ELA in Permanent Beta

Climbing the Ladder

 

I'm a fan of this drawing by Penny Kittle because I'm not a very good illustrator (yet!).

Everyone has an opinion about summer reading. Some think it should be 100% choice and not assessed. Others believe it should be assessed lightly. Still others believe it should be the first assignment of the year, with little to no choice, and that students must be held accountable with reading logs and post-it notes. (We're keeping 3M in business, people.) I've lived in all these neighborhoods and much prefer my current residence. The universal truth about reading is that we choose the books that suit us best for the life we live. The following list represents my preferences from this summer. Some of the books were ones I forced myself to finish. Others, I devoured. Some bored me at times. Others were the reason the laundry didn't get done.

My affection (or lack thereof) aside, I've arranged my books in the order in which they challenged me as a reader. By challenge, I don't particularly mean text complexity. Sometimes the challenge was finishing a book I wasn't set on abandoning but not altogether crazy about. Sometimes the challenge was getting through sections of the text that seemed laborious or unimportant to the meaning of the book as a whole. That is how I define my own challenges. I've linked each of these to my review in Goodreads. It's interesting to me that I might give a book four or five stars, even though it is rather "low" on my challenge ladder, but those on the top of the ladder aren't five star reviews. This leads me to believe that the books that most challenge me aren't always the ones I'm going to fall in love with, though they are books I feel a sense of accomplishment about reading.

The Dinner by Herman Koch

A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris

Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Love May Fail by Matthew Quick

Missoula: Rape and Justice in a College Town by Jon Krakaeur

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight

A Sudden Light by Garth Stein

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

He's the Weird Teacher by Doug Robinson

Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands By Chris Bohjalian

The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

Over the course of the summer, I enjoyed sharing my reading experiences with the #Read4Fun community via #ShelfieWednesday. I began using Instagram and Periscope to share my reading experiences, give book talks and connect with authors. (Thank you Matthew Quick, for responding to my question about book talks at length on Goodreads,  and Chris Bohjalian for chatting with me on Instagram. And props to Matthew Quick, Chris Bohjalian, Maile Meloy, Kimberly McCreight, Graeme Simsion, Doug Robinson, Meg Wolitzer and Lynda Mullaly Hunt for your responses, retweets and favorites. Your responses will help me model a meaningful reading life for my students. Okay, this is a really long parenthetical.)

And now for the grand tallies:

Total books read: 19. This is down from 22 last summer, but data is only as good as the people who interpret it. I moved houses and landed in a neighborhood where play dates abound. And my toddler, who seemed to have navigated the Terrible Twos with no problems whatsoever, turned three and became quite high maintenance -- overnight it seemed. So my usual goal of 20 books for the summer wasn't reached. I might reach 20 by my first day back on Tuesday, but I'm not going to get too technical. Summer's over.

Total pages: 6,564. Okay, I'm the first to say that page counts are subjective. Some publishers have fat fonts and spaces between lines you can plough a Mack Truck through (think The Body of Christopher Creed by Carol Plum Ucci). Others require a magnifying glass and a trip to the chiropractor with the reading of each chapter (think Open by Andre Agassi). Some books have short chapters with lots of white space (think Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson.) Nonetheless, give or take a thousand pages, it is good to do this tally at the end of the summer. It is not, however, good to do this tally EVERY DAY (Are you there reading log punishers? It's me, Oona!).

I would have liked to have read more books sitting down this summer. I would have liked to read books that challenged me even more than the ones on this list. Because of my lifestyle, the tradeoff is that I acquire the books I can read and/or listen to with a lot of interruptions. I look forward to the day I can read a book in solitude and quiet. Today, however, is not that day.

 

 

Ten Picture Books for the ADHD Child

 

 

For the kid who asks "why not?" to the rules, this book shows the worst case scenario for what might happen when you break a rule your parents set down.

With vivid language and illustrations, this picture book invites kids to take their learning outside. The informational text in the back was great for reference when we were tracking woodpeckers in our backyard.

