Challenge Day #17

Nancy Drew

When I was young I did the same book report for two years in a row Louisa May Alcott by Catherine O. Peare.  I had to look it up in the Library of Congress to try and find it – it was published in 1954, the year before I was born.  I picked it because it was the smallest book in my elementary school library that my fourth and fifth grade teacher would approve as difficult enough.  As a kid I hated reading.  Looking back as an adult I think it had something to do with reading wasn’t easy for me.  Neither was spelling.  Not an unusually combination. I didn’t learn phonics until I was an education major in college.  I was brought up in the site word era of Dick and Jane.  At home I was surrounded by books and readers.  My parents and my brother were always reading something.  My dad was an avid Tom Clancy fan and my brother read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy long before they were the thing to read.  Even in elementary school he belonged to a book club for the Hardy Boys.  I just didn’t get it – for me reading wasn’t fun, it was something you had to do to get a decent grade in school.  

I know if you met me as an adult you are probably shocked because now I read two and three books at a time.  Today as I took a nap the UPS man stopped and dropped off the second book in The Guardians Trilogy by Nora Roberts, and although I’m already reading two others I’m chomping at the bit to start reading it.  I know once I start I will not put it down – good thing one of the books I’m reading is short and it is supposed to rain tomorrow.  Woot-Woot!

You may be wondering what changed.  It was Nancy Drew and The Secret of the Clock Tower by Carolyn Keene. [Actually Carolyn Keen is the pseudonym under which many ghostwriter penned the Nancy Drew series.  The series was created by Edward Stratemeyer, found of the Stratemeyer Syndicate book packaging firm, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.] Along with a room on the third floor of a huge house in West Berlin. With not much to do but baby-sit three kids. 

Having lived in Germany during my ninth and tenth grade years I had always wanted to go back and teach overseas.  I love traveling and I loved living somewhere very different.  Being a baby boomer the chance of getting a job was daunting, even with a college education. I decided I might have a better chance if I did my student teaching overseas.  I’d be there and could look for a job while I was living there. Besides I love a good adventure. Originally I requested to go to Italy or Scandinavia but the University had a relationship in West Berlin with the John F. Kennedy School which happened to be a bilingual school.  Having lived in Germany before they assumed I spoke some German and so that’s where I was assigned. 

I lived with the Protocol Officer from the US.  He had three children and a wife. Part of the exchange was that I watched the kids periodically in the evening when they had to go to events.  The really odd thing was his wife’s family lived within two miles of my parent’s house back in Minnesota. She was also from Minnesota – just like me. In fact she went to college with Charles Schultz the creator of Peanuts and had some of his original drawing.  It was a great arrangement until the wife injured her back and had to return to the states for surgery – leaving me to do a lot more baby-sitting than was originally expected. 

On the second floor of the house where the children’s bedrooms were there was a shelf filled with the entire collection of Nancy Drew.  An early hard back versions.  One night bored – no television in English – I stopped on the second floor on the way to my third floor bedroom and grabbed The Secret of the Clock Tower. That was it I was hooked. 

Reading books that were way below my reading level, where I could read the entire story in one night it was like reading a movie.  For the first time in my life I enjoyed reading.  I doubt that if any contemporaries of mine would have been around I would have been reading Nancy Drew at the age of twenty-one.  In fact if I wasn't stuck in the house I probably would have passed the book by without a thought. That spring I read the entire series.  I finally understood what my brother was talking about – reading could be as much fun as watch television. 

I learned a powerful lesson from reading Nancy Drew—that I took with me into my teaching career.  Often when we are not good at something it is easier just to say I don’t like it.  When we have to struggle too much it is easier to not try. Reading for pleasure for the first time at the age of twenty-one was a testament to the idea that success breeds success.  Once I was successful without too much difficulty to read for pleasure I was willing to continue to try.  For educators this idea isn’t new, Lev Vygotsky the Soviet psychologies wrote about the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) around 1924.  The ZPD is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help.  Finally I could read for pleasure without help from the teacher.  I was in my zone. 

Nancy Drew had helped me solve the mystery of why many children say “I don’t like____________.” Thank you Nancy Drew!