Is our children learning?

I booktalked at County Home School today, and my throat feels like I spent 5 class periods swallowing cotton balls and desiccants. County Home School is a residential treatment facility where first-time juvenile offenders live and go to school and receive treatment for however long their sentenced to be there. Our library system does a booktalk program where every month two librarians visit the school and tell all the English classes about books we've picked out just for them. The students (9th-12th grade, mostly male, mostly black) can request the books they like from our Outreach department.

The kids at County Home School have no TV--our booktalks, and the books they request ARE their entertainment. As a result, I agonize over my book choices, because I want so badly to choose books that will speak to them, books that they will enjoy. Then there's more agony over how to booktalk the books--how do you sell this book? What's going to get their attention? I'm a melodramatic person in my normal life, but for whatever reason it's hard for me to really ham things up when I'm standing up in front of a group of teens. The end result is worth the agony, however. The kids are attentive and appreciative and they just can't wait to get their hands on the books, and that is just an awesome and beautiful thing.

The thing most interesting to me about this tour of duty was the number of kids who begged us to read to them. They were politely attentive while we did our little booktalk performances, but invariably, in each class there'd be a chorus of kids asking us to tell them what happened in the book. I kept saying 'well you gotta read the book and find out!' These comments were interspersed with pleas for us to read the books out loud to the class. I finally asked a kid at the beginning of the class period why everyone wanted us to read out loud to them. He said 'some of us don't read good but we want to know the story, you know?'

So, there's this population of our country that is cut off from worlds to which many of us escape, because they don't read good. They can't access those stories. They can't visit these places. I am trying to imagine what my life as a youth would have been like had I not been able to escape into Judy Blume or Madeline L'Engle or William Gibson. What kind of impoverished, sorry-ass existence would that be? It just floors me. But I can't live without stories. I don't understand history except in the context of stories of individuals.

Some would argue that this existence is as good as these kids deserve--they've had the same opportunities to learn to read as everyone else, they are lazy so they never learned well, etc., etc. Whatever. It is still the case that these kids don't get to have these stories, and that sucks. It makes me dwell angrily once again on how all the grant funding for literacy floating around out there is aimed at the birth-6 age group. What do you do with a 15 year old who can't read? And why don't more people care? These are our fellow countrymen (and women,) y'all. They'll be taxpayers and voters and neighbors. We either learn 'em good now, or we pay the price in the future.