We are Loving Animals

How to Do What You Love

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.

I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

Jobs

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.

The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.

Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.

What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."

Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.

The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]

It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.

The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

Bounds

How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.

Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.

I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.

Sirens

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]

This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.

The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.

Discipline

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.

It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.

Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.

Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. [6]

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.

If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society just has to make do without. That's what happened with domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without.

So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.

Two Routes

There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.

The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.

The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.

The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to have to work for money again.

The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.

The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7] The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.

Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your lifetime) for what you want to do. If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.

Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.

In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into any number of other kinds of work.

It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like. Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous because it teaches you so little about what you like. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?

Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.

Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.







Notes

[1] Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.

[2] One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself concealing from his family how much he liked his work. When he wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to work than stay home with them.

[3] Something similar happens with suburbs. Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring.

[4] I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your work. The more people you can help, the better. But friends should be your compass.

[5] Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he's no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the difference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.

[6] This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.

[7] A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs is not very well connected.

http://schools.nycenet.edu/d75/academics/literacy/adaptedbooks/default.htm#titles

Kids at Your Library

A Room with Windows
Few people would disagree with the developmental
importance of books and reading. Today, in a world be-
set by change, the importance of reading seems greater
than ever. Children must become literate in the fullest
sense of the word. The demand is for individuals who
are rich in language, communication and technical
skillsÑall of which grow out of reading. To prepare
children, we must stimulate their curiosity and imagina-
tion, cultivate their learning potential, and encourage the
habits of lifelong learning.
For many children the place where this happensÐ
their house filled with books, their room with windowsÐ
is the local public library. With its wealth of books (more
books than any one family can afford), the public library
provides a fertile ground for the growth of young people.
If knowledge is the key then a local library constitutes a
brilliant opportunity. Public libraries offer children a
chance to mix ideas, knowledge and hope.
Fun and Goosebumps
The most dynamic area in many libraries is the
childrenÕs section. The physical space might be a base-
ment room, or it might be painted to look like a castle or
a rocket ship. Whatever the appearance, librarians work
to make the area inviting to kids and their parents. Youth
Services librarians, like Brook Jones of Alva Public
Library, strive to allow children to create their own
world. Ms. Jones uses toys, games, and an inclusive at-
titude to create a fun place where everyone is welcome.
Today, most libraries offer a wide selection of
childrenÕs books and magazines. Libraries also lend au-
dio and video cassettes of childrenÕs books. Considered
as complements to the written word, many tapes come
bundled with books so children can follow along. As
more books for children become available on tape, some
