A school playground at recess is a happy and heartening sight. Kids kicking a ball around, building a snowman, playing on the swings, bundled up for the cold but not so much you can’t hear their excited laughs.
What makes Hartford’s White River School so special is that there’s even more excitement going on in the lobby. There by the book cart that serves as base camp, community volunteers are signing in, taking off their coats, stooping down to pick out a Dr. Seuss or a Judy Blume, straightening back up again just in time to be greeted by students hurrying up from the cafeteria with their trays.
For the next five minutes it looks like a reunion’s going on, as kids and adults greet each other like long-lost friends. Gwen and Arlene, the program coordinators, pair everyone up and send them off to the library or a nearby classroom, where for 40 minutes they’ll be sharing, not just lunch, but a love for reading and books.
What’s going on here? It’s the extraordinary Everybody Wins! program, where students read books with adult volunteers — grad students, working people, retirees — who act as their reading mentors. This isn’t a formal tutorial; there is no curriculum. The only rule the mentors have to follow is that they share their love of reading, which can mean laughing through that Dr. Seuss together, the mentor reading the first few pages, the student the next few, then, once the book’s done, puzzling over a word game together or taking a crack at one of the shorter Roald Dahls.
Despite the informality — or maybe because of it — reading scores have risen dramatically in the 18 years the program’s been offered in the school. This makes perfect sense, since mentoring allows students to read in a no-pressure situation where they’re not being evaluated or tested. And — a nice bonus — if a word or sentence proves a little difficult for the student, the mentor is right there to help.
In the course of reading, a lot of subjects spontaneously come up — whether a bird could really build a nest between moose antlers; whether a teacher could really disappear and come back as a witch — and the relaxed, far-ranging conversations the books prompt are every bit as important as the reading itself.
They don’t call it Everybody Wins! for no reason, since mentors get just as much out of the program as the kids do. Reading out loud to a child is about as much fun as life offers, and the only thing that tops it is having a child read out loud to you. Many mentors remember reading to their own kids when they were little, so having the chance to do it again is reason enough to spend your lunch hour there.
(Another great thing about the program is the venue. The White River School is a proud and historic building set on a low terrace overlooking downtown and the confluence of two major rivers. Built in l907 as the town’s high school, it’s been completely renovated now, and exudes the happy aura of a place where important things are happening.)
Even novelists of a certain age win here. The one I’m talking about is in his fifth year of mentoring, and comes out from the school on his Wednesdays feeling a lot better about life than he did going in. What especially heartens him is spending time in an environment where books are still a big deal — where the delights of reading link one generation to another in a partnership that’s very real.
He loves sharing old favorites with his mentorees — this year he reads with a terrific second-grader. These golden oldies include Robert McCloskey (especially his Homer Price stories; especially the one about the donut machine running amok ), Barbara Cooney, Bill Peet, and the other classics his own kids loved — and even books like Freddy the Pig, by Walter Brooks, which he remembers loving when he was a second-grader. Then too, he’s more than happy to let his students steer him to the books they’ve found on their own. A lot of these are about dinosaurs, sharks, or grizzly bears, but there are also books about magic tree houses and cat detectives, which — sucking it up! — he manages to find virtues in, thanks to his little pal’s excited response.
He also comes away with some important reminders about things a novelist can too often take for granted. The first is that kids are born with a wondrous credulity, so they have no trouble believing that a friendly rat can talk and wear clothes and skipper boats across a pond in Central Park, as long as the story is told with imagination and conviction.
This credulity becomes more discriminating as they get older — they want to read about Harry Potter now, not Stuart Little — but you never age out of it completely, or else adults wouldn’t read fiction at all. The willingness to believe that something made-up is real is one of the great human resources novelists get to tap. And — a wonderful paradox in this era of “fake news” — a made-up fiction, done well, can often contain more truth than the most factual non-fiction.
Going hand-in-hand with this is something even more fundamental: man’s great curiosity to learn, in any kind of situation or story, what happens next. Kids will read almost anything as long as it has a plot, or, in other words, as long as their curiosity is stimulated and teased and finally satisfied, or at least until a new book is opened, when right from the first page they’re wondering all over again what happens next. (Indeed, one of the mentor’s hardest tasks can be preventing their student from jumping ahead to read the end first.)
There have been times in literary history where novelists have not asked much from their readers’ imaginations — “realism” was the goal — and there have been times where they claim, when interviewed, “I don’t believe in plot.”
His experience reading with young people has convinced this novelist these dismissals are foolish — that in writing for adults, in trying to craft even the most experimental, subtle, sensibility-driven kind of fiction, writers can’t afford to lose sight of the reader’s credulity, their eagerness to be enchanted and their demand to have satisfied that overwhelming human desire to learn what happens next. These are the basics that make possible the novelist’s most important task, whether they’re writing for children or adults: getting the reader to turn the page, and the next page, and all the pages after that.
Everbody Wins!, the largest student mentoring program in Vermont, runs programs not just at the White River School, but at elementary schools in Tunbridge, West Fairlee, Chelsea, and Claremont. There are currently many students on the waiting list hoping for mentors, so by volunteering you’ll not only be making a difference in a young person’s life, but giving literature’s future an important vote of confidence.
To learn more, go to the organization’s website: everybodywinsvermont.org.
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