One School, Many Books

My students have all headed off for Spring Break--a welcome break for all involved! I'm relieved to be on break (goal for break: get my sleep back in functioning condition), but also excited about what will be happening when students come back from break.

We started a program I'm calling "One School, Many Books" this year. I'd long been interested in doing a One School One Book program, but had no idea what book I would choose for such a program. As a result of working in a very small school with students with very diverse reading interests, all of my top ten checkouts have checkout totals in the single digits. What book could I possibly choose? Especially since much of my population is comprised of VERY reluctant readers. If the book doesn't appeal to them, there's no way they're going to even give it a shot.

But then I started thinking about what could motivate students to read a book over Spring Break. And I realized, as with so many other things, it's about making connections between people. A student who might not be interested in reading a book (or only have a passing interest in reading a book) might be more interested if reading that book was tied to a book club being hosted by one of their favorite teachers.

We have an amazing faculty here, and several of them stepped up right away to host book clubs. Each of them have different interests, and connect with different kids, and so picked out very different books. Which I love. We've got groups reading The Hunger Games, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Lola and the Boy Next Door, Gentlemen and Trapped.

Once I announced the book clubs, students would come in looking for "the book that Ms. _______ is reading." Didn't matter the book, they wanted to spend time with the teacher. They knew the teacher, liked the teacher, assumed

We're building on relationships that already exist in order to foster a love of reading. And it's really cool to watch it happening.

As part of this, we're hosting a visit from Michael Northrop (author of Gentlemen and Trapped) in April. Handing out those books to kids has been particularly cool. "This is mine to keep? Do you think he'll sign it for me? Awesome!"

In honor of that visit--and in the interest of generating more interest in those books, I made a couple book trailers.





I love making book trailers, as it pushes me to think in ways I don't usually think. "Thinking in pictures" is generally a weakness for me, but many of my students connect really well with images, so it's a skill I work on a lot--and making book trailers is a really fun way to develop that skill set. I use flickrCCBlueMountains for images, and have recently added PhotoPin to my "go to" sites for CC images. I use Jamendo for music, and I don't know what I'd do without it.

Overall we have about 30 (out of 180) kids involved in the book clubs in some way. I'm looking forward to the book club discussions that will be happening after break!

This not about that WSJ article

I had been planning a post about YA lit and why I read it and what I love about it, but before I could Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote that ridiculous article and I felt like if I was going to write about YA I had to respond to what she said--but I really, honestly don’t feel like it, for many reasons. One is that it’s incredibly infuriating and even thinking about causes a spike in my blood pressure. But the more time went on people responded to her article, saying exactly the things I wanted to say, but saying them far more eloquently.

• Read Barry Lyga’s response if you want something viscerally satisfying: On the WSJ, YA, and Art
• Read Gayle Forman on Wall Street Depravity if you want to know how such ridiculous “journalism” ends up in print.
• And read Libba Bray’s tweets, because she says everything that needs to be said and gives a shout out to librarians, which is one of many reasons to love her.
• For an excellent dissection of the original article--along with links to many other responses not included here--read Liz Burns There’s Dark Things in Them There Books.
• Read Maureen Johnson for a wonderful Italian food analogy (and because I sat at the table next to her in an Italian restaurant Thursday night, and we both totally played it cool)
• And if you want to feel like you’ve been punched in the gut in the best way possible, read Sherman Alexie on Why the Best Kid’s Books are Written in Blood. Actually, go read that one no matter what. Read that instead of this if you must.

But never mind all that for now.

Our graduation was about two weeks ago. This is my fourth year here, so this was the first group of four-year seniors I worked with. It was amazing and emotional in the way that all graduations are, but somehow more so. Knowing that we’d all started at this school together made me feel a special connection to these kids. And now we were sending them off.

It had me thinking a lot about potential (as in “these kids have so much potential’) and why I love working with teenagers so much--and also why I love reading YA lit. It is this really fascinating and frustrating time of life when ANYTHING--good or bad--seems possible, even likely. What I love about YA lit is what I love about working with young adults--there is, no matter how bleak, a sense of potential.

