Sharon M. Draper

Sharon M. Draper: You can't be preachy. I just put it out there, if you learn something, oh, good. I got that out of it. Wonderful. You can't say, well, this is what you need to learn from this.

You put it out there, and sometimes if you ask a group of students, well, what did you get from this story? Well, I got this and I got this. They they get completely different messages. And so I think that's what reading is. As you read, you get a personal interpretation of the story and it may not be the same as somebody else.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: The beauty of a great story is that it doesn't tell you what to think. It gives the reader space to feel, to question, and to see themselves inside.

Sharon M. Draper: That's the whole idea of a good teacher. There should be different interpretations. And sometimes student will come up with something that I never thought of. So sometimes the students become the teacher. I've learned a lot from my kids.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Sharon M. Draper knows stories and she knows kids. She was the kid who maxed out her library card every Saturday, the teacher who read aloud to even the most skeptical students, and the writer whose best selling novel, Out of My Mind, was adapted into a film for Disney plus and remains requisite reading for many middle schoolers year after year. A two time Coretta Scott King award winner, Sharon is the author of Stella by Starlight, Blended, Tears of a Tiger, and many more. In this episode, Sharon digs into what it means to trust readers, how her students helped guide her first book, and how she's navigated seeing her stories be banned in classrooms.

Plus, we talk about church music, spiked lemonade, and how she ended up with a special library card that gave her access to the adult section of the library. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and this is the reading culture, a show where we speak with diverse authors about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive deep into their personal experiences and inspirations. This show is made possible by Beanstack, the leading solution for motivating students to read more. Learn more at beanstack.com, and make sure to check us out on Instagram at the reading culture pod and subscribe to our newsletter for bonus content at the readingculturepod.com forward slash newsletter alright on to the show Hey, listeners.

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Let's get started at the beginning. You grew up in Cleveland. Is that right?

Sharon M. Draper: I grew up in Cleveland. It was my mom and my dad and my brother and my sister. I'm the oldest. And I kind of controlled what happened. So if I was reading, everybody was reading.

If I was playing the piano, everybody was playing the piano. So, you know, I was the the natural leader of the family while mom and dad were at work or whatever. But from the time I was, I don't know, maybe three years old, we lived in walking distance in the library. And my mother would walk me every single Saturday down to the library. And we would check out 10 books because that was the max that you could take.

And I would check out 10 books and I would read them all. And then the next Saturday, we would go back and I'd get 10 more. So after a while, everybody at the library knew me. You know, they knew me. They knew the cat and the dog.

And so reading just became the thing that I did. You know? That was the thing that I was good at and the thing I enjoyed. So I read everything on the elementary side of the library, and then I started sneaking to the grown up side of the library when they weren't checking. But they knew me so well, they didn't really care.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I heard you got a special library card?

Sharon M. Draper: I did. I got permission to do basically what I wanted to. They checked me. They knew me. They knew I was a reader.

I mean, there's those kids that are just the reader kids and ugh, Karen, her go. So I read everything. I read some things that I probably shouldn't have read at that age. I learned a lot. I said, oh, really?

Is that how that works?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Look how you turned out for all those people out there that are

Sharon M. Draper: trying to ban these books that are about nothing. Yeah. But books were a huge basis of my childhood. Huge.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. I know. It definitely sounds like that was, like, the cornerstone of your childhood, really. Right? And what about spirituality?

Was your family religious?

Sharon M. Draper: We went to church every Sunday and Wednesday night bible class too sometimes. Yeah. But yeah. So the church was very, very important and very influential. Mhmm.

And there's a lot of music in church and song and stories. And so the whole idea of stories and songs and music that you learn from church, you can apply. You know, it's the same kind of thing. You know, church is the same thing except the story is a song. Mhmm.

You know, with a little snippets of wisdom in between, but it's the songs that I like about church. I

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: love that. Little pieces of wisdom woven into the songs. Were your family were they storytellers, or did a lot of the story that you are familiar with come from books? Or did you grow up in a tradition of telling stories and that sort of experience?

Sharon M. Draper: The storytelling came from my grandmother who lived in North Carolina. And we would visit every summer, and that was where the stories were good. The people would come out at night and they'd all get their lemonade, which I'm sure was spiked with something. And later it got, the better those stories got. That's right.