Dated for sure, but this book is laugh out loud funny. The miscommunication and malapropisms of Morris the Moose make for a fun read-aloud.

If you teach the Notice and Note Signpost "Again and Again," the title sentence is a great example! The rhyme makes the text catchy for re-reading, and there are great details in the illustrations to notice each time you read the book again.

Be prepared to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the imaginative ride. The questions from the first read will provide a great focus for the second (and third, and fourth) reads.

Got a kid who passes up crayons and glue sticks for shoeboxes and duct tape? For the imaginative builders in us all, this one puts the A in STEAM.

For the kid who always asks "What if?" meet your match. What if Darth Vader actually had the chance to raise Luke and Leia? What if they just didn't listen?

In his TED Talk, author Mac Barnett talks about how great books shouldn't just be a magical door into a different world; instead, they should break through the door of our world's reality. Kids will have no choice but to suspend their disbelief, and have lots of fun doing so.

As illustrator Jon Klassen has said, the best parts of a story are those that happen between the pages. The words and illustrations in this text offer readers countless interpretive opportunities. A fantastic picture book for teaching irony.

To celebrate the fun of language and the silliness of words, break out this classic. Then, reserve all the other ones in the series to branch out into even more hilarity.

Are My Students House Proud?

 

The zinnias on my new front steps. I don't know much about gardening, but I'm learning as I go. The hydrangeas and peonies in the backyard inspired me to add some color to the front. The more you know, the more you know how much you don't know...

It's been a month since we moved into our new home. The New Place is, ironically, right down the block from the Old Place, a house we rented for two years. The New Place is the sixth home we have lived in since we got married. The New Place is what I like to call “the forever house.” “They can carry me out of this house in a pine box,” I tell my husband, as he climbs into the driver’s seat of the rented moving truck to drive it down the hill. He shrugs and grins, because we have both joked that as soon as we move into the New Place, he’ll get an offer to relocate somewhere around the world. That would be just our luck.

 

The New Place is great. It has all we’ve been looking for in a home, and we should know, because we’ve been looking for the past two years. When we relocated, we had to close on our home in North Carolina within two weeks. We needed to decide upon the town we wanted to live in, even though I had no idea where I’d be working. We needed to decide quickly, because our children were school aged, and we had to get them registered and transferred. So we found the Old Place to rent. We didn’t think we’d be in there for two years, but we were.

 

I wasn’t a fan of the Old Place, nor was my husband. It was a house in the town where we wanted our kids to go to school, and it fit our family. It would suffice short term, but it wasn’t Our Home. We had, prior to this had three of those, so it was kind of weird to be renters instead of owners. The owner of the Old Place was a nice guy, a family guy. He lived right down the street, which is how we know that he knew how to keep a house nicely. His front walk always had nice plantings on it, his yard was fenced and his two car garage always fit both cars . This is why we know our Old Place could have looked nicer. But it didn’t. The words “orange” and “burlap” and “wallpaper” should never appear in the same sentence, let alone a singular phrase, but this house had it: orange burlap wallpaper.  (I expected to turn any corner and find Carol and Mike Brady.)  The Old Place had old stuff. Drafty windows with lead paint chips crusting the edges. A basement and a garage full of coffee cans filled with rusty screws, half filled paint cans and old miniature light bulbs. A garage door opener that was so cracked you could see the battery at the other side. Old washer, old dryer, old fridge, cheap, tiny oven, and a vent fan over the stove that was broken.

 

It was awful and soul killing to live in that place. As we rounded the corner on the final months of our lease, we started not to care. At all. If a lightbulb went out, we didn’t replace it, unless it was essential to do so. When it looked like bees were building a hive near one of the gutters in the back yard, we just told the kids to stay inside and watch TV. Our floors needed to be “broom clean” as per the terms of the rental, so we swept and Swiffered as needed, but the steam mop stopped coming out. In short, it wasn’t our home. We did our due diligence and very little else.

