A few months back, long after her retirement, Rochelle Lee received a letter from a student she had taught many years ago. He had been a problem child who had pulled himself together and now lived a productive life working with children. “He wanted me to send him a picture of myself,” says Lee. “I called him up and asked why. He said, ‘Mrs. Lee, it was in your library that I read a book about Martin Luther King Jr. And my black students don’t believe that I learned about Dr. King from a white woman. So I want to show them your picture.’”
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Her purpose is simple: to promote a love of reading by working with grade-school teachers. Teachers who sign up for Lee’s yearlong program receive $500 to build their own classroom paperback library. In return they agree to spend at least 40 minutes a day reading aloud to their students or letting students read to themselves.
“Reading is the key–it’s the gateway kids have to pass through for success in school,” says Lee. “But too often they think of reading as a chore, an endless drill. They don’t see that it’s enjoyable. They don’t realize there are tremendous joys and satisfactions they can get from it.”
“The teachers come here, they read the books, and we talk about them,” says Lee. “We try to figure out what it is that their students would want to read, what would unlock their imaginations. There are so many ways in which reading can help us understand things. There are books for kids of all ages on all sorts of subjects: divorce problems, child abuse, relations with grandparents, not to mention the more conventional topics such as science, math, and history. Teachers are empowered to order the books they think their students would like. The teachers know what’s appropriate for their students. We feel the way to get to the kids is through the teachers.”
Lee followed with a story about her college graduation, which occurred the day after D-Day. “I cannot forget the message given to me on June 7, the day I received my bachelor’s degree,” she began. “As teachers we think we are burdened by so many problems. And to a degree we are. But I came from that generation whose childhood was defined by the greatest depression in history. And our young adulthood was defined by the greatest war that covered the globe. Each of us had brothers, friends, cousins in the service.
When he first read these words, said Terkel, they created images so powerful and profound they kept him awake. “I know there are marvelous visual aides in schools today, but that’s nothing like learning something through reading,” he concluded. “No matter how good Sesame Street is, it doesn’t match reading.”