And I would sit in the corner and hope nobody would send me to bed because they would just tell stories. That was what they did. They would sit in the evening. You know, there was no Walmart to go to. There was, you know, it was just neighborhood and friends.

And so I learned so much just by listening to the old people tell these stories. I wasn't writing them down. I wasn't taking notes. I wasn't planning on being a writer. I was swallowing all of that, the music of those words.

I was swallowing it. And so that became a real strong part of what I did. And then in one of the books, Stella by Starlight, I included that southern family and the girl who wanted to read and the girl who was having difficulty in school and the racial tensions and things like that. So a lot of Stella by Starlight was inspired by my grandmother's house.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, interesting. In terms of, like, some of the story itself or in terms of just, the environment that we're in there?

Sharon M. Draper: The environment. Yeah. And it was in North Carolina and it was extremely racist and divided. But as a kid, I didn't know. Mhmm.

You know, I just knew there were places that my mother says, no, you can't go there and quiet, you know. And I remember when it was the thing because of the movement of people from the South to the North, There was a huge amount of people in the North, but they all had relatives in the South. So they would all go back and they would exchange information about go straight through this town, do not stop. Make sure you get through this town before dark. Because there were cities that you could not be in if you were African American, and you could not be in these cities after dark.

There were sundown cities.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Mhmm.

Sharon M. Draper: And I remember my father sitting with the people who had gone a few weeks before saying, okay. This is safe. This is safe. This is not safe. And I remember we would drive all night without stopping.

There was no such thing as stopping at McDonald's. There were no McDonald's. There were no places that we could stop and eat. No place. Not any.

So my mother would pack food and we would eat the food that she packed in the car. Then when we got there, my grandmother would have food for us to eat. It was a whole different world and I wasn't aware of it because I was a child.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: What was your world like in that way in Ohio? Did you grow up in like a predominantly black neighborhood? Was your world mostly black there too?

Sharon M. Draper: Sure was great. Integrated neighborhood, integrated school. We didn't really have a lot of racial tension in schools. Mhmm. You kind of knew without saying what was safe and what wasn't and who to hang with and who not to hang with.

Some things don't change. Yeah. Just like the teenagers. Right. So we just figured things out as we needed to.

I was learning things that I did not know I was being taught. I was just observant and watching everything. But one of the most exciting things was sitting around on my grandmother's porch late at night listening to the old people tell stories. And they told stories from way back. Know, they were the stories, folk tales that are now told.

The story of Anansi and the story of the animals and how the animals spoke to each other and all of those stories. I learned from my grandmother sitting on the porch listening to the old people tell the stories. And that's something that we've lost. I think we should sit around and tell the stories to our grandchildren again. They need to hear the stories of the old times and the old people and the people way before before them and way before me.

Hi, teach. Look at her. Is she a teacher? Who is she? Is this three or four?

Are you mister Beringer? Are you the teacher? You too young. Hey. She's cute.

Hey, teach. Can I be in your class? Good afternoon, miss Byrne. My name is on the blackboard. Oh, no.

A dame for homework. You want I should slug him? Is this homeroom period?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yes, listeners. That was a book, an unconventional one read by missus Draper that is called up the down staircase by Bell Kaufman, first published in 1965 and quickly became a cult classic among teachers. Told through memos, notes, and fragments of school life, it captures the messy, funny, sometimes heartbreaking reality of a first year teacher trying to make sense of it all.

Sharon M. Draper: So it's just comments from the kids, comments from the teachers. It's a glorious little book. It's old. It's dated. You know, just the regular confusion and that comes in with the kids and how this young teacher figures her way out through the red tape of being a teacher.

She's not sure how to be a teacher. The kids certainly are not sure how to be students, and so how she manages to do that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay.

Sharon M. Draper: But this was pivotal as I was I knew I was gonna be a teacher, but this helped, you know, because it was everything about what it was like to be a classroom teacher, how hard it was, how frustrating, and how rewarding. And it was very different then, but it's still the same. You know, the first day of school is still a zoo. Yeah. It's still confusing even with computers and this is where you will sit and, you know, it's still a zoo and you still have a room full of children who don't know each other coming together.