I don’t want to paint adult literature with a broad brush, as I am by no means an expert (I know, clearly, I shouldn’t let that stop me) but one of the reasons I often end up frustrated when reading a lot of adult literature (particularly realistic fiction) is that everyone brings so much. . . baggage to the story. There is a lot of past that needs to be sifted through, and the focus is often on that past and how it got them there. And even when characters in YA bring a heavy past with them to a story, they are more often looking to the future than the past. And I like that. A lot.

There are always more possibilities than past.

I remember a student I had my second year teaching. His girlfriend was his soul mate and the love of his life. As was the girlfriend after her. And the one after her. Yes, it was kind of ridiculous, but there was also something kind of. . . charming about it.

There’s something kind of awesome about the ability to believe with passion and intensity something that is the exact opposite of what you believed the day before. And that happens with love interests and political beliefs and sartorial choices, often with the same level of intensity.

The best teachers and YA librarians and YA authors I know have managed to hang on to a little bit of that mutability. I don’t know if it’s that people with that quality are drawn to working with teenagers, or if working with teenagers keeps whatever that is alive in you.

Meghan Cox Gurdon has made up her mind. No counter-argument (no matter how well-crafted or persuasive) will convince her otherwise at this point. And part of that is because she feels under attack (though I have a hard time believing she didn’t know she was picking a fight) and we all dig in our heels when we feel we’re under attack. And part of it is because the older we get the harder time we have shifting our perspective.

There is the old line about the older we get the more we realize we don’t know, but I think the counterweight to that is that the older we get the more absolutely certain we get that we are 100% correct about the little we do think we know.

And that’s the thing with adults. Most of the time, what you see is what you get. By the time we’re adults, we’ve pretty much made up our minds about who we are and how we act. Habits are ingrained. Sure, they can change, and life happens and we adjust and adapt, but a lot of who we are is set in stone.

Not so much with teenagers. Things are still shifting and forming and developing. Personalities are still being fine-tuned. So much about your life is still up in the air as a teenager; you can try on different personalities and world views with a lot more ease.

Literature can offer a way to try and on and experience different lives without having to take those paths yourself. You can see how other people live, and develop a sense of empathy. Sometimes we look to books to mirror our experiences and sometimes we look to books to experience another life completely.

Here’s the thing that annoyed me about that article that I haven’t seen discussed much--I give those books that Cox Gurdon derided as containing “hideously distorted portrayals of what life is” to students ALL THE TIME. Am I corrupting these students? Ruining their lives? When a student comes in looking for the latest Ellen Hopkins book am I supposed to turn them away and tell them I don’t trust them enough to know what they’re interested in reading? Am I supposed to say, “Sorry, I don’t trust you with your own development”?

I’ve recommended light books, dark books, and everything in between. What I recommend depends on the student and what they're looking for right at that moment. Sometimes my recommendation isn’t quite right, and a student comes back and we find something different. I’m not “bulldozing” anyone. Not to get all Ranganathan on you, but every book his reader, and every reader his book.

Adolescence is, mostly, about deciding who and what you want to be post-adolescence. You are full of potential, but still deciding what direction it will take you. And a lot of the time, reading is a lot safer way to try on those different lives than actually living them. Yes, teens need guidance and help and support--in everything, not just reading selections--but if we’re trusting them to become independent adults, can’t we trust them enough to let them chose what they want--and need--to read along the way?

How (not) to make a book recommendation

I have a few other blog posts I've been thinking about, but this whole BitchMedia/100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader snafu has gotten my hackles up, and nothing inspires writing like raised hackles.

I had seen a couple comments about the 100 Books for the Feminist Reader, but hadn't had a chance to check it out yet. I generally enjoy lists like that, however--I use them in deciding what the read or order for myself and my library.

And then Bitch Media got a few complaints about a few books and pulled three books from the list (power of your convictions FTL!) and then everything exploded. There are some really thoughtful and eloquent comments on the article itself (including several by YA authors asking to be removed from the list), which I was reading last night until the mansplainer troll showed up, and I had to stop because I value my health.

I won't get into how aggravating and lame Bitch Media's waffling on this issue has been, as that's already been said much better here and here. If you want a more thorough overview, or if you feel your blood pressure is too low, go read those posts.

I had been assuming that the list had been made by someone who had actually read the books she was recommending, which ended up being a less than accurate assumption. Which, in my book, is a cardinal sin of book recommendation. You can not recommend something you haven't read. It's like saying, "Those shoes are really comfortable, I saw them in a magazine once" or "That restaurant's excellent, I've seen the sign they have."