 

There are some things the landlord could have done to ensure that we enjoyed living in the Old Place and cared more about its upkeep. He could have:

1) installed an outlet in the master bathroom so that I could dry and style my hair there instead of in the kids bathroom,

2) had the leak in the chimney fully repaired instead of patched so that cards and school projects on the mantle didn’t get soaked periodically,

3) purchased a new garage door remote,

4) cleared all of the workshop crap out of the garage so we could park our car in there,

5) planted flowers in the front yard, pruned the shrubberies and weeded,

6) nailed lattice board beneath the raised deck so it wasn't a death trap for children;

7) replaced the drafty windows, and;

8) installed a fence in the backyard.

 

I hope you’ve predicted the analogy I’m about to make. If not, you have already stopped reading and assumed it’s about my real estate woes.

It’s not.

It’s about the state of our homes as educators and the state of our students’ homes as learners. For far too long, students have been trained to rent their knowledge. They’ve passed through classrooms as tenants and not owners. They’ve been conditioned to hunt for correct answers, to be dependent on their instructors to give them answers and, when that doesn’t suffice, to read their instructors (far more closely than they have any text) and target their answers to align with their instructors’ preferences. They’ve been trained on due diligence, and they do that work well.

 

If we feel as if our students have successfully gamed the system more than they have learned, if we have experienced a classroom environment in which students have engaged more in the cost benefit analysis of what the bottom line of their grade will be if they do X amount of work for Y result, if we resent the cooperative enterprise created by students who cheat on coursework, then it’s time for a change.

 

If we want our students to own their learning, to build equity in their own futures, they’ve got to be in it to win it. They have to believe that their education is an investment and not an expense. I could have bought the Old Place from the landlord, but why would I? He never took care to spruce up the place more than was necessary for it not to look bad. The Old Place was livable, but it certainly wasn’t enjoyable. I could never imagine building my own home in it. It was a stopgap and that was all.

 

How many adults today feel that their schooling was simply a holding pattern they had to endure and wait out in order to get to their true passion? How many more students will feel this way before the changes they deserve are implemented? How many students want to be success oriented and not failure avoidant, if only we ask them what changes they would like, what repairs we might make?

 

As stewards of learning, it’s time for us to build the homes our students truly want, not the ones that are easy to maintain. It may mean knocking down some walls, pulling down the ugly wallpaper that went out of style long ago. It may mean making some investments that we don’t see a return on for quite some time.

We work for the future, and it’s uncertain for us all, but sticking with what’s comfortable and easy isn’t the answer. It’s time to start asking some serious questions of ourselves and of our students, to build our house on a foundation of inquiry, not image. It’s time to approach this profession with the mindset that change is constant, and the changes that matter most stay the longest. It’s time to own the house, not to rent it out.

Genius Hour Pilot: The Proof is in the Pudding

After wrapping up a pilot of Genius Hour with one of my classes, I asked my eleventh grade students to reflect on its value. When I surveyed my students about their preferences for GH projects, most replied that they simply wanted to write more. Given the responses below, it's understandable why I intend to offer Genius Hour to students again next year. Here are some of my students' thoughts about the value of Genius Hour:

 

"I would go into the period with an idea of something to accomplish, and many times met and surpassed my goals for each day."

 

"I definitely took my time, but the work was consistent and genuine." 

 

"Overall, this was the least stressful assignment of the year for me, because it was my project, I could do whatever I wanted with it, and it couldn’t be wrong."

 

"I learned a lot more about preliminary work for any writing piece. It has been a long time since I have done this much background work for a piece. However, that is totally realistic. In life, writing pieces such as books, articles, etc. require much more background information if it is not provided in a novel or class discussions like we practice in school."

 

"I very much enjoyed the 'delivery' portion of Genius Hour. Given the fact that most of our writing assignments throughout the year are synthesis-based, there isn't as much opportunity for read-alouds; that said, I really liked hearing others read pieces they wrote purely for the sake of enjoyment and creativity."