libraries find lending recorded books to be a growing
service. At the Choctaw Extension Library, circula-
tion in audio tapes has doubled this past fiscal year
because of the popularity of books on tape. The Alva
Public Library spent 20% of its childrenÕs budget on
audio books, including bestsellers and such favorites
as the Goosebumps series.
Positive Influences
More and more libraries employ a specialized
childrenÕs librarian to help administer a variety of pro-
gramsÑranging from story hours and summer reading
programs, to homework help. Historically, librarians
serving children and youth have been the vanguard of
library progress. Experts consider them the originators
of such ideas as library outreach, deposit collections of
books, and bookmobile routes for rural areas. Most im-
portantly, these dedicated individuals have proven pow-
erful stimuli in the lives of children, supplying a mix-
ture of attentiveness and encouragement. Like many li-
brarians, AlvaÕs Brook Jones enjoys working around
children and takes a genuine interest in their well-
ÒA house without books is like a
room without windows.Ó
ÑHeinrich Mann
(1871-1950), one of the foremost German
writers of the twentieth century, elder brother of
Nobel Prize winning novelist Thomas Mann.
How Oklahoma Libraries are Good for KidsÒ When you read, you want to learn more and more words.
It tells you that you can do anything you wantÑyou can
get higher goals.Ó
ÑMuskogee Ten-year Old
H e n n e s s e y Õ s V e r y S p e c i a l V o l u n t e e r .
Hispanic children had been coming to storytime
at the public library and enjoying the activities,
but they could not understand the storiesÑthat
is until twelve-year old Valeria Zubia volun-
teered to help. With assistance from her adult
sponsor Carolina Orozco, Valeria organized
and promoted a summer story hour for Hispanic
kids. For eight weeks, Valeria and Carolina read
to the children, led them in crafts, and super-
vised planned activities for as many as eighteen
boys and girls.
being while theyÕre at the library. She believesÑ
and parents seem to agreeÑthat public libraries have
a definite positive influence on a childÕs development.
Extending that positive influence to communities,
libraries commonly act as neighborhood centers serv-
ing as hosts to various clubs, civic and parent groups.
The Edmond Public Library worked this summer
with the local 4-H sponsor to offer an aerospace
camp, where kids ages 9 to 13 learned about space
travel and built model rockets. In Enid, the public
library and Sooner State Kennel Club sponsored a
seminar to launch SeptemberÕs National Dog Week
with the aim of educating children about what they
can do with and for their dogs. A Tulsa library branch
played host to the cityÕs Snake Club.
EveryoneÕs Access to the Future
Computer literacy will be an essential attribute of
the work force of the 21st century. A recent Michigan
State survey of 525 businesses, industries and govern-
mental agencies found that young persons without
computer skills need not apply for new service sector
jobs. To fill the need for computer knowledge, many
libraries have held computer classes for children and
adults. Many libraries are expanding their resources
to include services designed to develop childrenÕs key-
boarding skills and other computer familiarity. The
Anadarko Community Library currently has dedi-
cated four computers to CD-ROM educational soft-
ware, with more on the way. Christina Owen,
AnadarkoÕs director, says that computers are playing
a larger role throughout the library. The library will
soon have a total of fifteen computers with the major-
ity configured for Internet exploration. Access to the
Internet means access to the world, and librarians can
help families find friendly sites that will help children
grow.
On the Road To Reading
A classic outreach tool is the venerable bookmo-
bile. Dee Ann Ray reports that the Western Plains
Library System always has at least one bookmo-
bile on the road. The daily trips eventually cover a
4,200 square mile area, with the longest being 160
miles round-trip. In rural areas, the bookmobile is the
main library for some children. Typically, more than
50% of the stock of a bookmobile is childrenÕs books.
Some schools use bookmobiles to augment school li-
braries. Ms. Ray remembers one particularly heavy
user who recently won the Truman fellowship of the
Oklahoma State University business school. Students
use bookmobiles to research term papers, and this year
the Burns Flat school won the state History Day con-
test doing their work through bookmobiles.
As with the bookmobiles of Western Plains, pub-
lic libraries have long worked closely with local
schools. Today, libraries across the state are likely to
coordinate their shelving decisions according to class-
room project plans. Students are taught how to use a
library and encouraged to stop by often. The Tulsa
City-County Library promotes student research
with a free seminar on how to create a winning sci-ence project. Using local teachers as well as librar-
ians as speakers, topics cover all the steps in a project,
from choosing and researching a project to design and
presentation. To assist home schooled children, many
libraries offer support and continuing education op-
portunities for parents.
Brand New Volunteers
Libraries are also playing a growing role in nur-
turing kidsÕ community involvement. In some parts of