The only book list I create in any official capacity is my Summer Reading list. And I AGONIZE over it. Seriously, I lose sleep. I'll usually start with an initial pool of a hundred books and eventually winnow it down to twenty, carefully trying to balance the list. And I'm never sure I've gotten it just right. So I tweak and tweak and eventually have to set a final list because having your Summer Reading list come out in September is ridiculous. This is for an audience of about 180 students.

I take book recommendations seriously. I haven't read every book in my library (though some students seem to think either I have or I should), so when it comes to recommending books to students I rely on my catalog and reviews I've read in order to fill in the gaps. If I can recommend something I've read, great. But when I put a book in a student's hands that I haven't read, I say "I haven't read this, but this is what I've heard about it." Because recommendations carry weight, and they are about trust. A student asking me for a book recommendation is trusting me to help them with a decision. And yes, one book choice is a small decision, but relationships--with me, with reading, with libraries and librarians--are built on decisions like that.

That's how seriously I take recommending one book to one student. It's a fairly limited audience. I'm fairly certain Bitch Media has a larger audience than that, yet they don't seem to take that responsibility very seriously.

Bitch Media--and anyone else interested in making a list of recommended books, for that matter--if you don't have the time or interest in taking this responsibility seriously, find someone who will. There are lots of us out here who do this kind of thing professionally, and we'd be happy to help.

Why We Read

There has recently been much discussion about Grant Wiggins’ proposal to ban fiction, which has, of course, got me thinking a lot about reading and fiction.

I had read (quickly) the original post by Grant Wiggins about banning fiction and had intended to return to it and read it more thoroughly but couldn’t find it again. Which, it turns out, is because Wiggins didn’t really mean it. (Note to aspiring satire writers: satire is a good way to make a point, but it’s not always as easy as The Onion makes it look)

His attempted point about needing to revisit the materials we use in the classroom is a good one, and one that Nicholas Provenzano makes far better than Wiggins did, and since I’d just be repeating everything he said, I’ll just tell you to go and read what he wrote.

But the other point--the one about students needing to be prepared for the mostly non-fiction reading they’ll be doing in the future--is the one that won’t stop rattling around my brain.

Reading and thinking about this issue I was reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague at the beginning of the year. She was returning Gayle Forman's amazing If I Stay, which she had checked out and read because it was on my summer reading list. I was excited to talk to someone new about what they'd thought of the book, so I asked her what she thought of the book. Her response (not completely verbatim):

"It was okay. The vocabulary wasn't very sophisticated."

I was floored. I just stared at her blankly for a moment and then said, "You and I read books for very different reasons."

'Cause seriously. I was so completely absorbed by If I Stay that it didn't even occur to me to pay attention to the vocabulary level. I was there for the story. I was so caught up in Mia’s decision that I completely failed to notice whether or not the words she was using would also appear on the SATs.

I’ve also had a teacher ask me if I could contact the editors of short story publications to ask them to use more standard grammar. I neglected to follow through on that request.

Reading fiction is about far more than learning new vocabulary and studying grammar in its natural habitat. One of the most critically important skills we develop by reading fiction is the ability to see and understand a world and viewpoint completely different from our own.

Reading fiction helps us develop our ability to empathize. Seriously, it's been studied (go read that article, right now). Being able to put yourself in another person's shoes is an invaluable skill for reading fiction, non-fiction, and, you know, interacting with the world at large.

This has been at the forefront of my mind as I've recently started reading Jason Ohler's new book, Digital Community, Digital Citizen. In the introduction he talks about helping students learn to balance the rights and responsibilities of interacting with people in a digital environment. Understanding your rights is relatively easy--you only have to understand your own perspective; but when you start talking about understanding responsibilities, you need to be able to understand the world from someone else’s perspective.

The concept of empathy is at the core of so much of what we, as librarians, are trying to teach. You want credit for the work that you do? Then give credit to others. Don't want to be bored to tears by a boring paper or presentation? The don't create a boring one yourself. Don't want to be harassed online? Don't want to be misled by false information? Want to be respected? You get the idea. It is hard to thoroughly grasp the underlying concepts that make these things more than just actions and turn them into attitudes unless you have developed an ability to empathize--particularly the ability to empathize with people completely unlike yourself.

