I was invited to participate in the Open a World of Possible essay anthology. And so I really shared – I wanted to share a story I hadn’t shared before. And it was a story that this summer I had recently gone back to my elementary school to do some professional development. And walking around that library, it really brought back memories of Miss Potter, the librarian that I had at that school.
And when I was a third-grader, I was a precocious reader, but I was also kind of bossy and had my own opinions about reading. That clearly hasn’t gone away into my adult life. But we had SRA cards. My third-grade teacher tested us, put us in a box, put us in the box. Many of us remember that box. And we read SRA cards. And I hated those cards. They were so boring.
But I wanted to be an achiever also so I burned through those cards. Well, I finished them around Christmastime, the whole box, and my teacher would not let me move on to the next grade-level box because she said, “What will you do next year?” So, she asked me to tutor other children on SRA cards. Now, this was back in the ’70s where teachers would leave the classroom to go who knows where and leave children.
So, she came back from the classroom one day – from being out of the classroom, and I was standing at the front of the classroom with the chalk in my hand giving out answers to the SRA cards. She grabbed me by the upper arm and moved me quickly down to the office where I had never been. So, I was horrified. My mother had to come to the school, and I just knew that it was all going to come down on me after that.
So, my mom – I was crying so much my mom just decided to take me home. And we got in the car in the parking lot and she said, “Did you know that your teacher was standing there for three or four minutes before you saw her? She said you gave out about 10 answers.” And I said, “Mom, I promise you the other kids don’t mind that I gave out those answers.” And I said, “What’s going to happen to me?” And she said, “Well, I wanted them to move you to the fourth‑grade reading class, but they said no. So, what you’ll be doing during reading time now, during SRA time now is going down to the library to help Miss Potter.”
Miss Potter was our librarian, and I knew her from our weekly library visits, but I wouldn’t say I really had bonded with her at that time. And when I came down to be her library assistant, I thought I would just be shelving books, but she really took me in hand. And she would ask me about the things that I was interested in. And I was crazy for horses back then. And she said, “Horses? You like horses? Have you met Marguerite Henry?”
And she would take me to the Marguerite Henry section of the library, and I read every horse book, King of the Wind, Misty of Chincoteague. It’s still on my bucket list to go to that island and see those mustangs. And when I finished those books, she would talk to me about them, what I learned from the books, what interested me about them, and then she would start me on another path. She really was in my elementary years probably the best reading teacher I had for me.
But what she showed me was that reading wasn’t just a skill, it wasn’t just something that I did because I enjoyed it, but that reading was something that was powerful and that I could have power over my own education if I read. And that really changed reading for me at that time. It probably saved me as a reader.