Last night, after a long day of travel that culminated in beach and pool time, I crawled into bed, exhausted, and read a few pages of my new book (The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store). This morning, I woke to a long meandering chat with my aunt over tea and coffee. At some point, as I caught her up on my life, I talked about literacy. If you talk to me long enough, I pretty much always do.

She has recently gone through her books and had set aside some for me to look through, in case I want any. Would I contemplate taking books from an island back to Ottawa? Yes, yes I would. I am constantly looking for ways to get books into my students’ hands, and books cost a lot, so I am well-known for my – ahem – willingness to accept books. As a matter of fact, I brought books as gifts for my cousin-nephews, so I’ll have space to take more back if any of these look enticing. Now, out on the veranda, as I sit down to write, books and reading are on my mind, as they often are. 

I know the 2024 NAEP Reading Scores have just been released, and I know they’re not great. I teach in Canada, but I have little evidence to suggest we’re doing a lot better. Oh, I know our PISA scores are better than most, but only if you consider having 50% of Canadian students reading at level 2 or below “fine”. I do not.

I’ve just spent a frankly silly amount of time looking at the statistics I linked to in the previous paragraph. I was reading because I wanted to be sure that what I wrote was true, and now I’m stuck for what to say. Thinking about literacy is a huge part of my life, but is this little blog, mostly anecdotes, really the place to write about this? Is today, sitting by the ocean, really the day? And what will I say that others haven’t said? My family is waiting for me (only half true: the teens are still asleep), and hey, I’m on vacation: I should be relaxing. But I am almost never not thinking about literacy.

Even here, on vacation, reading and writing are firmly part of my life, and I find myself wondering if what I want for students is realistic. Do I want everyone to travel with books? Do I think we all need to be “readers” (whatever that means)? I don’t think that’s what I’m after. I do want all students to have reading as a back pocket possibility. I want them to develop the empathy and the knowledge and the critical thinking that come from reading. Literacy is a pathway to many kinds of success, and I know that very few people who have achieved only functional literacy are able to follow that pathway with any ease.

Now I’ve gotten lost in the weeds of this post: I’ve been typing and erasing for too long and I feel silly for starting my vacation thinking about this, but I can’t stop. Do I write about what I’m doing in my classroom? Do I link to more information? Do I share my hopes and dreams for my students? Maybe not today. For now, I’ll go back inside and go through that bag of books to find ones that students might read, then I’ll snuggle in with my cousin-nephew and see if I can tempt him into the world of Dragon Masters, one of my own children’s favourite book series when they were his age. I’ll have to pull him away from the iPad, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

And I’ll write more about literacy later – because heaven knows I’ll be thinking about it.