Teaching Books

Made some book lists at Teaching Books from the New York Times Book Review Best Sellers Lists of March 21st to see how the site does on contemporary fiction. They hit 8 out of 10 on the Middle Grade Best Sellers list.

NYT Middle Grade March 21st on TeachingBooks

And the Young Adult List: 8 out of 10

NYT Young Adult Hardcover, March 21st on TeachingBooks

This is what the Collection Analysis Report looks like for the YA books:

TeachingBooks | Book Resources to Support Reading Education on TeachingBooks

Lists, resources, guides, vocabulary, and assignments are easily shared (no log in from links!) Cool beans.

By the way, SORA hit 75% of the books on those lists.

Poem

So here’s the thing

For twenty-seven years
I have been stockpiling
revelations, epiphanies, and jewels
for you. Whether they are
easy for you to find or whether
you have to work up a sweat
to get at them, they are here.
Of course, there are more elsewhere,
but what I have hoarded here
is enough to bring reaching,
noticing, and doing within your grasp.
It’s something alive that I am leaving you.
It’s not a tombstone, or a dare, or even an expectation.

It’s a promise.
Persevere.
Read widely.
Make time in your world for this world.
It is the world of before and now and next.
You can have it. You can know it.
It is here in reach.
Reach.

March 2020

Speak Truth Plurally

On the heels of my previous post, I read an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with Scott L. Newstok which led me to his 2016 essay in that publication, "How to Think Like Shakespeare." He urges many of the rigors of the Renaissance (precision, inventiveness, and empathy) as a template for present-day habits of the mind: communication, collaboration, and creativity.

In explaining the complete meaning of rhetoric he writes:

In the Renaissance, the rhetorical tradition encouraged such "play of the mind" through the practice of disputation. Students had to argue from multiple perspectives rather than dogmatically insist upon one biased position.
Once you are familiar with Shakespeare’s training in disputation, you can easily see how it would lead to the verbal give-and-take that constitutes the heart of drama. As Zadie Smith marvels: "Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing. ... In his plays he is woman, man, black, white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim. ... He understood what fierce, singular certainty creates — and what it destroys. In response, he made himself ... speak truth plurally." Now that’s the kind of critical thinking you should aspire to: speaking truth plurally.

I think that aligns pretty well with Chimamanda Adichie's avoiding the danger of only one story.

His reasoning for the value of rhetoric:

Antonio Gramsci described education in this way: "One has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts." You take it for granted that Olympic athletes and professional musicians must practice relentlessly to perfect their craft. Why should you expect the craft of thought to require anything less disciplined? Fierce attention to clear and precise writing is the essential tool for you to foster independent judgment. That is rhetoric.


Renaissance rhetoric achieved precision through a practice that might surprise you: imitation. Like "rhetoric," "imitation" sounds pejorative today: a fake, a knockoff, a mere copy. But Renaissance thinkers — aptly, looking back to the Roman Seneca, who himself looked back to the Greeks — compared the process of imitation to a bee’s gathering nectar from many flowers and then transforming it into honey. As Michel de Montaigne put it:
"The bees steal from this flower and that, but afterward turn their pilferings into honey, which is their own. ... So the pupil will transform and fuse together the passages that he borrows from others, to make of them something entirely his own; that is to say, his own judgment. His education, his labor, and his study have no other aim but to form this."

The Danger of a Single Story

Even though I am well past the 21-millionth person to watch Chimamanda Adichie speak in this video, it arrives for me just in time; as I imagine it did for them.

Featured Readers: Design

Our Elementary Librarian asked if I would work up a design for her "Featured Reader" incentive program. The series of wall posters will have a "book" format. Here's the cover and introduction. The reader pages will feature a student photo on the left and their accomplishment on the right.

Holiday greetings

I am using my own chap-book video to make up a short gift-book of poems for folks who supported our poetry reading in November. Doing the assembly in the library has prompted plenty of questions from students passing by.

Post-poetry glow

Many thanks to the friends, colleagues, and students who came to our library Coffee House last night and were such comforting listeners as I read a selection of my poetry. It was good to be among their warm company and to share so many diverse conversations about the community, books, and history.Looking forward to the next Coffee House in february.

Autumn Reading

Started sharing, mailing, and posting my reading handbills.

Mid-October display

Virtual/Actual shelf-browse, sort of

Figure I'll email HS students images of selected shelves to encourage some virtual-to-actual shelf browsing. Here is my SciFi stack!

Or maybe bookmarks:

From reading

Every couple of months, my wife's friend gives us a small pile of New Yorker magazines. They make a fine nice night's browsing and reading; cartoons, poems, book reviews, articles.

A few weeks ago, I was going through a recent stack and read a poem by an author I did not know. The poem was, Claude Monet, "The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil, 1880", by Ciaran Carson. I really liked it. In fact, I hopped on Thriftbooks and ordered two of his books, blindly.

I have been reading his prose book, Fishing for Amber; alternating essay/chapters of pub myths and Annie Dillard-like esoteric dives into nuggets of the world. Frankly, I have been skipping the pub stories and deeply enjoying, and quoting, the others - all of them loosely connected like Nabakov coincidences.

So he's writing at length about marigolds, Genus calendula in Latin: colors, medicinal properties, etc. And that word, the sound of it, rings a bell. It was my Aunt Clara's "real" name, her Italian name, Calendula. So she was Marigold. Which, poignantly, was the affectionate name my caretaker/brother called my Mom, Marijane, when they were joshing - Marigold.

And then yesterday in the Sunday New York Times an obituary for Ciaran Carson. Of course, his words and books remain, but there is something of the passing serendipitous stranger in this (perhaps one you might meet in a pub), one who you meet once, but who somehow touches you deeply, changes you in an intimate way.

