Week 8, Blog Post 8
In conclusion… The summer and this course on adolescent literature are coming to an end, and I definitely have takeaways. But because I believe conclusions, like good-byes, should be brief, I’ll give you just the two biggest takeaways. The first big takeaway this summer is the importance of finding the space to be a teacher who reads, where being a teacher who reads means reading books that belong in the hands of my students and therefore knowing which students' hands they most belong in. My other big takeaway is that the passion I have for representation and discussion and critical thinking about the world around us (especially the world around us that doesn’t look like us or talk like us or think like us) is represented in YA books. The work I want to do in the classroom, the conversations I want to have, they’re already started in the space of YA books. But what does this mean for my students? Well, they’ll see a reading community in their classroom, they’ll see bookshelves and book talks and book boards, and they’ll see meaningful books that lead to meaningful projects. They’ll see that I support them as individuals, as readers, and as members of a reading community. They’ll see that I’m excited for books… and for them. I think what I need and want now is more ideas, activities, and experiences. I want to keep this momentum and excitement. And, of course, I need (and want!) to read more YA books from my to-read list/annotated library. A few that I plan on purchasing and reading in the near future are: Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes; Akata Witch (series) by Nnedi Okorafor; Throne of Glass (series) by Sarah J. Maas; Love, Hate, and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed; The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang; Hope Nation: YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration by multiple authors; We Are Okay by Nina LaCour; and The Memory of Things by Gae Polisner.
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Week 7, Blog Post 7
Thinking about historical fiction and my students, informed in part by a timeline of YA historical fiction books. As with all genres, there are good books and less-than-good books. However, I think historical fiction of the YA variety may be heavier on the not-so-good books than many other genres. Looking at the bookshelf of YA historical fiction, much of the genre is white-washed. This is deeply concerning and frustrating, as it can send the wrong and devastating message to our students that the individuals of their histories are not worth writing about. All people’s histories are worth writing about on their own terms, and I intend for the books in my classroom to reflect that. My students don’t have to think historical fiction is interesting, but they do need to know that their familial and ethnic histories are valued in literature and in my classroom. Historical fiction can contribute to this goal. I intend to use it as such (recommendations for this would bring me joy!) so that the students who are interested in historical fiction can have access to historical fiction that is respectful, genuine, and meaningful. Historical fiction should honor the individuals and communities it fictionalizes for it to have a place in my classroom (respectful: ✓). Many historical fiction books written for adolescents do this. Some do this very powerfully- Refugee by Alan Gratz is on my mind as I write this. His book is respectful, genuine, and meaningful (so my students will definitely have access to it). “Genuine” is vague, but I’m using it here as a criterion of worthwhile historical fiction to mean that the novel isn’t superimposing values that don’t belong to the individuals and groups represented. The emotions, thoughts, and experiences are appropriate to characters’ historical origins (genuine: ✓). I particularly love Refugee because not only is this a piece of historical fiction that seeks to honor and bear witness to the individuals of our world history, it is also a book that guides readers to see and assist the individuals of our own historical moment (meaningful: ✓). Therefore, as a book that can lead my students to experience, evaluate, and take action, his is the kind of book that most definitively belongs in my classroom. Which leads to the role that historical fiction will have in my classroom: helping students to witness and respect members of our history and to take action in our current moment. Judith Geary said it best: “History shows us a window into our past. Historical fiction can take us by the hand and lead us into that world.” Historical fiction should be about humanizing, individualizing, and seeing, really seeing, the people and circumstances of history. Where do you write? ![]() Starbucks (Starbuckses?) are a personal favorite writing location, particularly the one pictured. However, I feel like a fraud, trying to claim I have a singularly special spot where I write. A tidy answer of a tidy space where I write ideas in a way that’s also tidy. Because I