Weekly Reflections: The Power of Reading

The theme of this week is reading, which as you might expect, as an English Teacher, I think is very important! It was a delight to start the week by presenting certificates to our Year 7s who had taken up the Library’s Reading Challenge since September. I was bowled over by the number of books our Year 7s had read in the last few months, and it was heartening to see just how important reading is in our school community. 

The power of stories has been celebrated in our Drama department this week, with a trip for Years 8-13 to see ‘Play On!’ at The Bristol Old Vic. Think Twelfth Night meets 1940s Jazz Musical, with the Big Band songs of Duke Ellington. The play explored the theme of female empowerment and patriarchal control within the Music industry – proof that Shakespeare can be translated into any era. 

The Drama department is also thrilled to report that this rich history of storytelling has been taken up by forty of our Year 7 students, who are currently rehearsing for Carol Ann Duffy’s retelling of the classic fairy tales in Strange Tales of The Brothers Grimm. Directed by our Sixth Form students and aided by some eager Year 9 helpers, the show will be performed in different locations around the school site on 12 February. 

My own love of stories started when I was a very young child. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my mother’s lap as I ate my breakfast, which I believe firmly established reading as part of my daily routine. But I chart my passion for reading from about the age of seven when I became hooked on The Famous Five. I distinctly remember sitting in the car on Milsom Street, clutching a paper bag with the latest volume from Waterstones, and not being able to wait until I got home to start reading it. I still remember the disappointment, verging on grief, when I got to the end of the final 21st novel of the series, and I couldn’t imagine what would fill the gap. Happily, Enid Blyton came to the rescue again with Mallory Towers and The Twins at St Clare’s. What I loved about these books was the sense of adventure – being immersed in a story was to be transported to a world utterly different from my own, where summer days seemed endless and picnics and ginger beer were in abundance.

But aside from adventure, the value in reading is a didactic one, and we see this in the very basic stories that we might read as children. Stories can teach us moral lessons about how we should live our lives – no one can have read Grimm’s Fairy Tales without escaping their terrifying warnings to small children! But more complex literature has greater didactic power. It has the power to open our eyes to worlds entirely different from our own frame of existence. Literature is a vehicle through which we can learn about other cultures and other historical periods. 

One of my favourite modern writers is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who explores gritty themes in her novels based in her homeland, Nigeria, such as the Biafran war, repressive attitudes towards women and the impact of harsh religion on family relationships. Last week I was teaching Year 10 a section of her fantastic TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story. In the talk, she explores how literature can overcome stereotypes by educating readers about life in misrepresented countries. She argues that so many people have a ‘single story’ of Africa because western literature only presents it through the lens of catastrophe. 

Literature has the ability to break down prejudice though education, and to generate a more balanced and compassionate world. Fundamentally, it cuts to the very heart of what it means to be human.