the state, libraries are encouraging young people to
volunteer as Junior Friends of the Library. Programs
generally include a reading discussion group followed
by volunteer work for their local library. The number
and broad mix of children involved excites librarians.
ItÕs no longer just bookworms and Òlibrary weenies.Ó
Muskogee has a new Book Buddies program to
teach teenagers how to read to younger children.
Teenagers will attend a seminar for certification, where
they will learn the skills and tools needed to handle
younger childrenÑeverything from patience and posi-
tive reinforcement to sounding out words. Once the
program is running, the older students will be reading
more, while earning service hour credit for their
schools. The younger children might just get a role
model.
From the Cradle On
When it comes to the youngest children, evidence
now suggests that full brain development requires be-
ing talked to, read to, and exposed to booksÑand to
adults who read. With this in mind, a number of librar-
ies have begun reading programs for pre-school chil-
dren and their caregivers. Leslie Langley, PoteauÕs
Youth Services librarian leads a lap-sit program for
children, newborn to three years old. As many as
15 pairs of children and parents meet weekly to par-
ticipate in finger play, rhymes, and reading. The five-
year old program has eager new participants as well
as parents returning with each new child in their fam-
ily. Ms. Langley recounts the response of one young
participant who saw her outside the library: ÒThe book
lady! Reading É reading!Ó
Summer Reading to Enthralled Listeners at
the Newkirk Public Library
Kids Gathering Evidence with Charlie Blair,
Director of Criminal Studies at Northern
Oklahoma CollegeFor older kids, story hours and storytime continue
to play a big role at most libraries across Oklahoma.
Participants in these reading programs range from pre-
school aged children (four and five-year olds) to the
adults who attended HenryettaÕs Not For Children
Only program. Most of these programs go beyond
reading and discussion to include activities; for ex-
ample, children at the Duncan Public Library
learned to make their own bookmarks. Storytime
often incorporates speakers on books or related themes.
Librarians have used story programs for outreach too,
as they take reading to daycare centers, as well as in-
viting their visits to the library.
Budding Writers by the Hundreds
In addition to reading, libraries are encouraging
children to write. The Public Library for Enid and
Garfield County shepherds a regular poetry group
of children in grades six through nine. Starting out
shy and reluctant, the young poets change after they
have met a few times, and enjoy the support and re-
spect of their peers. Tulsa libraries have an annual
Young PeopleÕs Writing Contest for kids, ages ten to
eighteen, writing poetry, informal essays, short sto-
ries, and one-act plays. More than 400 youths entered
this year.
ItÕs Summer! LetÕs Read!
An article about children and libraries would not
be complete without discussion of the most extensive
childrenÕs initiative at most librariesÑsummer read-
ing programs. Nearly 30-years old, the Oklahoma
Department of LibrariesÕ summer program is designed
to furnish incentives for school-aged children to read,
and to provide entertaining and educational ways for
children to pass the summer. The 1997 program, Be a
Super Snooper Sleuth at Your Library, had 186 librar-
ies throughout the state reporting participation. These
libraries held over 3,000 storytimes or special events
with 136,658 children attending. For the first time this
year, libraries in the statewide program allowed chil-
dren to set their goals, deciding for themselves how
much or how long they wanted to read. Libraries of-
fered a variety of incentives to encourage kids. Librar-
ies in the Metropolitan Library System offered tick-
ets to Oklahoma City 89ers baseball and the Okla-
homa ChildrenÕs Theatre. In the spirit of sleuthing,
PoteauÕs Buckley Public Library had a mystery
prize, with weekly clues about what was in the box
($30 worth of 50-cent pieces).
Throughout the summer, mystery themes were
evident in presentations and activities. A variety of
guests and performers were introduced to the kids.
Some librarians created mysteries for children to un-
tangle. Carnegie Public Library devised a card cata-
log puzzle, giving kids only a catalog number or a
description with which to find a book. Broken Bow
Library had children identifying animals from their
tracks. The Tahlequah Public Library hosted a free
ÒMystery DinnerÓ (provided by the Friends of the
Library) where guests could investigate an intrigue
complete with appearances by mysterious characters.
In Pawhuska and Edmond, librarians encouraged
children to write a mystery based on the Super
Snooper Sleuth posters.
Whether itÕs in a small town or a large city, there is
a lot going on for children at your public library. Warm,
inviting houses filled with books, libraries offer chil-
dren opportunities for growth. Providing encourage-
ment and support for children, public libraries offer a
wide view filled with hope.
Proud Participants of the
Newkirk Public Library
Summer Reading ProgramVisit KidÕs Connections at OK Kids for a
current listing of Internet sites designed for
kids, parents, teachers, librarians, and
the young at heart.