SSR

...which stands for "Sustained Silent Reading." Which is one of the happier memories of my grade-school days.

When I was a grade-schooler, I think up to about 6th grade, they'd do that at the end of the day - the last 15 or 20 minutes of class time, before the buses came, was Sustained Silent Reading time. The idea was - you just sat and read. You weren't expected to write a report on it, you weren't expected to get up and tell the class about it - it was just "free reading." (Which I think was one of the other names it went by.)

In the primary grades in particular - I think it was second grade - the teacher let us sit whereever or however we wanted. You could sit AT your desk, or you could sit ON your desk (we had desks that year that were kind of like little individual tables with four legs and separate chairs. There was a small shelf under the desktop where you could keep your textbooks). Or, as I most often chose, you could sit UNDER your desk. I liked the little cave that the desk formed - the privacy of it. (And the dimness, though perhaps that contributed to my needing glasses later on. I still prefer lower light levels). You could read however you wanted provided you weren't disturbing any of the other students (And you know? That's kind of my political philosophy in a lot of ways, today, figuratively speaking: read however you want as long as you don't disturb any of the other students.)

The books could be pretty much anything, also. I think some of the kids brought comic books (which normally were frowned upon) but the teacher didn't say anything. You could bring a book from home (and, coming from a book-filled house, that's what I normally did). Or you could check one out from the school library. Or you could pick one off the shelves of books the teacher had in the classroom - and the deal was, if you were reading a "classroom book," no one else could cop it for SSR until you were done (which seemed eminently fair to me, as a child - I'd have hated to start a long "chapter book" and then find that someone else grabbed it for the next day.)

"Chapter books." Heh. I hadn't thought of that term in a while.

I'm thinking of some of the things I read during that time. I think I had my mom's old copy of "The Red Fairy Book" and read from that. And I read "No Flying in the House" during SSR. And I think, in later grades, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Harriet the Spy, and some of the Oz books....and Summer of my German Soldier, and Where the Red Fern Grows, and all of the "dog" and "horse" books that girls read...

It was a nice end to the day. (Oh, maybe not all the kids liked it. Probably not all of them did.) But I liked it - it was sort of taking a breath at the end of the day, being able to spend a little time in something quiet and private (even as a child I was an introvert - in fact, I was probably more pronouncedly introverted and withdrawing as a child than I am now). It was a nice transition - in a way, the fact that I usually read before going to sleep at night is a similar type of transition. It's sort of a quietening-down, a being-still, after the activity of the day.

And with a good "chapter book," there was always something to look forward to - the next bit, especially if you were forced to stop (by the arrival of the buses and the ringing of the end-of-the-day bell) at an exciting part. (Of course, if it was a book from home - you took it home with you, and I often continued reading after I got home [the bus was far too chaotic to even try to read on.])

I'm sure schools still do this. (Or at least, I hope they do). I can picture legions of kids, sitting at, on, or under their desks, reading Harry Potter. (I would have loved the Harry Potter books as a child. I also would have loved the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. And I marvel that no one suggested I read the "Dark is Rising" sequence - the early books were published shortly before I was born, and reading it as an adult, I realize I would have loved that series as well).

Another thing I thought of, that's tangentially related - not quite 150 years ago, crowds were meeting ships bound in from Britain with the question, "Is Little Nell dead?" ("The Old Curiosity Shop" was being serialized, and I guess the latest installment had not made it to the U.S.). Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of people were wondering, "Is Harry Potter alive?" (Although they probably, or many of them at least, would have stopped any potential informant with "No, don't tell me, I want to read it myself!") The power of good stories.

(I just love the mental image of thousands upon thousands of people reading Harry Potter. I'm not a big fan - actually, haven't read beyond the second book - but it makes me happy that so many people are entranced by it.)