Notes from Summer School

Please … if next year I start talking about teaching summer school again … if I say, "I'll be in a library, it will be fun" … do me a favor and ask me if I'm out of my mind. I just finished my 3rd straight day of working in a 97˚ library. Humidity was at 56%. I've been uncomfortable, but I make a point of staying hydrated and moving as little as possible. The kids however, are miserable which does nothing for their behavior. To me it's veered over into the realm of ludicrous. For the kids it seems criminal.

Which brings me to another point about our summer school program: MMSD thinks it's a good idea to take all of the kids who were not "proficient" in reading by spring -- who for whatever reason, were not particularly engaged in or struggled with learning during the school year -- and give them more of the same (aka MOTS) for 6 weeks in buildings without air conditioning. Recipe for success? No, I don't think so either.

It's particularly sad for me when so many kids come to the library and can't find anything to read. The most popular books are Sponge Bob, Spiderman, Pokémon, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. There are limited numbers of those books and when they are all checked out, the kids are frequently at a loss. They frequently go and search for them in the online catalog, as if the act of typing the desired book will conjure it up. They can't hear me when I say "It's not here," and they frequently get angry.

I do what a good librarian is supposed to do. I've been going to the shelves and pulling a lot of books that I know they will never look at otherwise. I give book talks. I pay attention to what they're interested in, and try to find similar titles. I look for movie tie-ins. Occasionally it works. Tintin books were flying off the shelves today, after 5 weeks of plugging them. My first class was all over Neil Gaimann and checked out Coraline, The Wolves in the Wall, and The Graveyard Book -- and proceeded to lay down on the floor and actually read them! With few exceptions my next four classes were testy and unwilling to try anything. (Maybe it was the 97˚.)

I drove home, musing on the whole summer school experience, feeling kind of frustrated. Then I remembered a situation from yesterday. I had one kid -- an upcoming 2nd grader -- who was mad that I was out of Pokémon books. After 20 minutes of a slow motion tantrum (him, not me) I finally got him to tell me that he wanted a book about "hot air" (Appropriate, right?) which I took to mean hot air balloons. We went to nonfiction. No, he didn't want that book or that one either. No, not that one. (As you can imagine, the selection is somewhat limited.) He's frustrated. I'm frustrated. He finally says, "I'll SHOW you what I want!" and goes and gets the book that I had set aside as a read aloud for the next class: Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy's Parade. (A WONDERFUL picture book biography of Tony Sarg.)

I tightened my bun, sucked in my girdled abdomen, pushed my glasses further down on my nose and hissed, "No, you can't have that one. I'm reading it aloud!" Just kidding. I said, "You want THAT ONE? COOL!!" and let him take it. There are lots of books in the library, I could always find something else to read.

I think that the educator Susan Ohanian was correct when she observed that teachers ultimately teach themselves, or to put it another way, it's a lot about the relationship that you build with kids. Why should they listen to me when I say a book is good? They don't know me. They're only just starting to know their summer school teachers.

Well, 6 hot days remaining.

Book Review: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

My carefree days of summer reading were short-lived. Next week I begin a class for my school library media specialist certification, called "Trends in K-12 Literature." The reading list is extensive, and I've tried to get a head start on it. (Thank heavens, no boy wizards on the list.) I've seen The Invention of Hugo Cabret around, but I probably wouldn't have gravitated toward it if it wasn't required reading. At approximately 525 pages the book looks like a tome, but it is really more of an extended picture book with pages and pages of illustrations that are reminiscent of an old movie, interspersed with Hugo Cabret's story. (Indeed, it won the Caldecott medal -- given for best illustrations in a picture book -- in 2007.)

Hugo Cabret is an orphan who, due to tragic circumstances, lives by himself in a Paris train station. His most treasured possessions are a notebook of drawings from his deceased father and a rusty automaton from the attic of a museum. His path crosses that of an old toymaker and his young god-daughter, and there is a mystery that Hugo must solve. (I don't want to say much more because it might spoil the magic of this book.)

Author Brian Selznick says that he was inspired by real events that were recounted in the book Edison's Eve: a Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. I found the format hard to get into at first, although veteran readers of comic books and graphic novels won't be disturbed by it at all. As an adult reader, I thought that the story moved a little too quickly and was tied up a little too neatly at the end. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and would have loved it when I was about 10. Judging by the number of copies of this book in my summer school library, it is a popular book with middle grade readers.

If you like reading kids' books, if you like old movies, or if you're looking for a fun book for a 9-12 year old reader, I recommend this book.

This is heresy!

Call me old-fashioned, but this is just wrong.

He might be almost 90 years old in real terms, but Christopher Robin and his bear of very little brain are set to make a literary comeback after the estate of AA Milne agreed to authorise the first-ever official sequel to the much-loved children's books.

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood by author David Benedictus picks up from the poignant ending of Milne's last Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner, in which Christopher Robin is growing up and heading away to school. "Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred," he tells the bear, and they leave together. (Read the rest here.)

One good thing -- at least it wasn't written by J.K. Rowlings.

Easter Book Review

(Cross-posted at the Spring Reading Challenge)

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward, Illustrated by Marjorie Flack is one of my all-time favorite picture books. Published in 1939, it has a wonderfully strong female character in the girl bunny who stands up to the big white bunnies and the Jack Rabbits with long legs who can run so fast, to declare that one day she will be an Easter bunny. She goes on to have 21 babies which would appear to seal her fate as an ordinary bunny, but babies become children, and she wisely teaches all of them how to work together to take care of the household.

When one of the old Easter bunnies retires, the country bunny becomes an Easter bunny. She is sent to deliver an Easter egg to an ill child who lives high up on a mountain, a dangerous journey.

I love love love this book. I used to check it out from my school library repeatedly when I was little. As an adult I love the feminist bent to the story, but as a child I think I loved the sweet illustrations most of all. We are lucky to be living in a kind of golden age of children's literature right now. There is an amazing array of picture books to choose from, each one more beautifully or cleverly illustrated than the one previous. But sometimes my eyes get tired of the super-saturated colors or the computer-generated sameness of contemporary book illustration. I frequently find myself turning back to my old favorites.

Interested in sampling older children's books? A great place to start is with Caldecott medal winners, and go from there. I guarantee you will find a treasure trove.