Nagle Library

I have had one of the many pleasures of experiencing Ms Penna as an outstanding English teacher, but never have I had the lovely experience of interviewing her. Until now...

Ms Penna, like many of us, enjoys reading for the sheer purpose of relaxation, but it wasn’t relaxation that drew her in.

Having started reading from a young age, her love of reading stemmed from the library, where all good bookworms begin. Ms Penna’s primary school librarian had a very strong dedication to her job and would decorate a stage located in their library every week. This made her borrow a lot of books in school. Moreover, she had weekly visits to her own local library and borrow there as well.

Even after being exposed to so many books, how could Ms Penna pick a favourite genre. Trick question. She can’t. Although she can name one that she doesn’t particularly like.

Sci-fi.

But when it comes down to choosing a genre to teach, she’d always go to sci-fi (because apparently it’s the easiest to teach but, for the sake of all genre appreciation we are ignoring this). As Ms Penna reads to relax, sci-fi just causes too much thinking for it to be enjoyable. Having to reinvent a world just to include some new technology is too much work and too much to remember constantly.

Though I personally love a good fantasy book, originally I felt that sci-fi and fantasy had similar complexity when it comes to reinventing a world and it’s ways. Though that may be, Ms Penna has clearly differentiated the two, unfortunately once again proving why she doesn’t enjoy reading sci-fi. Like every good book, sci-fi outlines good and evil. For more less complicated genres, good and evil have their individual characteristics but for sci-fi, authors have to invent good technology and then counter it with bad ones. Also somehow the villain always ends up getting the better piece of technology. It’s these complications that push her away from sci-fi. She uses Harry Potter, the classic fantasy series, as an example to prove that fantasy is simple while sci-fi is not so much. For the better part of her reading life Ms Penna will be keeping sci-fi in the too hard basket.

Besides thinking this, as every true English teacher believes, Ms Penna strongly encourages reading as it strengthens creative writing. It is actually obvious to differentiate a composition written by an avid reader to a non-reader. Reading improves vocabulary, which most of us already knew, but it surprised me when she said that it helps to structure thoughts. From always being exposed to strong narratives and novel structures, reading helps create muscle memory on how to structure a creative piece. Not only this, she says the readers are more open minded to different ideas, opinions and perspectives. When you are a veteran reader, and you open a new book for the first time, you have a general idea of where the book is going but then BOOM... the story unfolds, plot twists come rolling in and soon you will lose your mind. This not only happens in the fantasy world, but it can also shatter preconceived ideas of the real world. So it is practically shaping your reading and your real world thinking at the same time.

Ms Penna shares that “books have the power to open your mind”. With this, she encourages reading to everyone--students, teachers and even to her own child. Ms Penna has already allocated time every night to read to her child, a new book each time. Ranging from simple picture books like Spot to the classic tales such as the Story of Dumbo.

It turns out that Ms Penna also thoroughly enjoys the classics, not Dumbo, but the classic Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” she correctly quotes the first line of Pride and Prejudice. She continues to blow my mind by stating that she’s watched the 6-hour BBC series Pride and Prejudice. Truly a real Pride and Prejudice fan. She calls it her “pride and joy”, and after going through a series of thrillers and true crime documentaries last year she turned back to her ‘pride and joy’ for a sense of happiness.

If you are planning to read Pride and Prejudice, Ms Penna advises to keep in mind that the novel was written in the early 19th Century, so it would be a little backwards in the sense that a woman can’t live without a man. The context is different from today.

Thank you again to Ms Penna who sacrificed her time for this interview and big CONGRATULATIONS to her for being October’s STAFF READER OF THE MONTH.

-Neha Venu, Year 10