“Shit…” That was the exact thought that I had as I was hovering behind my mother as she was editing a paper that I had written in regards to public education and charter schools. It was while we were working on the paper together that I realized that my focus was shifting from psychology towards education. My whole life I avoided being in the education field. The reason behind this is that my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother all were powerhouses in the field of education. The shadow that they cast could blanket Earth. Who the fuck wants to go up against that? So how does this all relate to the book I picked? Well, as my mother congratulated me on my paper, she handed me the book and told me that I would find it very interesting and would help foster my ideas about psychology and education. She had come across the book as she was obtaining one of her masters degrees…. (yes, she has multiple masters degrees). As she handed the book to me I saw that there were a bunch of yellow post-it notes crinkling out of the pages of the book. As I slowly flipped through the book, I noticed notes written in pencil by my mother’s textbook style of handwriting. I felt like I was being handed some family secret that had been passed down from generation to generation. I was never much of a reader. This was truly the first book that kept my attention. It’s the first time that I read something and I felt emotions run through me as I read. I had thoughts of happiness and joy and felt the same pride that someone would feel as if they’ve accomplished a life long goal. All these thoughts and feelings are things that I never thought I could obtain through reading a book. I know… all this over was is something like a textbook for education. I’m weird. This book taught me to look at all the nuances of a person. It helped me understand how people have different ways of learning. This book, and the values that were instilled by my parents, are what make me good at my job. Not just good at my job, but good at relating to people, to helping them with any problems they might have, helping people learn, or just even taking the time to listen to them. I work at a Chicago public school as a teacher assistant. I’m continuing in psychology, but my focus is still on education. This book, my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother, (all without knowing they influenced me), made me swallow my words and say, “shit… I’m going into education.”
"I was an asshole of a child. Particularly an asshole of a pre-teen. Not in any kind of violent or angry way, more of a spoiled, comfortable middle class white girl asshole in which I stomped around the house and slammed doors when I was angry or languished on the floor of the living room dramatically whining, "I'mmmm boooooored!" I was quite unaware of how good I had it. It was during one of these floor whining sessions between being bored by television and bored by suburban Michigan that my dad, having had enough of my whining for the day, towered over me and tossed two books onto my chest. "You're bored? Read that." It appealed almost immediately to my trained-on-talking-animal-Disney-movies aesthetic but also had an air of forbidden adult mystery in the haunting imagery on the covers. I had seen and known what a swastika was when Carly Silverstein broke down crying in the hallway after someone had carved one on her locker. Even to myself I thought, "Am I old enough for this?" Reading Maus by Art Spiegelman at 13 or so was a punch in the stomach. Having only consumed a steady diet of Archie, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Misty comics I had never known the medium was capable of telling stories like this. I remember spending time with a particular panel depicting a hanging execution, the illustrated faces expressive with bulging eyes and the bodies stripped naked and shivering. It ushered me quietly into the world of adults where bad things happened to good people. I had been aware that that sort of thing was known to happen but I had never really understood it until I read Maus."
"In the age of computers, many designers have lost sight of how important typography is within a design. This book, The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, is such a great reference book. It has taught me so much about the history and proper use of typography. I keep this on my work desk and often reference it. Just the other day I looked up the proper usage of asterisks and daggers, and then spend another 10 minutes learning the history of a dagger and other ways you can use it in typography. Every time I open this book up to learn one thing, I walk away with another tidbit of typographic knowledge. This keeps me growing as a designer and continuously being aware of all the little details."