And so, I keep reading.

This is News for you. I mean it.

My video introducing ad-free unlimited access to the New York Times from our school network!

A physics-based look at the Johnstown Flood

Some one had been reading about the Johnstown Flood and left David McCullough's fine book on one of our library tables. I remember being enthralled as I read it years ago. It prompted me to see if there were any 3D geographic renderings of it online.

I was delighted to find this "physics-based simulation of it: https://youtu.be/tMc9kP9q-d8

Inspiring stuff

New York Times access for ACS

I have forwarded the particulars of this NYT/Verizon offer to our Tech Team. If it passes muster there and with administration, it will provide a powerful resource for teaching and learning at ACS. Exciting news.

Booktalk

I don’t know about you, but I expect, at least occasionally, to gain some insights into my world; either through people I meet, experiences I have, or by allowing myself time for reflection.

For me, all three can happen when I read a book. Sometimes it happens when I read two in a row that I thought had nothing to do with each other. That happened this Summer.

After 40 years, I re-read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is a book my wife shared with my soon after we were married and it hit me like few others have. Not only is it gorgeously written, and intellectually rich, but the author’s curiosity and profound awakening to what was miraculously transpiring in the natural world at her feet inspired my life-long awareness of the incremental and particular world that is mine - right here in Afton, even.

It was her wonderment at the unimaginable inventiveness, immense complexity, and sheer fecundity of nature’s engine at work that awed her and transformed me.

Transformed me.

After re-reading that, I turned to a bucket-list book; Ovid’s The Metamorphoses - written 2000 years ago ( I have enduring weak spot for reading “first stories.’) It is a series of linked story/myths rooted in the appetites, foibles, and indifference of the gods as they muck around with human lives and their own eternal ones transforming, through confrontations and kindnesses, the world into its myriad varieties. The metamorphoses.

Like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, it is rich with the serendipitous, unbelievable, and often heartless “change” that is our world. Not only seeking to “explain” how that variety came to be (mostly through vengeful wrath) , but by sobering us to how unplanned, accidental, and out-of-our-hands this tumultuous but beautiful life of ours is.

Two writers. Two eras. Both trying to get a handle on why beauty and purpose emerge in a world that seems both indifferent and incidental, yet persistently dear and our own.

This week's goal ...

... loan more soccer books!

Opening displays

Our 9/11 display of original print news coverage.

Our foyer flat-screen featuring a slide show of some of our new arrivals (and a link to our ACS ebooks).

We moved our growing Graphic Novel collection to a primo spot by our entrance!

Filling in the gaps

The NYRB is always such a wealth of diverse and wonderfully esoteric scholarship. And often it supplements or unseats an understanding I need to modify or discard.

An example is Howard French’s review of several books about the African Middle Ages. His thesis sentence sets the tone:

‘It may remain a little-known fact, but Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms, and they admirably complicate our understanding of Africa’s past and present.”

In the course of his discussion, he introduces the fabulously wealthy Malian ruler Mansa Musa who in the early 14th century journeyed to Mecca by way of Cairo with “13 to 18 tons” of pure gold and thousands of slaves and attendants. Beyond the legends of this entourage, it is the fact that only a few years later (1375) he earned an illustrated spot on the Catalan Atlas, spurring fortune-seekers and ultimately the competition of the slave trade between Portugal and Spain which “ was crucial to the creation of the modern nation-state and of what became modern European nationalism;” certainly a supplement to my understanding of that phenomenon.

He also highlights the observation of Herman L. Bennett “that the Sahara has long been miscast as a barrier separating a notional black Africa from an equally notional white or Arab one. In reality, it argues, the desert has always been not just permeable but heavily trafficked, much like the ocean, with trade as well as religious and cultural influences traveling back and forth, and with world-shaping effects.” Discard and update.

Reading the NYRB is a little more intense than browsing a magazine. I find myself underlining text, looking up books and references to research, and adding snippets to this bog so that I will remember how and when my understanding of the world changed and grew.

Emailed this to colleagues

    Load Up with books for the Summer:
     a reason for faculty participation

            My guess is that you are a life-long learner - just like we expect our students to be. I also guess that you continually challenge yourself, within your discipline and without, with reading widely and deeply - especially during the Summer when short-term freedom from routine and long-term guilt over reading-procrastination is ripest.

    So along with the Summer books that you intend to buy or borrow or download from your usual sources, I invite you to borrow or download some from the MS/HS Library. Whether you are delightfully surprised or disappointed-as-expected by our holdings, it would be a powerful incentive to our students next Fall when you casually mention in a class discussion having “read something about that this Summer from a book I borrowed from the ACS Library. You should check it out, too.”

    Although you and I may be day-in/day-out near-strangers, I am, like all librarians everywhere, delighted and non-judgmental when a new face appears to borrow a book. Whether it’s a bucket-list classic, a binge-read of a favorite series, sci-fi or science essays, historical perspectives in fiction or in fact, new Young Adult fiction to help you better inhabit the teenage experiences of gender issues, multi-culturalism, and family problems, or titles for your own children to enjoy…the MS/HS Library has something for you.

    I would be glad to curate a list of books for you to choose from based on your interests, or, by all means, stop by to browse the table-top displays in the library foyer or explore the stacks.

    Being explicit about the fact that we read on our own for meaning and for recreation is part of “walking the walk” as we raise that expectation for our students. Being seen in the MS/Library, or letting it be known that you are reading a book or ebook from our collection is a concrete way to mentor that life-long discipline.

    Thanks for your help,