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.

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.

Checking out a Human Book

The February issue of School Library Journal features an article entitled, "Unjudging a Book." It describes programs at several schools and libraries that have adopted the Human Library model to foster respect and reduce bias by "checking out" a "human" book. It is an idea that may be within reach for our school.

Our Guidance department recently planned and carried out a very successful Career Day at school. Professionals from diverse paths,  many with a connection to our staff, were contacted, vetted, and scheduled for four morning sessions with mixed grade-level students to share and discuss their career.

Our school has also invested in the PBIS program and adopted a day-end period for connecting with a mixed-grade circle of students each day to cultivate connectedness and trust. We "circle up" and use a "talking piece" to practice nonjudgmental interaction.

We seem to have the organizational experience as well as the small group systems in place to tackle this equally important focus at ACS; fostering respect and reducing bias. We seem like such a good fit for the challenge; both in our district focus on those issues and our limited encounter with the diverse kind of lives that make up the world.

I like very much the whole idea of getting real, walking about in someone else's shoes, and challenging stereotypes by engaging "primary sources."

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.

Booktalk

    I am no expert, but I have been infatuated with the intricate, innocently frank first-stories of Greek myths; reading several versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (including Ted Hughes' elegant retellings), and recently, Madeline Miller’s inspired, Circe.

    Nearly every page of Miller’s book reminded me of my first reading of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; where each sentence, impossibly, managed to be a work of art as priceless as the story. How could someone frame so many insightful, original, beautiful sentences?

    Which has led me to Miller’s earlier book, The Song of Achilles. It is the love story of Achilles and Patroclus; all the more poignant for knowing the vortex of the story from Edith Hamilton-days in high school. I have picked it up and set it aside several times in my reading because, I think, she has made such a moving human story from such an overshadowing epic; and so I fear for both of them, hope for both of them. There is a fragility to my page-to-page expectation.

    I have not finished it yet, In a way, I don’t have to. I know the outcome. But Madeline Miler has taken me inside the story where all the hurts and foibles of the characters create something new for me to inhabit. It is not an ancient world. It is as expectant and beautiful, and as terrible and temporal as our own. And so it sings.

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.

Pages to PDF

Commenced scanning the 1993-1997 yearbooks to make digital versions. These are the ones for which I was the advisor. Fond memories.

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.

Ode to Childrens Books

Because this blog is (among many things) a place a put things I don't want to lose, I am posting this post that my daughter made yesterday. I don't think I need to say anymore, in fact, words fail me.

A long post with a purpose! And a bit of self promotion! And lots of advocacy for literacy and making books a part of your life. And also lots of appreciation and love for my family, I can't help it. They're a good bunch.

Children's books are so important to me. Personally, they hold some of my favorite memories. From before we could walk and talk, our parents had been reading to us, my brothers and I. Family favorites like Burton and Dudley, Two Bad Ants, White Dynamite and Curly Kidd, My Rotten Red Headed Older Brother, Firemouse, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear, Wild Wild Sunflower Child Anna, or any Bill Peet book, to this day fill me with wonderment and entertainment while giving me a sensation of home, comfort, and love. 

When we reached elementary school, part of our morning routine, along with breakfast, chores, packing our lunch bags, and in my case, brushing and braiding my 2.5 foot long hair, was sitting in Mom's lap as she read to us from chapter books. Over the years as we waited for the bus we heard all about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family as they moved west through America, from their little house in the big woods, to the dugout house in the plains. Then we heard stories from the other side of the wardrobe as we traveled to Narnia and back, then all the way to The Last Battle. From Beverly Clearly classics, the escapades of Ramona Quimby, Ralph S. Mouse, Henry Huggins and Ribsy to loooots of horse stories. You know, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka, Misty of Chincoteague, etc. 

When my older brother was six, soon to turn seven, I was born, so I had the benefit of hearing stories read from him as I grew up! And then I was eight when our youngest brother was born, so he enjoyed a houseful of accumulated stories and books! There are cassettes of us reading our favorite books we taped, as we anxiously anticipated a new sibling, bursting with excitement to share with them our favorite books! The idea being that the baby would want to hear our voices at all hours of the day, maybe when we're gone at school and couldn't actually hear us, that this tape and these stories would bring comfort. 

Go through our family library of children's books, you'll see inscriptions inside the cover, books from my Dad to my Mom, before they ever even had kids! Books wishing us happy birthday or a merry Christmas from grandparents, aunts and uncles. Books with our handprints drawn inside, nesting in each other. Books with our names scrawled in them as we learned to write. Now looking back, stamping the books with another layer of story to tell.