You can't directly teach empathy. There's no way to say, "Look, this is how you empathize. Now empathize with problems 1-6 on page 43 for homework." What we can, as educators, do is to create an environment in which students are routinely exposed to views and lives that are completely foreign to them. That's a skill that they will need when reading non-fiction that discusses lives and experiences that are completely foreign to them.

Then there's this article, from a while ago, which I found both interesting and really, really obnoxious. First of all, could we please have an article about teens and reading that either a) mentions books other than Harry Potter and Twilight (I’m starting to get to that point with Hunger Games, too) or b) better yet, doesn't mention them at all. I know they are the "big titles", but teens read LOTS of other things, and any time I read an article about teens and reading that mentions only those two series I can't shank the feeling that the writer is less than well-informed about the real landscape of YA lit.

Things like this paragraph:

So they are in fact not about what is it to be an adolescent, but what it should be, since, perhaps unconsciously, adults want to instruct young people and guide them into adulthood. So images of adolescence in YA fiction are images of what adults want teenagers to believe. It’s a very powerful ideological tool.

make me so annoyed I cannot even articulately respond with anything beyond wondering if Maria Nikolajeva has read any YA lit, or if she was ever actually a teenager.

Though, in fairness, I will point out that she redeems herself significantly when asked what parents should do about teens reading dark literature. Specifically, "Nothing." :

So it is important to let young people be exposed to all kinds of literature and culture, dark and light, serious and entertaining; and it is always a good idea to talk to kids about what they read, watch or listen to.

Anyway, slightly ranty tangent aside, the major takeaway from that article (for me, anyway), is that what we read effects us. Which is both an excellent point and a major duh. Obviously what we read affects us--and it affects us differently at different ages, because we read it through the lens of different life experiences. I read The Great Gatsby in high school and HATED it. A lot. I re-read it at 23 because I was going to have to teach it and LOVED it. And understood why 16-year-old me thought it was awful; there was no way I could relate to that story in any meaningful way. Knowing that did not make it any easier to teach it to a room full of 16-year-olds (one of them, quite memorably, said the book made him want to forget how to read).

Anyway, yes. What we read affects us--good, bad, in between. It changes both how we see ourselves and how we see the world. This is true of both fiction and non-fiction (one of the reasons I read so many blogs by people in my field is that I love being able to learn from their experiences and see problems--and solutions--in a new light). I believe that I would not be as adept a reader of non-fiction without hours (and hours!) of fiction reading under my belt. Good fiction makes it easy to imagine yourself in someone else's place--a skill that is vital to effective reading of non-fiction, particularly if you want to learn anything from it.

And learning, really, is what it’s all about. And if we want to learn about people other than ourselves (and I don’t think anyone is arguing otherwise, even satirically), reading fiction is an indispensable part of the process.

Every Brain is Different

photo © 2009 Janine | more info (via: Wylio)One of the most common misconceptions I encounter about learning disabilities is that they all affect everyone the same way--every student with dyslexia is the same, every students with ADD is the same, every student with executive functioning issues is the same, every student with X is like Y. And oh if it were that way, education (and life) would be so much easier. But every student with dyslexia/ADD/whatever is very, very different. These are big umbrella diagnoses, and there's a lot that fits under them.

Think of it like being diagnosed with allergies--everyone who has allergies is allergic to different things, reacts in different ways, and is best treated by different methods. There's overlap, sure, but it's still a highly individualized diagnosis. So it is with learning disabilities--there's overlap, sure, but what works for Dyslexic Student A is by no means guaranteed to work for Dyslexic Student B.

Which is why I find the research reported on in the article Dyslexia: Brain scans predict reading skills so fascinating and so, so important. Not only does it give us a better understanding of what is going on in the brain, it could help us fine-tune how we work with individual students.

These are the two paragraphs that resonated with me the most:

In contrast, the battery of standardized, paper-and-pencil tests typically used by reading specialists did not aid in predicting which of the children with dyslexia would go on to improve their reading ability years later.

“Our findings add to a body of studies looking at a wide range of conditions that suggest brain imaging can help determine when a treatment is likely to be effective or which patients are most susceptible to risks,” says study leader Fumiko Hoeft, associate director of neuroimaging applications at Stanford University.

