Homer Hickam, Jr. from Coalwood, West Virginia, grew up to be both a NASA engineer and the author of the best-selling memoir Rocket Boys.
Just how did it happen, and might there be some lessons for librarians and teachers who want e-books to catch on in the classroom? And perhaps a few governments as well? I’ll explain in time. Meanwhile here is what I picked up on, most of all.
Homer Hickam was nimble with words and able to befriend numbers, and we also know that his mother endlessly pushed him. His grandfather, too, an ex-coalminer with both legs cut off at the hip, served as a role model. Even amid all his pain, “Poppy” still managed to read “nearly every book” in the county library. But there was another reason why Hickam’s excelled, “‘The Great Six,’ a corruption of the phrase ‘grades one through six.’ For years, these same six teachers had seen through their classroom generations of Coalwood students.” Hickam goes on to say in Rocket Boys, the inspiration for the movie October Sky:
It seemed very important to these teachers that I read. By the second grade, I was intimately familiar with and capable of discussing in some detail Tom Sawyer and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Huckleberry Finn they saved for me until the third grade, tantalizingly holding it back as if it contained the very secrets of life. When I was finally allowed to read it, I very well knew this was no simple tale of rafting down a river but the everlasting story of America itself, with all our glory and shame…
When the Great Six inspected my library record and found it top-heavy with adventure and science fiction, they prescribed appropriate doses of Steinbeck, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It seemed as if all through grade school I was reading two books, one for me and one for my teachers.
So what does this have to do with e-books? Plenty. You’ll notice that Hickam’s reading for school was not haphazard; teachers went out of their way to track his progress and respond. Without Hickam’s exposure to Fitzgerald, would Rocket Boys be so evocative? Now enter e-books. They will increase the range of choices, a Good Thing and in fact one of the glories of the medium. Imagine the potential to multiply the number of titles that students can enjoy even in tiny towns like Coalwood. But isn’t it also desirable that asparagus reading, so to speak, be assigned along with the sweet-potato or apple-pie variety?
Of course, some interesting questions arise. At many schools and libraries today, privacy advocates would be aghast at teachers having access to children’s library records. How to square this with the desirability of a focused approach? I’m a privacy advocate myself and don’t pretend to have an easy answer. One possibility would be for libraries to let students decide, on checkout, whether they wanted their teachers to be aware of their choice of individual titles. With greater ease of tracking, at any rate, e-books would lend themselves better to this kind of arrangement than would p-books.
Young Hickam’s pleasure reading in Coalwood: “When I was in the fourth grade, I started going upstairs to the juior high school library to check out the Black Stallion series. There, I also discovered Jules Verne. I fell in love with his books, filled as they were with no only greart adventures but scientists and engineers who considered the acquistion of knowledge to be the greatest pursuit of mankind.” That should make the DP and Gutenberg folks very happy. Remember, the potential readership for the old favorites isn’t just here in the States, but in the Third World where Verne typically isn’t available in any form.
The John Edwards angle: For admirers in small Carolina towns, Prof. Edwards has served as a Hickam of sorts–a textile worker’s son who succeeded even by middle- and upper-class standards. Why has the head of UNC’s new poverty center refused to utter a syllable against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act? If it weren’t for the Act, kids in Coalwood today could be reading The Great Gatsby for free over the Internet.
Related: E-books and the guy conspiracy. K-12 students need both focused reading and the pleasure variety, and one of the big problems today is that boys often cannot find the right books to read for fun.
Disclaimer: I’m not an MLIS, and on or off televison, I don’t even play a teacher. But I can well imagine what e-books would have meant to me when I was growing up. Oh, to have had the Gutenberg collection back then! Better still to have had access to a TeleRead-sized collection.