have none of those things. I write wherever I can prop up my computer, although preferably somewhere with internet so I can find that pesky perfect word that eludes my fingers as they dash across the keyboard. Perhaps that’s what I should have pictured- my computer. By now, my fingers are perfectly attuned to my sassy little ASUS laptop and clumsily mis-step on any other keyboard even though they’re perfectly graceful on their home turf (home keys?). But even my computer isn’t the just-right answer, because I’ll have an idea and type it up on my phone (usually at the most inconvenient time, like three in the morning. Thanks, brain.) and email it to myself. I’ll sketch essay outlines and reflection ideas on any piece of paper unlucky enough to be near me when inspiration strikes. If there’s a method to my madness, I’m unaware of it. But I suppose I can stand beside my claim that Starbucks are my writing space because when I really need to hunker down and make myself write, I go to a Starbucks, order enough caffeine to energize an elephant, and type for hours. Drafts usually started out somewhere else, stitched together in those fleeting moments between classes, jobs, and other obligations. I’ll tinker over the course of a few days with all the focus of Dug from Disney’s Up (squirrel!) until I have something that resembles an essay, waiting to be revised into something (hopefully) worth reading. This act of revising into a real paper is when I sit down and write and really pretend to know what I’m doing… often at a Starbucks. ![]() Perhaps you’re wondering why I chose a Stephen quote about reading and writing when I’m talking about where I write. (Perhaps you didn’t notice the quote, or perhaps you simply don’t care. Those are fair, too, but I’ve already decided to explain. Disinterested readers have my blessing to call this post finished right here.) Whenever I write, I usually have books or articles beside me, dogeared and written in (articles usually covered in my colorful notes and notations, my books a little more gently loved), made into tools for the task at hand. And as hard as it is to answer where I write, it’s easy compared to trying to choose a picture for where I read. I read anywhere there’s something to read and light to read by- sitting in the hall on the floor between classes, in the church when it’s empty, on my couch by sunlight or lamp-light, in my bathtub, in the car, at the library- I’m not going to pretend there’s a location that is my “reading place.” The whole world is my reading place. Week 7, unnumbered blog post, "From the Writer's Desk" “There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.” ― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down7/16/2018 Week 6, Blog Post 6 Responding to mental health in YA literature, including ideas from Using Literature to Confront the Stigma of Mental Illness, Teach Empathy, and Break Stereotypes, published in the Language Arts Journal of Michigan and Language and Symptoms of Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature. For the most part, the realization I wanted to teach came in these seemingly haphazard moments that I now realize were etched on my heart from the moment they happened. One of those magical moments was the very honest and very necessary conversation with my own high school English teacher about mental health. It was a turning point in my life in more ways than one. I treasured these moments then and I treasure them even more now. I believe I have found my calling in the relationships, conversations, and support that English teachers especially are positioned to offer students. My own experiences as a high school student continue to motivate me, but I since have found more encouragement in the breadth and depth of YA books I’ve begun to witness this summer. All this to say, what does teacher-me have to say about mental health in YA literature? It has a place in my classroom, although where in my classroom- on my bookshelves, in my desk, book-talked, or taught- depends on the book and the students… which is delightfully vague and not particularly helpful. Nonetheless, I argue that it’s the necessary reality. More than any other genre, books dealing with mental health need to be carefully read and the student(s) carefully known before I’m offering them. This isn’t to encourage the stigma already surrounding mental health, but to make sure a book doesn’t do the exact opposite of what it intends. However, acknowledging that very prevalent and powerful stigma around mental health, these books will be shelved as realistic fiction (if my shelves are organized by genre at all. We’ll see). Beyond just acknowledging that stigma by books’ physical locations, I want to be intentional about having conversations about mental health and mental health books (including book talks, perhaps many of them by peers) and addressing that stigma. As the articles here (and hundreds others) mention, the number of students with diagnosed mental illnesses is increasing, in part because we are finally starting to understand