 

"While working on the GH project, I learned the importance of a good idea.  It was sometimes frustrating for me to begin writing without a concrete question to answer.  Therefore, I tried to think of a couple of varied ideas and edit from there.  It was interesting to see how different people paced themselves, because some of my peers completed an entire draft during Genius Hour, while I wrote parts of essays and later switched them in favor of a different idea."

 

"I came away from this Genius Hour experience with the knowledge that there is a distinct difference between reading and knowing about something, and experiencing and truly understanding it. I was surprised at how little I have truly experienced."

 

"Genius Hour helped me grow as a writer and as a person. The fact that I could write about whatever I wanted (i.e. there was no prompt or formal essay, like most high school English assignments) sparked my creativity and allowed me to learn what I wanted to learn about writing, which was how to write a college essay. Personally, I was able to tap into a hard period of my life and convey it to a reader, I learned that it is very hard to write about yourself to an audience that doesn’t know you, you need to choose your words and details wisely."

 

"Genius Hour really forced me to tackle head on something that I find intimidating, but it allowed me to do it in a controlled way."

 

"I learned that writing before outlining is a form of planning, but after that first stage of pure writing, it's key to go back and outline (or even simply mentally outline) the rest of the story from there."

 

 

"In terms of my writing process for these college essays, I was surprised, after taking the time to read so many online, that one specific event can be explained in so many different ways/styles, and that the one you choose really has an impact on the reader." 

 

"For me, a lot of the time I spent writing during genius hour was spent exploring ideas of the teenagedom that my peers and I are a part of and the common problems that lie therein. Common themes in pieces I have written: love, loss, rape culture, depression/mental illness, family, etc. I basically chose to try and capture the very essence of teenage angst (teenage skaz?), and am working towards further sharpening my focus."

 

"I came into Genius Hour armed with my notebook, an assortment of colorful pens, and an idea. I knew that I wanted to write a story but instead of making a plan (i.e. today I am going to write one chapter, then the next time I will edit it, and then the time after that I will do character analysis, etc.) I decided to play it by ear as I thought that having concrete deadlines would stress me out and take the fun out of writing (I would be writing purely to get it done and not for fun)."

 

 With so much promising feedback, it might be logical to extend Genius Hour to all of my classes. However, while I would like to offer Genius Hour to all of my students, I am resolved to "walk, not run." In another year's time, I might take the full plunge, but I'd like to apply my workflow notes from this year first. It's fair to say that if I needed to defend my choice to allow students to do Genius Hour, all of the above student statements, and of course the student work that accompany those reflections, certainly make a compelling case for its place in a student led classroom.

Carrying Out Our Learning

Upon completing their novel study of The Things They Carried this week, my AP literature students wrote letters to support our troops. In addition, they also created care packages and decorated pillow covers to be sent to those helping to protect our freedom. As I entered into the project with my students, I’ll admit to feeling a bit like a fish out of water. I’m a words person, but I am by no means an art person. At all. (Art teachers, how do you manage?!)  My students and I came upon this opportunity because the grandmother of another eleventh grader (not in our class) is well known in our community for service to our troops.  Later this month, our care packages, gently loved paperback books, letters and pillowcases will make their way into  the hands of those servicemen and women who are protecting our freedom.

The project not only offered my students the opportunity to write to an authentic audience (after a year of writing essays in preparation for the AP exam, no one took umbrage when I suggested an alternative assessment at the end of the novel!), but it also gave me the chance to reach out to others in the school community as well. On the day that we finalized the pillowcases, I brought my iron to school and headed down to use the family living classroom to press the fabric marker designs permanently into the suitcases. Upon arrival, I discovered that my colleague who graciously opened her room for me had also heated up her own iron and was happy to lend a hand. 

Perhaps some might think that this final assessment wasn't "rigorous" enough for my students. It was just a fluff way of ending the year, you might say. I had no rubric for grading the pillowcase designs, nor did I have the expertise to assess my students' artistic abilities. What I do know is that the activity I blocked out two days for took three, because, simply put, my students wanted to be awesome. I'm down with that, because the rigor resides in the student, and in my observation, I think they hold themselves to some pretty high standards.

