“Serving Students with Service”
When my oldest daughter was in middle school, she was required to complete a certain number of community-service hours to graduate. She could satisfy these by doing any number of things, volunteering at a pet shelter, tutoring younger children, hosting a bake sale and donating the proceeds to a cause. It’s a lovely idea—service as part of education—but why, I now wonder, was the community and the service considered separate from the classroom, separate from the academic part of her education?
Particularly when so many of the things she was learning in the classroom were, once you unpeeled a layer or two, indelibly linked to the idea of community and service. So many of the great movements of our time have been powered by community groups collectively pushing for change or resisting tyranny, be it abolitionists working to end slavery or resistance groups smuggling Jews out of Nazi-dominated Europe, both of which were things my middle schooler was learning about in her history and ELA classes. And it’s movements such as these that continue to be the engine for change, be it Greta Thunberg inspiring an international coalition of young people to push for climate or the Parkland students to prevent future school shootings.
It’s important that schools encourage service as an element of education but why not incorporate the idea of contributing and improving communities into the curriculum, showing how historical movements are not merely things that happened in the past, ancient ideas encased in marble, but a living breathing continuum that today’s young people will carry forward?
In Not Nothing, 12-year-old Alex initially volunteers at an assisted living community called Shady Glen, because of a court order—service as assignment. But after he meets a 107-year-old resident named Josey and begins to hear Josey’s wartime story of resistance—namely his love story with Olka, a woman who rose to the occasion of her life to become a hero who saved many lives—Alex begins to connect the historical to the personal, the then to the now. In doing so, he becomes inspired by the idea of rising to the occasion of his own life. If Olka could do it, could he? Could anyone? The answer, he learns, is a resounding yes.
Recognizing the power of Josey’s story, Alex and fellow volunteer Maya-Jade begin interviewing other elderly residents at Shady Glen, asking them to recount examples of when they “beat the odds. Accomplished something they didn’t think they could. When they rose to the occasion of their own lives.”
The pair learn about history through those who’ve lived it, and uncover quotidian and extraordinary acts of heroism in the people around them: There’s the understudy opera singer who wows an audience disappointed that star diva is ill, the man who dropped out of college for two years to help run his family’s farm when his father died, the woman who defied her discouraging family and went on to open a chain of successful restaurants, the young Navy seaman who rediscovered his first love his life—a fellow seaman—50 years on, when the world had opened up to allow their kind of love.
The stories are fictional but they mirror the kinds of stories I’ve heard when I’ve asked older people to share remarkable moments of their lives. They are meant to represent the wisdom that is out there, waiting to be shared. At one point, after Maya-Jade interviews her own grandmother, she asks why her grandmother never told that story before. “I have,” replies her grandmother. “You just never listened.”
What would happen if we listened, if we asked, if we brought community service into the curriculum as the two-way street service nearly always is, benefitting the giver and the recipient. Could this deepen education and release history from its marble bust allowing young people to see today’s challenges as part of a continuum and feel empowered— both individually and collectively—to meet these challenges?
Educators, perhaps more than anyone else, invite young people to rise to the challenge each and every day. As an author, I am honored and humbled to help them in this life-changing work.
Published August 27th, 2024 by Aladdin
About the Book: “The book we all need at the time we all need it.” —Katherine Applegate, Newbery Award–winning author of The One and Only Ivan
In this multigenerational middle grade novel of hope, compassion, and forgiveness from #1 New York Times bestselling author Gayle Forman that is as timely as it is timeless, a boy who has been assigned to spend his summer volunteering at a senior living facility learns unexpected lessons that change the trajectory of his life.
Alex is twelve, and he did something very, very bad. A judge sentences him to spend his summer volunteering at a retirement home where he’s bossed around by an annoying and self-important do-gooder named Maya-Jade. He hasn’t seen his mom in a year, his aunt and uncle don’t want him, and Shady Glen’s geriatric residents seem like zombies to him.
Josey is 107 and ready for his life to be over. He has evaded death many times, having survived ghettos, dragnets, and a concentration camp—all thanks to the heroism of a woman named Olka and his own ability to sew. But now he spends his days in room 206 at Shady Glen, refusing to speak and waiting (and waiting and waiting) to die. Until Alex knocks on Josey’s door…and Josey begins to tell Alex his story.
As Alex comes back again and again to hear more, an unlikely bond grows between them. Soon a new possibility opens up for Alex: Can he rise to the occasion of his life, even if it means confronting the worst thing that he’s ever done?
About the Author: Award-winning author and journalist Gayle Forman (she/her/hers) has written several bestselling novels, including those in the Just One Day series, Where She Went, and the #1 New York Times bestseller If I Stay, which has been translated into more than forty languages and was adapted into a major motion picture. Her first middle grade novel, Frankie & Bug, was a New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2021. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
Thank you, Gayle, for this call to service!