and talk about mental illness and getting diagnoses. Regardless, as the number of students with diagnosed mental illnesses increases, we’re making progress in the mental health conversation as a society. Consequently, we as teachers are positioned to start talking more about mental health. Understanding one’s own mental health and empathizing with peers’ mental health is important. (I don’t think too many readers will disagree with that.) Books contribute to students’ ability to empathize. (This is also hard to disagree with. Research heartily supports this position.) The next step seems to announce itself then: we should use books to help students understand their peers and empathize with them regarding mental health and many other topics. The tricky part comes with the how to use books. And which books do we use? (Here’s where disagreement abounds and often rightfully so. Both articles offer excellent book suggestions.) I don’t have an answer. At least not yet. And I’m guessing that even once I do have an answer, it will be frequently changing, responding to new publications, new understanding, and always responding to my students’ needs. To quote Dr. Bickmore, “YA lit can demonstrate how our language signifies our beliefs” and “YA lit can showcase authentic symptoms of mental illness.” This is part of the empathy thing and therefore is part of having these important and often difficult conversations. YA books offer exercises in empathy in many topics- mental health is just one. YA literature provides foundations for conversations about mental health and many other relevant concerns. YA literature is a resource for encouraging our students as individuals in so many ways. In short, teacher-me thinks we should be using YA books to have conversations with our students about mental health and so much more.
Who doesn't love a good list?
(Because these lists contain spoilers, you'll need to click "read more" to see the lists.) "I want my [students] to become readers with my help, not in spite of me." —Stacey Riedmiller7/9/2018 Week 5, Blog Post 5 Reflecting on what it means to be a teacher who reads based on the ideas in this LLED course and this article by Stacey Riedmiller. We're hitting the big questions here: Have my thoughts about what it means to be a teacher who reads shifted because of this course? What have I learned here that I'll use out there in the classroom?
To start, before this class I knew comics had a place in my classroom (and they still do, but now I have even more evidence to disprove the nay-sayers!). However, I also knew that I personally skipped the YA genre for the most part and was woefully underinformed. My mom stuck a Stephen King book in my hands back in fifth grade (I’m not advising or suggesting you do that, in fact, please don’t give young children books very obviously not meant for young children) and from there it was all Stephen King and Dean Koontz and the random classic that I wasn’t really equipped to properly appreciate and then whatever was assigned for class. The exception to my decidedly “adult” reading was James Pattern’s Maximum Ride series (I do suggest you put that series in the hands of your students) and I still think about Maximum Ride. In hindsight, I think my love for those books comes from their appropriateness for who I was as a young person at that moment. Informed educators would agree, I believe. (Look at the takeaways for the last few weeks. There’s a pattern.) All this to say I didn’t (couldn’t?) appreciate YA books the way so many YA books deserve to be appreciated. And I definitely didn’t recognize their value in the classroom. Now I’m ready to fight anyone who doesn’t believe in YA books for their students (okay, maybe not fight, but I’m certainly armed with some intelligent ideas and empirical evidence to make my point thanks to this course). I’m excited about YA books. (I’m an excitable person in general.) Excitement is so often contagious. (I'm going to capitalize on that contagious quality of excitement with book talks and a "books I'm reading board" [see earlier posts] because being a teacher who reads means being a teacher who reads books that belong in the hands of their students and therefore knows which students' hands they most belong in.) On the other hand, grumbling and resisting are even more contagious. Stacey Riedmiller talks about this, about encouraging kids to read what they want to read and being excited for their choices. If we can’t get excited about reading and about YA books, how can we think our students will be excited? And here’s where a new (new to me) idea comes in: rewarding students isn’t helping them. Some of the educator books discussed earlier talk about this and it made sense, but I Riedmiller drove it home for me. Students need to read for themselves and be excited about reading on their own. Young readers need to motivated by their personal internal reasons, not our superficial external motivators that do nothing to support the bigger picture of supporting lifelong readers. We don’t want to