Adults as Close Readers
How can adults harness the idea of intimacy to make thoughtful choices for children?
“It seems to me that the first thing a man does is to forget that he was ever a little boy himself.” (from Tony and the Wonderful Door by Howard Fast)
Teachers are responsible for selecting texts that will allow children to find spending time in the close company of written (and spoken) language to be something joyful, something that inspires urgency; it should not be instructive drudgery. As teachers we are responsible for our own close reading, finding our way into texts by imagining the receptive qualities of the children who might be asked to read it. What is it in a text that demands closeness in its reading? Where is intimacy suggested or even possible? Is there something for the child to add in the creation of the text as they read it? When discussing writing for children, the author Joan Aiken states, “Children need to get from the stories they read a sense of their own inner existence...” It is with an eye toward the inner existence of children that we should always consider what we put in front of them. But that should not suggest that the texts should therefore be juvenile or simplistic. I agree with Aiken’s suggestion that what children can come to understand through reading is that “[t]he world is an infinitely rich, strange, confusing, wonderful, cruel, mysterious, beautiful, inexplicable riddle.” My hope is that teachers understand that the work we find for children to read is what will allow them to forge some of their first and most meaningful connections to other human minds and that those intimate relationships borne from reading will urge children on to make their own sense sensible to the rest of us.