Paper and pencil tests (or any standardized test, really) will do a good job of telling us what a student doesn't know or can't do--but they fail miserably at telling us why. And the why could be any number of things, depending on the student--even a student who we think fits in a particular box because they have a particular diagnosis. I think we're a LONG ways away from having up-to-date brain scans on every student (and I'm not sure about how I would feel about that, though my initial reaction is ew), but research like this will, hopefully, lead to discussions about the fact that there ARE differences in why and how students struggle with information, even if they're struggling with the same information.

If I haven't already recommended Maryanne Wolf's absolutely amazing Proust and the Squid a million times, I am severely negligent. You will come away with a new-found amazement at the sheer complexity of process of reading, and learning to read (and it's the most accessibly written book about neuroscience you'll ever read). Of particular resonance for me was the final section, on the dyslexic brain and how it doesn't learn to read--but does learn to do many other things. Wolf raises an excellent (but currently unanswerable) question about whether the over-development in certain areas of the dyslexic brain is a cause of or effect of struggles with reading--and also asks us to think about the talents that many dyslexics have that those of us with "normal" brains couldn't conceive of. If you're interested in this topic at all, you should go read it, like, right now. I'll wait.

We owe it to all our students--diagnosed, undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, undiagnosable--to do our best to understand and believe that having dyslexia, or ADD, or dyscalculia does not put them in a particular box. The same goes for "smart" kids--the ones who typically do well in school. If we tell them (through words or actions) that we think they can/will only learn a particular way, imagine the crushing defeat when that way just doesn't work for them. For resilient kids, or the ones for whom school usually "works", chances are they'll find or ask for another way. But LD kids generally won't--because, sadly, they've gotten the message that they just can't "do" school so many times that one more failure doesn't seem noteworthy. So it's up to us to notice, and adapt, and change, and work with them to find the how and why that DOES work.

Even if we don't have an fMRI in every classroom.

Why YA: Or, links to people who say so better than I can

This article from the New York Times on adults who read YA lit has, predictably enough, been making the rounds; and I am, predictably enough, late to the party (though slightly less late than usual). I enjoyed it and was annoyed by it for many of the same reasons Gayle Forman was, and she said it better than I could, so I'll just tell you to read what she has to say.

It drives me nuts that when people talk about reading YA fiction it is often ever-so-subtly juxtaposed as being different from, you know, "real" fiction. That adults read. (Which is somewhat analogous to the distinction that's set up when people talk about "women's fiction." As if it's somehow. . . other.) And even in the NYT article there is a bit of justifying of reading habits. It's okay to read YA because they're discussing it and analyzing it. What if they were just, you know, enjoying it? I enjoy discussing books as much as the next girl, and I love being able to share such a solitary pursuit with my friends by gushing about the great books we're reading. But that is not, at the core, why I read. I read because I love stories. And I don't have to analyze the book in order to justify the time spent reading it.

I regularly get asked why I prefer YA fiction (sometimes with a tone that suggests, "Defend yourself!", though not always). And there are lots of reasons (and as much as I don't like it when YA is distinguished from "real" fiction, I do think it is a distinct genre--one with many sub-genres, but this thought it getting too big for a parenthetical), many of them having to do with why I love my job. Basically, I like reading YA for the same reasons I like working with teenagers: there is the sense of possibility. There is someone who is at or near the beginning of something. Everything is big and new and incomprehensible. There is more of an excuse for acting like a complete jerk, as you're still too young to know any better. There is the potential for change. There is none of the navel-gazing mundanity of a mid-life crisis. Reading YA fiction helps me remember what it's like to be a teenager, which helps me understand my students--and the incomprehensible ways they behave--better.

Again, there is someone who says it much better than I do--this time it's Sarah Rees Brennan, over at The Book Smugglers (a post which I discovered via Bookshelves of Doom).

She sums it up really well in this section:

YA is about your first time. And not just that first time, though that’s often on the table as well.

It’s about the first time you ever get betrayed by a friend. The first time you fell in love. The first time you realised, on a bone-deep, gut-deep level, that the world was unfair, that something terrible and irreversible could happen to you, that nobody was coming to save you. And the first time is a really intense time – it’s shocking, it cuts deep. The world never comes as such a surprise again.

. . . but you should read the entire post, if only so those of you who know me in real life will understand why "assbucket" is being added to my lexicon.