The other day my (new) roommate asked if I had a good book that she can borrow so she can read on her way to work in the train since her iPod wasn't working. I got very excited to be able to share my book with someone and so I jumped up and ran to my room to get her something. Now I just recently moved to this place (less than a month ago) and since my last place was very small, I have not really brought all my books from my parents' house.
So, I ran up to my room and she followed me. I started looking at my little collection of books only to realize that I actually do not really have my good novels. As my roommate went through each book and asked me the title of one or the other and asked what it may be about, I suddenly looked from the outside and saw a library of a teacher, with books like "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Freire, "Grammar Troubleshoots", "Second Language Acquisition", feminism books by Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. I saw a library of an educated woman.
It really made me proud, finding out how I may be viewed by someone who may just come into my room to see the books I read. Even though I have to admit, I still feel like I am not ahead of my game and there are still a lot of books about education and literacy that I have to read that I have not yet even heard of. But I guess, it's good to find something out like this for a change, that I am not as "behind my game" as I thought.
Nice job Mahla.
Mah, I feel the same when I look at my bookshelves. I have gone from having more science fiction and golden age detective fiction, classic black and Feminist fiction, Caribbean literature and way too many self-help books to Shaughnessy, Freire, Elbow, Blanche Skurnick and Rosenblatt. I always liked to collect old grammar and style books, so I have some 1930's and 40's ESL books that are hysterical in some ways and very useful in others. The big change is that I no longer think of them as curiosities, I use the 1920 travel guides with 'useful phrases' to think of lesson plans.
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