Some of them do know each other and they don't like each other or they do like each other, which is even worse. You have to find seats for them. You have to figure out what their personalities are. You have to find their strengths and their weaknesses, and they close the door and say, good luck. They're yours.

She

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: may not have written the book, but when those classroom doors closed, missus Draper turned out to be, well, the best teacher, literally. In 1997, after more than two decades as an English teacher, she was called to the East Room of the White House where president Clinton awarded her the national teacher of the year. Yeah. That's on her resume too. Part of the secret to her success was her unflagging belief that any student could be drawn in if you could find them the right kind of stories.

Sharon M. Draper: You'd be surprised. Even kids who are very good readers or kids who are supposedly very sophisticated will be quiet if you read to them. I was read to a lot as a child, so I realized the importance of the voice that went along with the words. So a lot of times, I would just read to them, and I would say, okay. We're gonna read chapter three together.

And I would read it out loud to them, and I might ask them a couple of questions. Okay. You guys read chapter four, and then tomorrow, I'll read chapter five. So, you know, it was a shared experience. But I never had any trouble teaching.

Never had any trouble teaching. I loved my job. I loved reading. I loved writing. I loved teaching kids how to read and how to write.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Despite that love for reading, missus Draper and her students often found themselves stymied by the curriculum's overwhelming emphasis on dead male British authors. And so long before there was an official movement called We Need Diverse Books, missus Draper made it her business to find stories for her students that they could actually relate to.

Sharon M. Draper: I came up at the time when you read the required text.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Mhmm. For example?

Sharon M. Draper: You read Robinson Crusoe. You read Moby Dick. You read the approved canon of books. Most of which were very old and very boring. And you're reading stories about ancient England and, you know, kids are saying, well, what's a jitney?

You know? Vocabularies. Right. A lot of the stuff that's on the required reading, I don't necessarily agree with because it was a very small group of people says, yes. They all have to read this.

There's so many other wonderful books that were left off of their required list. Right. And so I did a lot of I had a library in my classroom and said, you don't have to read all that. Read this. Read this.

Here. Try this. Try this. Try this. And I didn't give them anything that was too mature for them, but there's so much more available than the literature of ancient England.

It was it was boring. It really was. I would spice it up with different books. I would bring books in. I would go to the library and bring books in.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: What kind of books did you bring in?

Sharon M. Draper: Anything. Anything that was interesting, that was lively. Henry Huggins, you know. The books that were about kids, books that were about real people. What was the name of that book about the girl that lived on the mountain?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, Heidi?

Sharon M. Draper: Yeah. Heidi. Those kinds of stories. Anything that would appeal to them because nothing at that time was contemporary. Nothing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Sharon M. Draper: There was no such thing as writing a book about what's happening today in the world. You read a from a long time ago, and you shut up and said you liked it because it was all that was there.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Did you feel like there was also, like, a prescriptive way to interpret a book? Like, this is the correct interpretation of a text as well?

Sharon M. Draper: In some cases, in some schools, schools, especially the parochial schools, you know, were very strict on the interpretation of this is what this means and very strict on what they would allow the students to read. Mhmm. But you tell a student that a book is banned, oh my goodness. I had a book that was banned in, I don't know, some state, Michigan, some I don't know. It was a long time ago, but it was banned.

And the kids all promptly went out and bought it because it was banned. It's like, oh, please ban something else because they want what you say they can't have.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: So true. Kids are just like us. They want what they can't have. Right? You know, one of my former guests on this show, Mac Barnett, he talked a lot about how before a book ever gets into a child's hands, it has to go through so many adult gatekeepers, you know, and it can get really diluted.

But you, you had this direct connection with kids for a really long time as a teacher, and I wonder how that informed your writing. Like, did it inform what you wrote about or how you

Sharon M. Draper: wrote it? I don't think I thought about it. I really don't. It was like I knew I had to tell a story. I knew I had to write a story.

Mhmm. I've read a million books. I can write one. I know I can do this. So when I wrote the first book, my students, I let them read passages from it.

And, okay. He was, no. We'd never say that in a locker room. I said, well, I can't write what you would say in a locker room. I still hear from those kids from time to time who are now grandparents.

