BY MIKHAIL BAKHTIN
BERRIEN SPRINGS-In a completely unexpected twist, students from the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary swept the first annual Berrien Springs Community Library Book Report Contest, winning the Grand Prize, First, Second, and Third Prizes, as well as all four honorable mentions.
Awards were presented Monday night in the Library commons to an assorted crowd of first-through-eighth graders from Sylvester Elementary, Berrien Springs Middle School, Trinity Lutheran, and Ruth Murdoch, and graduate students from the Seminary.
Prizes were cash gradients of $150, $100, $75, and $50 from Grand to Third, and gift certificates of $25 for the honorable mentions. Winners were selected through a multi-level voting process by a panel of librarians.
Winning Grand Prize was Allison Sparrow, a third-year Seminarian, for her four page, double-spaced, Andrews-University-Formatted book report on Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, a report she wrote for her Christian Theology II class. Librarians found her summary of the book to be "exceptionally comprehensive" and her personal reaction paragraphs to be "analytical and well-expressed." Librarians used similar adjectives to describe the winners of the other prizes.
"The crop of reports submitted from the Seminary students was a cut above what we expected," said Peggy Barnes, Head Librarian at the Berrien Springs Community Library. "Even the ones that were obviously written last-minute after a quick perusal of the table of contents were miles above the rest of the competition."
The Berrien Springs Community Library initiated the Book Report Contest with the goal of giving meaning to what is otherwise a brainless, pedantic task commonly assigned by teachers who are unable to provide their students with intrinsic motivation to read the assigned books. Students were invited to submit one report covering any book from any class they had taken in the past school year. Librarians had assumed a submission demographic of grades one through eight, and so had not set an age cutoff for qualifying submissions.
“We were caught completely off guard by the number of submissions we received from students at the Seminary,” said Barnes. “We were certain that book reports were ponderous assignments confined to the lower educational levels. We weren’t expecting high school students to be writing them, let alone students at the graduate level. But since we didn’t set an age limit this year, we’re happy to accept submissions from students at any educational level. And truly, even the lousiest Seminarian honorable mention was far better versed than seventh-grader Taylor Park’s report on The Call of the Wild, which was the closest a middle-schooler got to placing in the contest.”
Despite the unexpected circumstances, Barnes and the other librarians do not begrudge the Seminarians, nor do they consider this year’s contest a waste.
“It actually accomplished exactly what we wanted it to,” said Natalie Smith, a veteran librarian. “We wanted to give students some joy, acknowledgement, and reward for what is otherwise monotonous, useless work, and, by the faces of the Seminarians, we accomplished just that. Poor Justin Atason was weeping in gladness when he found out he had won third place for his report on Russell Burrill’s Rekindling a Lost Passion. The smile on his face was worth it.”
Atason, a second-year Track 2 Seminarian who majored in Engineering and minored in Creative Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had nothing but praise for the contest and the judges.
“Oh God, I had to write six book reports for one class. I would have gone crazy if it weren’t for this contest. Seminary is like elementary school on crack. The educational level of the work goes down from your undergrad, but the amount of it goes up. So you end up running ragged on small, meaningless, busy assignments.”
Atason’s face crumbled when informed that the library planned to put age restrictions on next year’s contest. Barnes says she sympathized with Atason, but had received too many complaints from parents of elementary-school children, and from the children themselves, about the inclusion of Seminarian reports.
“Little Tommy Jones was just wailing about how not fair it was that all these grown-ups were in the contest,” said Barnes. “So we have to, unfortunately, revise our contest guidelines for the future.”
Still, Atason takes some comfort that another contest at the library is still open.
“They’re running a perfect-classroom-attendance contest for much of the same reasons,” said Atason. “I bet they don’t expect a graduate-level school to be taking attendance. They’ll probably not put an age limit on it. Well, will we have another surprise for them!”
