And after Sant Jordi, what?
BarcelonaSant Jordi has ended and we save for next year the phrases we always repeat to ourselves: that it's the most beautiful day of the year, that it should be a holiday, that if some country had this festival we would envy them, what luck to enjoy a day that is about reading and loving. Exactly, a festival where we put books at the center and where we make the best-selling rankings, which doesn't mean the most read. I wonder how many of the books bought for Sant Jordi are left on nightstands, waiting for their moment. When it's summer, when the children go to camps, when this project is over, when I'm less tired. With reading, we do a bit like with life, we keep waiting for the optimal moment without realizing that it is now and today that we should read more, go out more, or rest more. And I tell this to those of you who now have young children and are more in the pit: they will not be small again, but you will not be the age and energy you have now either.
They say “we are what we read”, but the reality is that we all read less than we want. We are very clear that we want our children to be readers, but it is very difficult to prioritize it beyond Sant Jordi. Children have to do school homework, extracurricular activities, sports, healthy meals, and social life. And us too, between the 10,000 steps, drinking two liters of water, working eight hours, or beauty routines with many products, I don't know about you, but for me, the day is not enough for so much.
Now I should give you advice on how to read more and better. And I would love to do so, I wish there was a recipe for raising readers or that each book came with a gift voucher for the time needed to read it. Can you imagine it? “Here is the book and six free hours to enjoy it!” But no. I don't have the answer to how we can manage to read more in a world where we have a thousand things every day and where we juggle to get everything done.
Reading in the age of screens
I always think that the key is not to get bogged down, that if we don't like a book, we can abandon it without any remorse and that if we have a reading slump, it's very normal. When we've had a book stuck for a while, it's time to put it aside and look for a book that is either shorter or more our style to get out of the slump. And everyone has these reading droughts, children included. Don't worry if your children read a lot in primary school and have now stopped, they will come back. And vice versa, I see an infinite number of students who don't become readers until they reach secondary school. Because of a series, because of a movie, because it's a book that everyone reads on TikTok or for whatever reason. They start and then they can't stop.
Reading on screens is quite a challenge. Reading does not imply an immediate reward like social media because to get into a good story we often have to go through a "toll" of quite a few pages. These first pages require effort and a lot of calm, like the first twenty minutes of a movie or the first chapter of a series. Once inside, we're off to the races. But it's difficult because attention levels are at an all-time low, and even we teachers find it very difficult to put on a movie due to the low concentration capacity of many students.
That's why reading offers us so much. Because stopping and disconnecting is a challenge. And because we cannot forget the well-being and happiness that comes from a book captivating us. Reading is so rewarding that it can never be plan B or be seen as the boring alternative with phrases like "turn off the television and start reading." Surely our children will also encounter tedious books, but this effort helps them grow. Because they won't eat the children's macaroni menu their whole lives, there comes a day when they have to risk trying new things, and it's a bit the same with reading. The day comes when you click with a book (and we all know which book changed us forever), and it is at that moment that we are certain that reading will be part of our lives. Forever and beyond Sant Jordi.