My Blind Date With a Book

Standing in BookPeople last spring with Rachelle and Cyndi, looking over the Blind Date With a Book shelf and trying to decide which brown paper wrapped package to pick up was a hard decision–but a fun one. You would think there would be less pressure, but there was more pressure for me. I’m not good at surprises. I’m the kind who hates birthdays and shamefully unwrapped and rewrapped Christmas packages as a kid when I thought no one was looking. The suspense is just too much for me. So, standing there with no book blurb or cover art to look at was rough.

The top of one brown paper package (that wasn’t tied up with string–clear tape, the 21st-century fastener is not as musical) had the words “YA-15 and up” written in grass green marker. I thought that was a nice hint that it would be a book I could read and recommend to my students since I teach students who are mostly 15+.

Before Rachelle and I left town that day, we all opened our packages. I was not quite sure what to think of my book. Dear Fang, With Love. Even without the brown paper, I had very little evidence to suggest what I might find behind the salmon cover. The uncorrected softbound proof had nothing on the back to hint at whether on not it was a vampire or dog book. Since I was in the middle of my master’s paper, I knew it would be awhile before I would peel back that pink cover.

Neither. Once my summer cleared I found it was neither vampire nor dog related. Without giving too much away, I can say that Fang is just a character’s name. Although this book was not what I suspected it would be, I was pretty sure I was going to find it interesting just by reading the poem teasing me into chapter one:

 

Meaning

–Czeslaw Milosz

–When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

The true meaning, ready to be decoded.

What never added up will add up,

What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

–And if there is no lining to the world?

If a thrush on a bush is not a sign,

But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day

Make no sense following each other?

And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

–Even if that is so, there will remain

A word wakened by lips that perish,

A tireless messenger who runs and runs

Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,

And calls out, protests, screams.

 

After reading the book, I found the last two lines as a perfect metaphor for the protagonist–her cries for the help and attention she craves and needs from her dysfunctional, disassociated parents.

As I progressed through the book, I began to wonder whether it fit into the YA category its brown paper wrapping suggested in the store. There are several f-bombs and sexual discussions as well as underage alcohol use. I understood why the YA reference BookPeople wrote on the wrapping had the provision of 15 and up, it was not a Harry Potter-like read (although all the HP books have found their way onto many banned lists). But, where is the line between YA and adult literature? I guess that’s where well-read and informed adult guidance is important to young readers.

I may be cautious in which young reader I recommend this book, but the storyline’s tie to childhood mental illness and drug use makes it an important book for readers who are closer to the protagonist’s older teen age–as well as the adults who love and care for them.

 

Reading all that WRITING

A few of my former students have come back to tell me they’ve decided to become English teachers. I know they come back to tell me that news as a way of acknowledging the role they feel my class held in their high school career, but I’m always left wondering what to say in return.

I always give them a hug and thank them for their visit (I love visits from ghosts–former students), but I always have a sort of rolling feeling in my stomach. It could be caused by the flip-flopping my stomach does in reaction to my alternating emotions.

• “Yay! Teaching English is invigorating! So many great books to discuss! Seeing the light of understanding pop on over a struggling kid’s head is the best feeling ever!”
• “Yikes! You do know the grading load for an English teacher is HUGE! No one ever listens to the edits you make on their papers. So many papers! So much time spent grading. Are you sure? Don’t you remember how big the to-be-graded pile was on my desk at the end of the trimester?”

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. I know this is my forever career–I’ll always be a teacher. However, just like every job, there are pros and cons, and the con I struggle with the most is the grading load I create for myself every year. It is the one thing that haunts me year after year over the decade I’ve been teaching. I know it is largely caused by my inefficient planning and my reliance on teaching writing the way I’ve always taught it.

Why do I expect things to change if I don’t do anything differently?

I’m going to try something different this year. Writing Workshops.

In the reading I’ve done regarding Writing Workshops, I can see these workshops put more responsibility on students’ shoulders rather than waiting for me to point out the flaws and weaknesses in their work. At least, that’s my hope!

My hopes and goals for including Writing Workshops in this year’s curriculum:

• Better overall products (essays/papers) from my students
• Students who are more confident in their writing skills
• More open discussions about what good writing is and how to achieve it
• Less grading time
• A happier teacher–ME!
• Oh, and happier students too!