You know? Yeah. But I still hear from them and say, you remember when we sent that book in? And so it was like a group effort and I said, okay. So they were a % behind me when I sent the first manuscript in.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That first manuscript may have had Sharon Draper's name on the cover, but it was shaped by students who knew exactly what rang true and what didn't. That same trust carried into Sharon's teaching, where she made sure every reader had room to interpret the material in their own way and often found they had something to teach her in return.

Sharon M. Draper: I think kids are independent enough to have opinions on what they like and what they don't like. Mhmm. And I would keep a huge library of books in my classroom, you know, and say, if you don't like this, go read that. You don't wanna read that? That's fine.

You know, use this one. Use that one. That's harder. That's more challenging. I had one student who was just brilliant.

I mean, she was the smartest child I have ever taught in my life. She was just plain brilliant. It was a challenge to find books for her to read that she hadn't already read.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, like you. You know,

Sharon M. Draper: it was fun giving her books and giving her challenges. And each child required a different kind of book or a different kind of challenge, which is why I kept books in the classroom. I live in Florida and books have been removed from classrooms, so we won't go there. I went to a school in Florida and the room was empty and echoey. And I said, what is this room?

Oh, it used to be the library. Saddest thing I've ever heard in my life. They've taken all the books out. Really? Yeah.

I have some middle school in Florida.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Wow. Yes. Oh, God. That's so dystopian. Really?

Yes. But you were still invited to speak there?

Sharon M. Draper: Well, I was given parameters Mhmm. Of what I could and could not cover. But I still have four or five of my books on the Florida banned books list. The people who do that are people who were not the a students in school.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Say that again.

Sharon M. Draper: You know, who said, okay. We're gonna ban all these books. And it hurts me to my very soul, the fact that there are human beings who are saying we are limiting the number of books that children can read.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. I know. It's heartbreaking, really, to think about kids having that access taken away. Because as you've said, the way students, like, pull different meanings from the same story, I mean, that's the whole point. Right?

That's where the learning happens.

Sharon M. Draper: Yeah. And they learn a little something. You can't be preachy. They'll turn you off. Commit it if you're preachy.

I just put it out there, and if you learn something, oh, good. You got that out of it? Wonderful. You can't say, well, this is what you need to learn from this. You put it out there.

And sometimes if you ask a group of students, well, what did you get from this story? Well, I got this and I got this. They get completely different messages. And so I think that's what reading is. As you read, you get a personal interpretation of the story and it may not be the same as somebody else.

And that's okay when they're interpreting your stories differently too even than you would?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: It should be. In your experience, did you see that that was acceptable having different interpretations of the same text?

Sharon M. Draper: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole idea of a good teacher. There should be different interpretations. Right.

And sometimes a student will come up with something that I never thought of. Like, you know, that character reminded me of a bird. You know what? You're right. And I never even thought about that.

And the next time I teach it, I say, you know, this character could probably be a bird. I got that from a student. So sometimes the the students become the teachers. I've learned a lot from my kids. That is true.

I still communicate with lots of them. They still keep in touch. I remember when I first got on Facebook, they all said, hey. She finally joined the Facebook. And so I still hear from them from time to time.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: No. I love that. Your students were always shaping how you saw a character and then that relationship is, like, continuing today. Do you feel like that carries over into your writing too still? Like, when you're working on a book now, are you thinking about a lot about your readers or even, like, specific students, or is it more about the story that you feel pulled to tell?

Sharon M. Draper: Well, I think the teacher in me is always got the audience in the back of my mind. But my first job is to make sure that the book is readable, funny, exciting, just a little bit challenging, you know, because they won't read it if it's too hard. And it has to have something in it so that they can hey, you gotta read this book. This is pretty good, you know. And that kind of thing where you get a grudging respect from the students.

And over the years, I have kind of figured out what it is that they will read. And they wanna read about kids their own age. They wanna read about kids who have challenges, kids who have mastered challenges, and you have to know your audience. And I kind of know who my audience is and who my kids are, who's my reader kids, And they're right there for me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: What is it in your mind about, like, certain of your books that have had this, like, huge success? What is it that you

Sharon M. Draper: think is, like, just so captivating about them for students? When I'm writing a story, I don't think about where it's gonna end up. I really don't. Mhmm. You know, I can't.

