When I first began teaching at my current inner London secondary school in 2012, I was extremely lucky. The kids were too. We had the luxury of two full-time librarians whose own passion for reading teen and young adult fiction meant that we were always stocked up with the newest and the best books for kids. My own (rather shoddy) knowledge of teenage fiction didn't seem to matter too much (although with hindsight, it should have done). Despite seeing over four hundred kids a week for library lessons, the librarians knew what each pupil liked to read. They kept new stuff on hold for individual children, possessing a knowledge of what each of them would enjoy before most of them even knew it themselves. As an English teacher, my time in the library was spent hearing kids read, and wandering around talking to my classes about what they were checking out this week, and whether they had like the books that they were returning.
Fast forward five years. That's all gone. Both librarians progressed their careers in non-state secondary environments, and the squeeze on education funding led to us not replacing them. We stopped being able to fund trainee librarians doing their MA. We stopped being able to pay librarians for work out of term time. We stopped being able to employ more than one person. I know it's a fix a lot of schools have found themselves in, but it has undoubtedly had a negative impact on the attitudes that the pupils I teach have towards reading.
The two lessons a week that I am lucky enough to spend in the library each week now consist of me having to engage in much more behaviour management than intellectual discussion. Kids moan constantly that there's nothing to read, and whilst I'm tempted to turn them to face the full book stacks and tell them not to be ridiculous, I've recently come to the conclusion that there's some truth in their wingeing. A quick survey during a free period revealed that there is only one John Greene novel (The Fault In Our Stars, obviously), no more copies of R.J Palacio's Wonder (all pinched, or "finessed" as my kids have taken to saying), none of the recently-published LGBTQ novels that have helped a lot of young people to see themselves in the books that they read, and absolutely nothing that you'd find in any of the top ten YA fiction lists.
"What should I read?" is also a question that has regularly stumped me. When I was a teenager, I didn't actually read much YA, preferring to pilfer things from my Dad's bookshelf that I was probably a bit young for, but blew my mind never the less. Even if I had been a YA addict, I'm not sure any of the kids would be particularly enthusiastic about novels from a couple of decades ago (apart from the classics, obviously). I feel that, as someone who is supposed to inspire children to read books and to love the process, I'm a bit inadequate. So my resolution in January was to make myself more aware of what is out there for kids to read, to read more YA fiction myself, and to engage more with research about what kids should be reading and what helps them to read.
No one might ever read this blog, but it will be a helpful space for me to write about my own progress with this goal. If anybody does stumble across it, maybe there'll be a summary of research that will be helpful, or a review that will illuminate a bookshop or library choice.
I've got a laminated quotation on the wall of my classroom (teacher cliche, I know...) taken from a Guardian interview with my kids' favourite person Stormzy. It says “I read so many books when I was a kid that I didn’t even know were shaping me up." Maybe in my mission to ensure that my kids are shaped by the literature they read, I'll pick up a few things too.
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