discourage students from reading (grumbling about their choices), but we also don’t want to make students read only because they’re seeking something from us (rewards, grades). We want to support the choices students make and offer suggestions and encouragement as they’re wanted. But it’s something else from this course that I’m really, really excited about. The passion I have for representation and discussion and critical thinking about the world around us, especially the world around us that doesn’t look like us or talk like us or think like us, that passion is represented in YA books. The work I want to do in the classroom, the conversations I want to have, they’re already started in the space of YA books. (Just look at “the ‘write’ books” part of this blog. It’s right there at the top right of your screen. There I’ve sorted books by what they’re doing. And for the most part, these are just the books I’ve read this summer- there are so so many more out there!) I am so excited for these books and the ideas and the conversations they’ll ignite in my classroom. “The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me.” ― Lauren DeStefano7/8/2018 Directions: write a school counselor’s recommendation letter for a character in the book you read. Book: Dress Codes for Small Towns And a thank you to the school counselor’s recommendation letter mentor texts at https://blog.prepscholar.com/3-excellent-letter-of-recommendation-examples I can foresee doing this in my classroom and I'll use the site above as mentor text when I do. Week 5, unnumbered blog post Directions: create a book ladder that takes readers from YA books to more complex texts. Books: (Wolf Hollow, Maximum Ride,) Wolf by Wolf, Children of Blood and Bone, The Woman Warrior, The Taking, The Mist, the Dark Tower series I want a reading ladder that feels different from the examples, so at the risk of making a not-very-good reading ladder, I’m focusing on strong female leaders in books heavy on action. ![]() The first “rung” on this ladder is Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin. It’s the thriller that’s both speculative fiction and historical fiction in which “skinshifter” Yael takes part in a motorcycle race across the Axis owned Europe, Africa, and Asia for the opportunity to kill Hitler. As I said before, its rapid pace, the pages brimming with excitement and elegant phrasing, make it a quick read even at almost 400 pages. Neither the vocabulary nor sentence structures are too complex, which contribute to both it being a quick read and its place on the start of the ladder. However, if Wolf by Wolf is too intimidating, I could also see the middle grades Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk functioning as a good step before Wolf by Wolf because while much lighter on action, its complex female heroine adventures through 300 pages of elegant but easy reading. If Wolf Hollow is too light on action or if students need to stay at the middle grades reading level for longer, James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series contains nine books, a strong female lead, and so much action and excitement they’re impossible to put down. If a reader is especially hesitant, I could guide them into this ladder with Maximum Ride’s manga adaptions, then to the text-only Maximum Ride novels, and to Wolf by Wolf and so on from there. Wolf by Wolf is also a strong choice for this spot because while it easily stands on its own, it has a sequel (Blood for Blood) and an e-novella (Iron to Iron) that would let students stay on this rung for longer. This is a YA book. ![]() After Wolf by Wolf is the longer Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, an Afrofuturist fantasy about the quest to restore magic. It’s part of a trilogy (only Children of Blood and Bone is currently published, with the next two books coming in 2019 and 2020), allowing students to stay at this rung for a while as well. It has two strong female main characters and two strong male main characters, each with their own unique and potentially nontraditional but equally important personal strength. Its multi-perspective approach utilizes three different writing styles. This, along with the length (around 600 pages), put it at the second rung because the writing is similar in complexity to Wolf by Wolf. It’s also solidly a YA book. ![]() Moving out of YA territory is The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston. This feels like the odd one out because it is a memoir, but it blends memoir with Chinese mythology, creating spaces within the book that capture the action felt in the other books on this list. It maintains the theme of a strong female lead and because it moves from childhood to adulthood, it offers a nice bridge from adolescent female leads to adult female leads. It’s shorter than either Wolf by Wolf or Children of Blood and Bone, but it is more complex and demands more of its reader. However, that comparative brevity (224 pages) gives the reader space to tackle a harder book without becoming exhausted. The