Yeah. Because the world is so crazy now. It's hard to there's no way I can say, well, this is where I want this to land and this is the purpose or this way because it might end up going completely in a different direction. But I know young people. And even though today's young people are all on their computers and their laptops and their little finger things and they know how to do things that I don't know how to do.

You know, my computer goes down, my grandson comes and fixes it for me. That's far ahead that we But they're still wondering about who they are, who they're gonna be, what am I gonna do? I'm getting ready to grow up. What am I gonna do with my life? And they need something to help them make those decisions.

Like, when I do Zooms with kids, I'll tell them, how many of you like to cook? Oh, yeah. Good. Well, come to my house because I can't cook. They say, you can't cook.

I said, no. I can write, but I can't cook. So find that you're good at. If you're good at cooking, then look for a career in cooking. You're good in swimming, look for a career in swimming.

I can't swim.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Mhmm.

Sharon M. Draper: If I jumped in the pool, I would die and you would have to save me. So learn to be a good swimmer so you can save me so I don't die. So I tell them, we all have our gifts. Find your gift and then focus on that. Everybody has a gift.

So you figure out what your gift is.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: When we asked missus Draper to come up with a reading challenge, she was reluctant to give us a list of must reads. Maybe that's not surprising though given her past frustrations with inflexible required reading lists. In true teacher fashion, she flipped the assignment. What she gave us was basically a lesson plan.

Sharon M. Draper: The project that I would give for teachers is to find something that fits their classroom, that fits their students because every classroom is different, every student's needs are different. The background that the students have, the kids who live in challenged neighborhoods and have difficult family lives, the teachers have to know, how do I deal with this child who says, well, the reason I was late is my daddy got taken to jail this morning. There's you gotta be able to cope with that and deal with and that's a common thing that kids might say, and they just throw it off. But that child is traumatized, and so what do you do to reach out to that child? Ideally, you have a story or something that you can read to them or they can read.

So here's a book about a kid who had to do this. Oh, really? You know, that kind of thing. But there's no one answer because every day is different.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You can find Sharon's lesson plan and all of our past author reading challenges at the readingculturepod.com. And this week's Beanstack featured librarian is William Shaller, the middle school librarian at Hoffman Middle School in Houston, Texas for the past seven years. William shares his secret sauce for getting kids excited about reading.

William Schaller: So when I look at the middle school students at my school, they eat with their eyes first. So they're not even gonna come in to the library. So I really wanted to make something eye engaging and visually appealing and just to completely switch up the space. When I interviewed for the position, they said, what are you gonna do to make the library the heart of the school and energetic? And that got me thinking, like, the first thing it needs is a total, like, makeover.

It's ugly. The carpet stinks. The books are smelly. We just need to weed everything and get it up to par. So the secret sauce for me was getting the kids in the library and how am I gonna do that by just almost tricking them, but it's not really tricking them into reading.

It's tricking them to come into the library so then that way they can get a book. So we completely painted all the walls. We got the old books out. We did front facing shelving, and one of the biggest highlights is the LEGO wall. So they're building in the makerspace area, but then as they're building, they're looking at the books on the shelf.

They're realizing, oh, this looks good. There's Medusa on this cover. Oh, I like this one. This one has romance, and I I'm becoming a teenager, and I I wanna read about someone's love story. So by getting them in here and doing activities and, like, Lorcana tournaments or Lego activities or just book clubs during lunch, getting them here is the hardest part.

Then once they're here, I can talk to them. I can interact. They like me. I like them, and we can get them a book. And we can ask the questions, and building that trust is the secret sauce.

Getting them in, building the trust, and then getting them that book is the easy part once they're here.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: This has been the reading culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Sharon m Draper. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and currently, I'm reading a court of thorns and roses by Sarah j Maas and coven by Soman Shanani. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five star review. It just takes a second, and it really helps. This episode was produced by Mel Webb and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan.

To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, check out all of our resources at Beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at the readingculturepod.com forward slash newsletter for special offers and bonus content. Thanks for listening, and keep reading.