Searching for Books That Touched Lives

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 1, 2001; 11:42 AM

I was 11. I was going to win the book reading contest in my sixth grade class at Laurel Elementary School in San Mateo, Calif. I was sure of it. I practiced my neutral
smile and couldn't-care-less shrug of the shoulders. That way I could receive the award without jeopardizing my health on the playground.

I was aware that I was racking up points by turning in reports on second- and third-grade books. But so what? The person with the most books would win, and that would be me.

Unfortunately my mother, with her annoyingly refined sense of educational value and fair play, saw what I was up to. She ratted me out to my teacher. The prize went
to somebody else. I don't think it was a Davey Crockett hat or a tennis racket or anything I valued at that age, so I survived the trauma with my overgrown, if fragile,
ego more or less intact.

But memories of my underhandedness have since made me suspicious of contests and quotas and stunts designed to encourage academic effort. I wonder, for instance,
about the rule in the D.C. schools - and in several other districts around the country - that each child read 25 books a year. One teacher told me that her principal
demanded that lists of completed books be turned in for each student at the end of the year. Some of her colleagues, having despaired of getting their less motivated
students even to look at a book, fashioned reports out of thin air.

We see all kinds of strenuous efforts to persuade children to read more. In the last few years principals have donned fright wigs or climbed onto their schools' rooftops
or eaten inappropriate food items to the gleeful shouts of pupils who met their annual book-reading targets and earned the right to see an adult look ridiculous.

When I received a letter recently from nine students at the Bell Multicultural High School in the District, I thought at first it was another stunt. Like other D.C.
students, they each had to read 25 books, but they thought it would be a good idea to get Washington Post readers into the act.

The teacher of their Reading and Math Strategies class, Janeece Docal, had showed them an article about Burlingame, Calif., teacher Jim Burke. His book "I Hear
America Reading" was a compilation of letters from people saying why reading was important to them and what books had changed their lives. Many of the Bell
Multicultural students said they had never read anything that had much effect on them.

Docal told them she did not believe it. She brought in more than 30 books that had altered her thinking about the world and asked her students to do the same. She
told them to drop the disenchanted teen act. Maybe the weight of textbook prose had dulled their senses and maybe American youth culture did not celebrate great
moments in literature, but she knew they had read things that had moved them.

"It was okay to have read it but not understood it," she told me later. "It was okay to have faked it or have our mind wander, but now we needed to be honest, find
ways to get unstuck and remember when reading was enjoyable or meaningful."

It worked. The students began to bring in books that were, in small but important ways, precious to them. One produced a childhood book her father read to her
before he died. One brought in the first book with chapters he had ever read from cover to cover. One had a book she once read while drooped over the branches of
her grandmother's mango tree. One showed Docal a book on leadership for teenagers that was real for him because it proved that "other teens have gone through
what I am going through."

If they were going to read 25 books, the students decided, those books had to matter. The nine ninth-graders, Yocaira Barrett, Rosemary Becquer, Josue Castillo,
Holman Duran, Jose Flores, Jennifer Gomez, Oscar Montiel, Anna Segovia and Darnell Thompson, asked me to solicit letters and e-mails from Post and
washingtonpost.com readers telling personal stories of books that had changed lives. Their questions for you: "What do you read and why do you read it? How has
reading changed your life? What do you think about before, during and after you read?"

The idea began to make sense to me. Even the demand that everybody read 25 books did not seem so bad, seeing it had inspired such effort. Lewis and Clark, I
learned from one of my favorite recent books by Stephen E. Ambrose, tried to cover a certain number of miles every day. Bricklayers, doll-makers, novelists,
fishermen and janitors set goals. Some people would cheat, but that was their problem. Whatever gets us up and moving in the morning is probably a good thing.

If I were asked about books, I would mention my early love of space and science fiction. That led me to Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote stories of a rebellion on the
moon and a religious dictatorship in America as if they were true history. That fed my hunger for real stories of global sweep that took me through the Civil War,
World War II and finally the war in which I served in Vietnam. I was hooked on history, so I became a journalist.

Many of you have better stories than that. You can tell the students of Bell Multicultural why the books that touched you still pop into your heads at unexpected
moments. Letters can be addressed to Janeece Docal at Bell Multicultural, 3145 Hiatt Place, NW, Washington D.C. 20010. Or just take a few minutes now to type out
a quick e-mail. Send it to Docal's class at this address: jdbellmulticulturalhs@hotmail.com.

And if you don't mind, please cc a copy to me so that I can improve my own reading list, and use some of your thoughts in a future column.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company