Potter Tales

I have loved being a mother. I can’t think of anything I would rather be but it has not all been easy. In fact, a great deal of it has been stage managing one crisis after another. Then there have been legions of nights where sleep eluded me because I could not get a handle on my worries and fears long enough to put them aside and grab a few hours of well need rest so I could effectively manage the next crisis.

My oldest son wasn’t a neat fit for the educational system. He struggled terribly in the elementary grades learning to read. His brain just did not process information in the learning style which was used pre-dominantly in the classroom at that time. He was brilliant in math but he just couldn’t seem to get a handle on reading. The school didn’t have any kind of remedial program for primary children with language issues until grade 4 and the only help I was offered was a spot in the “behaviour program” for troubled children…except he didn’t have behavioral issues – the child just couldn’t read.

In despair, I almost enrolled him. It was when I started to fill out the behaviour questionnaire that rebellion kicked in. Answering questions like ‘how many times does your child wet the bed in any given week’ or ‘how many times in any given week does your child bite other children’ that caused the rebellion. This wasn’t even close to Montana’s behaviour. I am not an educator but it just seems to me, if we let Montana flounder till grade 4, we stood a good chance of losing him academically and firmly establishing in his mind a pattern of failure which would be almost impossible to break.

I searched long and hard for a method of teaching him literacy and didn’t come up with anything very different from what was being offered in the classroom. Then by chance I ran into my daughter’s grade one teacher who had since retired from teaching. She decided to finally retire after having the Last Amazon in her classroom. The LA had won an essay contest on the rights of children in which 54 schools across the country competed. She cleaned up in the 6-9 year old category and got to be on YTV and won a host of prizes for herself and her classmates. Ironically, she had been grounded to her room for a week and used the time to write and hone her essay. Miss Chapeski didn’t believe her career would get better than that so she decided to retire on a high note.

She asked me innocently how my family was doing and I burst into tears on the street. I don’t cry often, so when I do – it’s ugly. Poor woman didn’t expect that but she did give me great advice as it turned out. Not only did she tell me to try an approach which had completely fell out of favour during the height of “see and say” style of teaching literacy but also advice on how to manipulate school politics to get the kind of program enacted which Montana needed as well as a few pointers on what to do in the home.

It all worked. I had always read to the children and I spent many hours searching the children’s sections of bookstores looking for something that would really engage their interests. I bought the first Harry Potter book for the Last Amazon to read at night just after the second book came out. She loved it so much that by the third chapter she was not content to wait patiently for bedtime to learn what happened next and took to reading it on her own.

By the time Montana was 9, he had a year and a half of special ed in reading under his belt and he was progressing but he still wouldn’t pick up a book to read from choice. We did all we could to make him read every day things such as refusing to read the instructions on the video games so he would be forced to work out what it was. I still read to him every night and he loved stories as long as I did all the work.

I decided one night to try reading Harry Potter to him. By the end of the second chapter he wasn’t content to wait each night for the next chapter and announced that he would start reading it on his own because I was just too slow. I fretted about that. It was a big book and I was concerned that the vocabulary was just too advanced for his skill set. He worked it out because he had a solid grounding in phonics and had mastered dictionary skills.

Two weeks before the first Harry Potter movie was released I made a promise to the children. If Montana had finished the book before the movie was released; I would take them to see the movie on the night of its release. This was a big deal because bedtime was still 8:00 pm for all. In my mind, I can still picture that morning very clearly. Montana reading the last chapter of the book on the sofa with the Last Amazon on one side and Isaiah Sender on the other. Every few minutes one of them would be urging him on to hurry up and finish. By the time they were ready to leave for school; two of them were despondent. Montana came through in the end and finished the book on his lunch hour.

To the children, it was a magical night. Not only did they get to see their favourite fiction characters come to life but a large portion of the adult audience were dressed as characters as the book. While it struck me as a trifle strange - it struck them as a perfectly natural grown-up thing to do when going to see a Harry Potter movie. I don’t remember much after the movie started. I fell asleep and the children were far to engaged to bother to wake me up until the movie ended. Of course, they were disgusted with me. I mean, how could anyone fall asleep during Harry Potter…

Watching Potter come to life on the screen inspired Montana to write his own stories. I have about 50 exercise books from grades 4 and 5 filled with Montana’s stories. Montana being Montana came up with stories which were filled with unique twists and turns - even if the stories themselves were a trifle unorthodox. All his characters were named and drawn from his classmates and teachers. When I say he wrote stories - I mean stories. Not one or two pages stories but 20 to 30 pages for each story. He also discovered a unique way form of revenge against his classmates who he felt slighted him. He gave them bad characters or made terrible things happened to them. Both his grade 4 and 5th grade teacher use to allow him to read his stories once a week to the class which spurned him on to write even more stories. If a child’s feelings were hurt by their role in Montana’s stories both sets of teachers use to allow them to time to write rebuttal stories and read them to the class. It all ended in grade 6 when the teacher felt it wasn’t appropriate forum or use of class time for writing or reading stories.

By the time Montana graduated from grade 8, he was the valedictorian of his class. No one but him and I remembered the early days when he when he couldn’t tell the difference between tea or the. This year, his English teacher wrote a comment on his final report card to the affect - the high quality of his essay on Animal Farm on the final exam was completely unprecedented in his experience and where have you been all year?

So why the trip down memory lane? With the release of the final Harry Potter book all the papers seem to be running some kind of commentary – whether it be on hackers posting the “book” on the web, musing on who dies or lamenting of the decline of children’s literature with the advent of Harry Potter because they all seem to miss point. Harry Potter inspired a generation of children to not just read but to let their imagination run free. It doesn’t matter who dies or doesn’t die because the point of the reading for pleasure is not the ending but the journey.

This Saturday I will be awaiting delivery of three copies of the last Harry Potter book. One for Last Amazon who does not share her books very well, one for Montana who mangles books so badly during the reading process and one for me which I will share with Isaiah Sender when he comes home from Nana’s. Dinner will probably find all three of us sitting around the table with our noses stuck in a book and half our dinner in our laps. And after the books are read we will do what we always do - sit around as a family discussing what was good or bad and how we would have changed it or not.