If you are experienced in using Writing Workshops give me some pointers that will help me avoid trouble and find success for my students (and myself).

 

21st Century Education—A Different Frontier

I’m kind of old for the number of years I have in education—it’s my third and final career. You’d think a teacher who is entering her eleventh year would be early to mid-thirties (I wish)! I won’t reveal how old I am (many years ago I cancelled my birthday due to a general lack of interest—I try hard to forget how old I am), but I will admit during my senior year I took the very first computer class held at MVHS. I learned how to use DOS to program a tic-tac-toe game on an Apple Computer. Quite cutting edge at the time. Before that first computer class, I learned—as did most everyone in high schools across the country—my keyboarding skills on an IBM Selectric typewriter.

Not long ago our media specialist drew a crowd to her desk when she used a similar typewriter to type a book label. Several kids asked, “what’s that?” It was funny and disheartening—how could they not know what that machine was already? How our world has changed in (what seems to me) just a few years.

In my classroom I alternate between thanking the heavens above for the addition of technology to teaching and cursing my reliance on technology because my projector is suddenly on strike—always when I’ve neglected to prepare a Plan B. I must not be alone in my split feelings since I’ve seen meme after meme expressing similar feelings. Do a Google Image search—there are lots of them!

Sitting in my computer class  XX  years ago (no those are not the Roman numerals for twenty—just placeholders), I would never have imagined that  A) I’d be a teacher B) I’d be teaching in that very building someday C) a computer would be central to 75% of my teaching day helping me do things like project information and activities onto the screen for instructional purposes and maintain my grade books or communicate with colleagues and parents.

No more erasing and rewriting parts of a lesson on the board for each class during the day, no more messy overhead projector markers, and no more writing grades down by hand in a grade book and manually calculating the scores to figure out whether or not a student is passing. I teach English partly because Math and I have personality conflicts. I’m working to become friends someday, but it hasn’t happened yet.

As a high school kid, I dreaded the day we graded assignments in class and called out our scores for everyone to hear. Maybe calling out 83 or 88 wasn’t a bad thing (I was always Queen of the B’s), but after W. Abbott just called out 95 or 99, P. Bearnson always felt dumb. I suppose some teachers might still do that even with the assistance of a computer, but the addition of a computer has made that experience something I don’t ask of my students; it’s just too public, especially for shy or struggling students—I might not have struggled, but I was very, very shy.

Although I might find it important to respect my students’ in-class privacy, the word privacy does not hold the same meaning in our technologically connected world as it did XX years ago. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Linkedin, Reddit, Youtube, Flickr, Tumblr, Yik Yak and hundreds of other social networking sites link us together. Sometimes we are linked whether we want to be or not.

The addition of social media to the culture of a school has brought a mixed bag—helps and heartaches. Class blogs and school Facebook pages can certainly be welcome tools when set-up and used correctly, but they can also be tools for rumormongers and bullies. In the education world, social media has added one more thing to our long list of Things-To-Teach—Digital Citizenship.

Even the meanest bully knows how to be pleasant to his or her prey when in the presence of a teacher or adult, but too often, the sweetest child can become a beast through the seemingly safe distance provided by a social media site. Digital smarts are not inherent in children—or adults for that matter.

This week while attending an orientation class for a yearlong, statewide training, our instructor stopped the very intense conversation we were having about our class assignments and responsibilities to discuss what it means to be a good digital citizen. A room full of professionals and still the subject had to be discussed because there had been problems in the past.

If we as adults and professionals who are experienced as citizens in both the face-to-face and digital world had to be reminded how a good citizen acts on-line, how much more important is it for us to make sure to include expectations when providing learning opportunities for our students involving social media. We must be a physical and alert presence in their educational social media world. Should we also invite parents and administrators into these social media opportunities to provide another level of transparency?

Even though we must be a presence in the educational social media worlds we ask our students to step into, the role educators play in non-educational social media world that involve our students is murky and treacherous. Is it ever appropriate to be social with students outside of school? In the face-to-face world, we might chat with a student if we ran into them at the grocery store, but would we feel comfortable going with a student to a movie or a party? Would they really be comfortable having us there?

