Take a look, it’s in a book.

A lot of people came to see the LeVar Burton of Star Trek fame this past Friday at the 21^st annual Congress on Children, but I was 100% there as a Reading Rainbow fan.  Although the show debuted on PBS in 1983 when I was 17 years old, I actually remember watching it. I was in high school, which is pretty extraordinary, even granting that we had so many fewer television choices back then.  I remember wishing he would read books for older kids. Years later, I starting having kids of my own and the show was one of the few I allowed them to watch. 

I was enthralled with Burton’s remarks at the Congress event.  I’m a big one for "live tweeting*" an event I’m really enjoying so it will come up every year in social media memories, but I couldn’t keep up with Burton.  It was just one amazing nugget of wisdom after another.  I had to resort to old school note taking, fast and furious.

Burton first did a reading of his children’s book "The Rhino Who Swallowed a Storm." It’s a lovely story featuring a mouse called Mica (after Burton’s daughter), and a Rhino who is sad because a storm took away everything he loves.  Burton said he wrote the book in part to fill a gap left for children by the death of Mr. Rogers for helping kids learn how to deal with trauma.  The story follows the rhino as he meets all kinds of friends, a spider, a kangaroo, a tortoise, a whale, who help him heal.  The gentle, sweet moral of the story is that there are people who care about you and can help you when bad things happen.  The story guides children in expressing their feelings when coping with hard times.

After the reading, the audience got to ask questions and Burton shared stories about his personal life.  As a lifelong insatiable reader, I completely related to his description of the first book he read that helped him really understand the power and magic of reading:  "Captains Courageous" by Rudyard Kipling.  After finishing it, Burton said he felt sad and depressed because he missed the world he had been so completely immersed in.  I have had this experience countless times.  After that book, he said he learned to slow down in the last chapter of a good book in order to savor it.  I too, have tried this technique. 

He described the culture in his home growing up as one that required reading, and said his mother was a "voracious" reader.  "Reading was such a part of our lives. It was as normal as breathing.  In my house you either read a book or got hit in the head with one," he said, to much audience laughter. 

He grew up in a single parent home, and his mother was a social worker.  He said she knew that in order for him to survive and thrive, and to level the playing field for him as a black boy and eventually a black man, he needed an education.  She loved him "fiercely," and established firm expectations and goals, primary of which was reading.  She was his first teacher who knew that without opportunity for language and literature, children are not going to reach their full potential.  With a mom like that, and access to books like "Captains Courageous," reading soon became something he didn’t have to TRY to do, but something he HAD To do. 

Burton went on to describe how negatively children are affected by trauma, especially if they have no one to help them through it. "I was shaped by the trauma in my life. It’s informed the person I am," he shared.  He said that inevitably we all DEAL with the trauma we experience, but the question is do we deal with it in a healthy way - for a healthy recovery?  He worries that kids today lack a safety net of caring people around them, ready to catch them when they fall. 

"We used to live in communities of multi-generational families. There was a system, a net that held us up in times of trauma. Kids today don’t have that net. They have the TV and the internet. We need to be able to catch these kids, because the success of the community depends on the success of each individual. Life should be about making the world a better place."  This statement was obviously accompanied by a lot of head nodding from the crowd of youth serving professionals in attendance at the annual Congress. 

He also talked about how storytelling helps us cope with trauma.  "Humans are natural storytellers, they are storytelling machines" he said, "with every picture we take and every post we make.  And when we are reading a book, "we make the movie in our heads." He went on to say that storytelling used to be controlled by a small group of people, but we are living in the age of the "democratization of storytelling," where anyone can tell their story now, which he seemed to think is a good thing.  "The genie is out of the bottle," he described it. 

He said it is not only reading that is so instrumental in children’s learning today.  "What we watch, read, and consume, all shapes us."  He shared how transformational it was for him as a child to see Lt. O’Hara on the bridge of The Enterprise.*  That said to him that in the future there was a place for him, for people who look like him.

He went on about how children are shaped by media influences and need to see themselves represented in mainstream media for healthy development and positive self-esteem. Since kids have so much widespread exposure to media, it is inevitably a part of their education, but what it is teaching is not always positive. 

My absolute favorite part of Burton's remarks was when he shared his 4 Storytelling Mentors: "My mother, Alex Haley, creator of Roots, Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, and Mr Rogers."** 

#LOVE

Reading Rainbow aired for 26 years educating millions of children about the joys of reading and the power of the written word.  What an extraordinary achievement for LeVar Burton and how proud he must be.  I texted my daughters, aged 31, 26 and 17 asking what they remember about the show, and Lacey, the middle kid, texted back immediately:

"Take a Look, it’s in a Book."

"But…you don’t have to take MY word for it."    

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*One of my favorite parts of his talk was when he said "We had iPads on the Enterprise." #LOL

** I did post a couple of tweets including this one that LeVar Burton LIKED!!!  :)