I remember the first ever real chapter book I bought myself from a Barnes in Noble in second grade (Chasing Redbird). I remember as I advanced as a reader, still wanting to go to the children's section in our elementary school and local library, because, well, I like the illustrations and I wanted to revisit some old favorites! I remember listening to Harry Nilsson's The Point and illustrating it as the story was told and sung on giant rolls of kraft paper with my dad. I remember listening to my little brother retell stories he had been read, cute, backwards, and sleepy. I remember my dad home from the hospital and being worried at six years old, but we snuggled right in and he read me a story to calm me down and return us to normalcy. I remember Jim doing the voices spot on as he re-read aloud his favorite childhood series to Joe. I remember everyone taking their turn at making up bedtime stories for Joe. I remember my grandparents reading me a story they read to mom as a girl. I remember flipping through an animal encyclopedia and each choosing a side to draw in our own sketchbooks with Jim. I remember being in middle school and going downstairs with some other classmates to read to the kindergarteners, where Joe was a student. I remember dad coming home from a meeting at Barnes and Noble and when he came in to say good night he gave me my first Harry Potter book (which was the third one, Prisoner of Azkaban!) just as JK Rowling was taking off when I was in third grade. I remember other kids saying, "Well of course you like reading, your dad is the librarian, you have to read!" Sigh, no kids, I like to read because it's awesome and there are so many stories out there. I like reading because I am so lucky to be a part of this family. Where reading, storytelling, imagination, creation, drawing, thinking, playing and making are all connected and a part of life! Dad being a librarian is just a perk of this life!

Where I'm going with this is reading is awesome. Children's books are wonderful windows, influential and memorable. I have been lucky enough to meet an author who wanted me to illustrate her story, and now that book is done and ready and it's very exciting! I think you should read the story, and look at the illustrations. Support an artist and an author and buy our book:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/arlosgarden

Read aloud, read quietly, be read to, create a story, draw that story, retell that story. You can take reading with you YOUR ENTIRE LIFE!

Book talk about a book talk

I was reading this recent book review in the New York Times; Lakota America by Pekka Hamalainen. The reviewer, Parul Sehgal, pointed out two characteristics of the book which intrigue me and draw me in as a reader of histories:

The challenge of writing this history, Hamalainen notes, was making iconic events and figures unfamiliar again, which is never more necessary than at the twilight of the Lakota empire.

I like that idea; making the iconic events unfamiliar so that we have the chance to reorient our perspective; becoming more open, hopefully to new ideas.  And then this other:

In retrospect, history often seems preordained; vulnerabilities seem garishly announced, outcomes a matter of course. Hamalainen seeks…to infuse a sense of chance and contingency in the narrative, to remain “alive to the ever-present possibility that events could have turned out differently.” He sows this feeling of uncertainty into the composition of the book, replacing a traditional arc with “a more unpredictable narrative structure that is full of triumphs, twists, reversals, victories, lulls and low points, big and small. If the book’s Lakotas — haughty and imperial at one moment, fearful and vulnerable the next, prudent and accommodating the third — seem strange and unfamiliar, this portrayal has succeeded.

Chance and contingency frame so much of our lives, it seems entirely appropriate and strategic to frame a history the same way.

Gotta get me this book.

Book talk

    I don’t know how Svetlana Alexievich gets people to relive memories like these. Perhaps it has less to do with trusting her, than with the mourning process. In Last Witnesses, she has strung the anguished WWII recollections of now-grown Russian children into a work that transcends page-after-page of horror and misery into unspoken testament to the persistent miracle of their life-force; even as it has left them in its wreckage.

    The memories of these children, ages 2 -15 at the time the war ended their childhoods, recount the specific personal experiences that destroyed their dear families and home-life as the ravages of Nazi occupation marched through their lives.

    It is humbling to read and yet cathartic to acknowledge such crushing despair, yet desire to live.

    Again and again, children witness the death of their mothers, the destruction of their villages. Children of six become caretakers for siblings of  two. Hunger, homelessness, constant running and fear are their very real lives for years. But again and again, distant aunts, fearless neighbors, and the “community” of war offer food, provide shelter, become “mama.”

    The crimes of armies become imaginable for me in these wrenching memories.  The losses are children’s losses; dolls and sweets, then the reality of security and mama; always mama. The tragedy, dislocation, and cruelty they survived are never really balanced in later years by reunion, rebuilding, or time - their words.

    If the testament of their retellings can never serve them, then let it serve us. These human beings had so much taken from them, that when they decide to give, so painfully, the memories they have left, I must read them; their “last full measure of devotion.”

Just like that

Our OverDrive ebook site made it very easy to accommodate a student request for an audio version of Around the World in 80 Days, his current classroom reading assignment. I was able to locate an inexpensive 48-month "lease" version which was available for download within the hour. Cool beans.

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.

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

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!

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.