My niece, Lou, was one of my Fantasy Lit. students a few years ago, plus the poor kid had to live with me too—nearly everywhere she went there was her Aunt P. To break up the monotony of a school week, a colleague—Lou’s English teacher—invited me to go to the movie and when I mentioned it was one my niece wanted to see she suggested I bring her too (I brought my mother too—family outing!). As we sat waiting for the movie to start, my niece took a selfie with all of us in the background. She sent it in a text to her mother and a friend back in her hometown with the tagline, “Awkward! At the movie with two of my English teachers. Weird.” I don’t think she really felt awkward at the movie with us, but the idea of being at the movie with your teachers caused her to realize how others would feel in that situation.

As the social media file on my cellphone attests, my social network site of choice is Facebook. (That might tell my age right there!) Some kids feel it is awkward to be friends on Facebook with a teacher, but others feel it is completely normal. Generally, I don’t socialize with students on-line; as a matter of fact, I deleted two student friend requests just this week. I do have a few exceptions caused by my longtime relationship with people in my community whose children I’ve known since they were small. My on-line social networking rule: If I socialize with your parents through social media and I’ve accepted you as a friend before becoming my student, I won’t delete you. So far, it hasn’t been a problem. I only had two students last year who were linked to me directly through social media (not including my niece—another one—poor girls).

Since my district does not have an official policy regarding social media, I’m willing to take small risks with on-line social media and my students (I do give both students and their parents my cell phone number and I will text about assignments—they’ve always been respectful of that trust so far), but overall I’m not comfortable being their friend. I don’t want them to have access to the goofy sleeping-on-the-bus picture my friend took of me in Europe last summer, but mostly I feel uncomfortable being their friend because I’m not their friend; I’m their teacher.

 

 

Summer Break–Read, READ, and read some more!

I’m a reader.

At least I’ve always considered myself as a reader. I was the kid who read during lunch while holding a conversation with her friends, the kid in trouble for hiding a novel inside her history book, the adult who found a job in a bookstore and thought she’d found heaven, and the adult (a very young and dumb adult) who even tried to read and drive just one time–don’t try that, dumb move.

But lately, I’ve found myself envious as my friends discuss books they’ve finished reading. I always have at least one book I’m working on (usually more than one–one in the bedroom, one on the vanity, one on my iPad, one in my purse, one on my desk), but I don’t find myself making time to read like I did before I started teaching; consequently,  it takes me forever to finish a book when it usually only took me a couple of days in the past. Between grading Intro to College English essays and senior project research papers, and preparing for novel discussions with my literature classes while working on my graduate degree coursework, I allowed myself to drift away from the thing I’ve loved since I discovered stories while sitting on my mother’s lap as a very young child.

As I finished my new degree, I looked back on my behavior as a reader and realized I had become a bad example to my students. To remedy this, I decided to set a summer reading goal. A shoot-for-the-moon reading goal. Goal: read 50 books over the summer break.

Reading 50 books over the summer. That’s a lot of books!

The kids thought I was crazy–well, they already knew I was crazy, this just gave them additional proof–how can someone read 50 books in just 84 days? I knew that if all I had to do over the summer was sit around and read, then reading 50 books in 84 days would be easy.

As every teacher knows, there’s always lots to do over a summer break, so I knew it would take a great deal of dedication to accomplish the goal! But, sometimes accomplishing the goal isn’t the only good outcome, and if the goal isn’t a bit out of reach, it isn’t an opportunity to grow.

To be a good reading mentor to my students, I decided I needed to be better acquainted with the books my students loved, so I am focusing this summer reading goal on YA literature. That way I will be able to discuss books with the kids with concrete knowledge. Each year I lose a little bit of credibility with some of my students when I have to admit I might own Harry Potter, but I hadn’t read it.

This summer was an opportunity to fix that. Including some of my students’ suggestions would not only give me some reading ideas but also show me which books the kids believe are important.

