delight them. And we acknowledge the essential should in teaching reading: every student should read for the pleasure of it.
While instructional fads will come and go, nothing can equal the power of an adult who puts the right book in a child’s hands at the right time. Teachers who cultivate diverse secret gardens—quiet spaces in the school day when every student can venture into a story he or she loves—understand that engaged reading now makes engaged readers for a lifetime.
