If your students managed to read 10,000 books, would you climb up on the roof and dye your hair purple?
Apparently, yes. At Summit View Elementary in Castle Rock, Colorado, the principal and assistant principal accepted a challenge from their students to go purple and sleep on the roof if the school children read 10,000 books.
By the way, this reading challenge happened once before at Summit View Elementary. The principal had to eat a worm.
I'm lucky if I can read one book a week, and I'm retired. For me, that works out to about 50 books a year, because sometimes I sleep, eat, or listen to the radio.
The idea of reading challenges is of course not new. The non-profit group Reading is Fundamental or RIF promotes a number of reading contests, tied to commercial interests such as Scholastic or Target stores, or new movies.
For example, this summer the RIF character "Riffington" wants kids to read 200,000 books and log them into the Scholastic Reader Meter by September 3. If they succeed, according to the RIF web site, Scholastic will donate 50,000 books that RIF can give to kids, free.
Of course this is a good thing. But Scholastic also knows it will drive kids to their web site, and their goal is a fat bottom line, not reading per se.
RIF also is running a Nancy Drew sweepstakes. This one promotes the new Nancy Drew movie, not the books. One child will win an iPod Nano. Related Nancy Drew merchandise is available to other winners, but not one Nancy Drew book is being given away (a graphic novel spin-off is included in the prizes).
I prefer the more creative contests run by the long-standing Reading Rainbow series on PBS. Each year children are invited to submit original stories and art. Winners of the "Young Writers and Illustrators Contest" are published and praised. Every year 45,000 children enter this contest, and each one receives a certificate of recognition signed by LeVar Burton, a.k.a. Kunta Kinte and Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Maya Angelou once said, "ANY book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."
ANY book?
When Mark Twain heard that, he added: "The man who does not read GOOD books has no advantage over the man who CAN'T read them."
And that touches on another aspect of these competitions that bothers me. We are so anxious to get our children on the reading train that we stop caring about the quality of what they read.
I'd like to hear about children who not only consume books as fast as potato chips, but also learn to be selective about what they are reading, to seek out the books and authors that give something back in the way of depth and new worlds. For every book that takes a child to a new place, there are dozens that rehash adult cliches about what childhood should be like.
You can tell a sentimental or superficial or overly didactic children's book when you read it. And there seems to be a correlation between the quality of the art and the quality of the words, as if children's book editors themselves have learned to pair good art with good stories, mediocre stuff with the same.
The Maya Angelou side of this argument holds that as long as a child is reading, getting the reading habit, it's all good, and I can agree with that, as far as it goes.
The experience of sitting on the floor with a new book, losing yourself to the world while you swim inside the pages, is wholly independent of what any adult might conceive as literary quality. Jane or Johnny live in Dora The Explorer's world or run around with Sponge Bob just as enthusiastically as you once heard the wind in the willows or enjoyed the talking animals of Dr. Dolittle, and to the same good effect.
Still, educators and parents might think about providing better books for their kids, not simply more of them.