Their suggestions:    

• Louis Lamour
• The Reckoner Series by Brandon Sanderson
• Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
• The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and Tiernan O’Connor
• The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare
• Fablehaven  by Brandon Mull
• Ruined by Paula Morris
• Autobiography of Tyler (we will read it after he writes it–smart-alec senior boy!)
• The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt
• Red Rising by Pierce Brown
• Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Divided We Fall Series by Trent Reedy
• Red Queen  by Victoria Avenyard
• The Island  by Elin Hilderbrand
• Sweet Venom  by Tera Lynn Childs
• Dragonfly by Julia Golding
• The Silver Sea  by Julia Golding
• Extreme: Why Some People Thrive at the Limits  by Emma Barrett and Paul Martin
• Jim Button by Michael Ende
• I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak
• Skinny by Donna Coones
• The Cellar  by Natasha Preston
• Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
• All Sarah Dressen Books    
• Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Pierce
• Junie B. Jones  by Barbara Park and Denise Brunkus
• Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson
• The Keys to the Kingdom by Garth Nix
• Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Book of Mormon
• My Sister’s Keeper  by Jodi Picoult
• A-Z Metrics
• If I Stay  by Gayle Forman
• Where She Went  by Gayle Forman
• Artemis Fowl by Colfer    
• Mockingbird by Katherine Erskine
• The Martian  by Andy Weir
• Matilda by Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake
• The Magic in Manhattan Series by Sarah Mlynowski
• Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
• The Wedding Letters by Jason F. Wright
• The Chronicles of Narnia Series by C.S. Lewis
• Pillage by Obert Skye
• Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Enders Game by Orson Scott Card
• Enders Shadow by Orson Scott Card
• Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card

Because I’m weaving their suggestions in with my own To-Read and Need-to-Read lists, I have a long way to go before I complete all their recommendations (thankfully, I had already read some of their suggestions–Little House On the Prairie was my favorite in the third grade–I hyperlinked the suggestions I’ve already read), but I will finish their list. I’ve been surprised how much I’ve enjoyed some of the books they recommended.

I tried to read Orson Scott Card’s Seventh Son when it was new back in the late 1980s while I was working in the book department of a large department store. I hadn’t had a great deal of experience with fantasy literature (beyond fairy tales), and Card’s book didn’t hold my attention beyond the first few chapters. Truthfully, I was probably lured away by a new Kathleen Woodiwiss or Janet Dailey romance novel which was my genre of choice at that time. Last year, based on the ravings of several students, I gave another of Card’s books, Enders Game, a chance  and found it engaging, enjoyable, and easy to fall into.

When Brooklyn (one of my Intro to Literary Genres students) raved about Seventh Son and added it to my book suggestions, I decided it was time to give Card’s book another try.

I’m glad I tried again, but I didn’t remember Seventh Son being a historical fantasy novel. Since I preferred historical romance novels over all others during the late 1980s, it is a bit surprising that I didn’t stick with Card’s book and make the small jump from historical romance to historical fantasy. I guess I wasn’t able to put aside believability and tie into the interesting elements of the story. There are many interesting things in this book.

Card has set Seventh Son in Colonial America and includes cameos from historical figures like Benjamin Franklin. It is based around the large Maker family and specifically the life of Alvin Maker Jr., the seventh son of a seventh son. The Maker family members all have strong religious feelings but are also influenced by things we now refer to as old wives tales or magic. The hijinx of Alvin and the battle between good and evil made this book one I’m glad I read. I will recommend this book to kids who like books with magic as part of a storyline. Kids who enjoyed Harry Potter in grade school might find Seventh Son an intriguing read in high school.  

Books can be a little bit like vegetables are to small children–just not palatable at the time. Books we hated as children or young adults might just hit the spot if we give them a second try once we have had a chance to broadened our reading palate. Often, a vegetable I hated as a child will cross my path as an adult, and I’ve learned to give them a try–usually, I really like them. Apparently, this is true of books too. 

Just like Seventh Son, I tried to read Harry Potter when it was new and just couldn’t get through it–I blamed age and adulthood. It crossed my path again, I tried it and just like Card’s book, I liked it–a lot! I hope this fact will increase my credibility with my students next year. 

Now that I’ve finally read Harry Potter and Seventh Son, and unexpectedly enjoyed both, what other books of magic should I add to my increasingly lengthy To-Read list?  

 

P.S. I’ve only read 30 of my 50 books. Yikes! Twenty more books in just three weeks. Maybe I’d better see which of their suggestions are the shortest (wait–now I’m thinking like my students, oh dear).