Woman Warrior is a uniquely complex book, allowing readers to apply the reading skills they have developed thus far to focus on their ability to interact with a text. It also begins the transition into more complex sentence and story structures that continues in the next ladder rungs. ![]() We are out of YA territory using the definition of YA established earlier on this blog, but this next step still feels just right in high schoolers’ hands. Dean Koontz writes thrillers with numerous beautifully rich characters whose stories he weaves together through the course of a book. There’s usually a golden retriever somewhere in the story, too. All his books that I’ve read have gorgeous, lyrical writing and characters you can’t help but become quickly connected to. The vocabulary is more difficult and the books longer, but the stories are less complex and move quickly, offering a trade-off for the reader as they gradually practice and acquire the different reading skills needed for the top of this reading ladder. Dean Koontz's books are almost all heavy on action and many have strong female leads. If I had to suggest just one, it would be The Taking with the charming, intelligent, and dedicated Molly Sloan. The Taking is an end-of-the-world and alien invasion story with a brilliantly unexpected ending. It sounds cliché, but when reading it, it never feels cliché. Like most of his books, The Taking is around four hundred pages, bringing our list back up into longer reads for a moment. Dean Koontz has published more than seventy books, so readers can also stay here for as long as they want. Dean Koontz’s books often feel similar to Stephen King’s, but Koontz is not nearly as graphic as King, making him “safer” for those readers who aren’t ready for the maturity of King. ![]() To ease into the final rung and because they deserve to be here by their own merit, I recommend any of Stephen King’s collections of short stories. Just After Sunset and Nightmares and Dreamscapes are among my personal favorites of his collections. His writing style can sometimes make for a challenging read and his stories address very mature themes (although, side note, they’re not all horror), so his books are at the top of this ladder. His short stories, because they are short (at least compared to his novels), make them a good final transition- as with The Woman Warrior earlier, a jump in complexity should often be balanced by a decrease in length. Additionally, he has numerous short stories, so a reader could stay at this rung for a long time. Many of these short stories don’t necessarily fit into the strong female lead category, but his novella The Mist (which inspired a movie of the same name that manages to be even darker than its source material) has the tough Mrs. Hilda Repper who proves to be one the most capable survivors. The Mist is a horror-thriller of a small Maine town surrounded by a dense mist that hides giant murderous monsters. At the “top” of this ladder is Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. A series of nearly four thousand pages, it’s intense. It has a strong female lead among the male leads, many literary references, and wildly complex characters and storylines and writing. It’s a beautiful, haunting, intense experience and immersive in ways no other book I’ve read can rival. With numerous adult themes and heavy on the adult language, it’s solidly an adult book. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it’s not a horror story. It’s action and adventure and a little bit western and a little bit science fiction and all amazing. It’s also my favorite series of all time. (The movie isn’t worth your time.) Week 5, unnumbered blog post
My thought process making this was “how do I do this in a way that gives students ideas without being too simple or too intimidating?” I want this to be a kind of mentor text, so I chose a method of presentation that I didn’t see already present online (other examples of book trailers below- I chose them because they fit that space between not enough and too much, and many of them show the playfulness I want students to have with a project like this). I want variety in my examples and options because I want students to see an option that they can envision themselves flourishing in. For Children of Blood and Bone in particular, I wanted to capture that this book takes place in Africa and engages with African mythologies and traditions. To do this, I used free music from African artists on Free Music Archive. I think it’s a resource I’ll share with my students because Free Music Archive has thousands of tracks free for use- like pixabay for audio! Potential book trailer examples: With students as actors: With images from the internet: https://youtu.be/I7xFu0xU5Rc Stop-motion: https://youtu.be/cKv773vUmU4 Week 4, unnumbered blog post |
AuthorI'm a high school English teacher looking to share with students, parents, and peers some of what I'm learning in the classroom as a teacher. Archives
October 2018
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