I have always loved reading books. Ever since I was a child, books felt like a magical object that, when opened, would invite me into a vivid other world where I could do and be things I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. The feeling of finishing a book and ending my time in that other world always filled me with acute sadness. I think part of my early love of books was the fact that my mom read them aloud to me and my siblings each night before bed. These times inculcated in me an association of books with home and family.
In my school day, I aim to foster a similar feeling with my students. I always try to end my day with literature class. I enjoy that this timing allows the students to finish the day with a lovely read aloud where they can feel as if they have completed the more mentally taxing portions of their work and get to ease out of the day in our other fantasy world.
While these positive feelings and great imaginative exercises are certainly a valuable reason to include literature into our school days, I have grown to appreciate literature for the formative power it also provides for students. In our Hillsdale schools, we place a large emphasis on character formation in students. The school day is ripe with opportunities to help cultivate students’ morality, and I find literature to be one of the most powerful.
I have been reflecting on this formative power of literature recently, since we started reading Pollyanna. In this story, we meet a young orphan who goes to live with her aunt. We quickly recognize that Pollyanna is an incredibly optimistic person who seeks to find the best in the world while her Aunt Polly is filled with bitterness and gloom. Yet, we discover that both of these characters have experienced many of the same life events, such as losing all their other family members. We pause to question how the same tragedies could form such different human beings. How could one end up so cruel and one so kind?
As we delve further into the story, we learn that, when facing these challenges, Pollyanna decided to find some reason to still be glad, making this practice into a game, while Aunt Polly leaned into the sadness, allowing it to turn her bitter and cold. From these characters, we learn that our responses to situations will ultimately form us into the type of people we will become. The choice of how we react to difficulties, therefore, is truly the most important choice we will make.
Through reading the story of Pollyanna, my students learn this powerful message. Whenever hardships befall my students, I can use Pollyanna’s story as a tool to coach them to think about and carefully choose their reaction. While this story is greatly enjoyable for the students to read, I find it holds innumerable value in its formative power as well.