NCTE/CEL 2014

"If you read a nonfiction text and you are the exact same person after you've read it, you might as well have taken a nap." -Bob Probst at CEL 2014

 

Bob's words at the closing of CEL reinforced my sentiments at the opening of NCTE. While I was not able to attend NCTE on Thursday evening, I did follow tweets prior to my arrival in Washington DC late Friday evening. Before leaving school for the airport on Friday afternoon, I made sure to stop by the book room to borrow a copy of Enrique's Journey. Tweets on Nazario's keynote at NCTE prompted me to get my hands on a copy of it ASAP.  I began reading it at Newark Airport and on my short flight, and I will continue to read it each day in the first ten minutes of class, during which I often tweet quotes from the books I am reading.

 

I knew I wouldn't be able to finish Nazario's book at NCTE/CEL, but even just reading the first 50 pages made me more aware of the world in which I live. When I returned to my hotel room on Saturday, after a long and rewarding day, I was greeted with this note:

 

 

This isn't the first note I've gotten from housekeeping staff at a hotel before. In the past when I've gotten such notes, I might have left a gratuity at the end of my stay. If I had cash. Or not, if I didn't. (Most of the time, I didn't.) There are plenty of rationalizations I had for not leaving a tip. The hotel was expensive, even with the conference rate. I was already partially paying out of pocket to attend this conference for 4 days. I was paying my kids' caregiver for extra hours while I was traveling. The list could be populated with countless more reasons, all of which would be valid.

 

But what would be kind? If she was writing me a note, I should respond, no matter what her story was. Nazario's writing brought me into a world that I had chosen to ignore at worst or be selectively naive about at best. Until I saw the tweets of my fellow NCTE members, until I was brought into the world of Nazario's research, of the inequities faced by the migrant workforce in this country, until Nazario brought me only partially through the traumatizing journey that millions make to work jobs like Lusmila's, I had no idea. Or perhaps that is a lie. Perhaps I did have an idea, but I ignored it, because other things seemed more urgent.

 

As it turned out, I did have cash, which was rare for me. But I also had more. I had books. After perusing the exhibit hall and meeting with many authors for signings, I had an abundance of freebies, and a handful of books, one of which was given to me for free when an author couldn't show up for a signing. I had planned on taking it home to my own sons, but instead, I did this:

 

And then this happened:

 

More notes (and more tips) followed, but I hope that the book found its way into the hands of a child in Lusmila's family. Perhaps her story includes children left behind, but even if it doesn't, whether that book will travel a few blocks, or across the world,  my hope is that it lands in the hands of a child who will like the story and want to read it again. It was given to me for free, and I passed it along for free.

I haven't read all of Enrique's Journey yet, nor do I think that the complexities Nazario addresses in her book are within my province to solve by just one choice. But I am made more aware now that there are children who don't see their mothers for years. Leaving my own kids for just four days was heartwrenching. I could say, "I can't imagine what it would be like to have no choice but to leave them." But through Nazario's writing, I actually can. I can imagine, and my heart can break for Enrique's family and the millions of others.

In their closing keynote at CEL, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst asked attendees (and by extension their students) to consider the worth of these three questions when approaching nonfiction:

In approaching these questions with my reading of Enrique's Journey so far, I can share:

What surprised me? There are so many parents who separate themselves from their children in the effort to provide for them.

What did the author think I already knew? Nazario thinks that I am familiar with the general issues a migrant workforce faces. She thinks I already know that there are inequities faced by immigrant families in America.

What changed or confirmed what I already knew? Nazario offers details that both confirmed what I knew and changed it. For example, years ago, I remember watching the movie El Norte about illegal immigrants , and I remembered a scene where the boy and girl have to crawl through a tunnel of rats on their journey. Nazario has details like that, but many more. The greatest change came in how Nazario described the effects on the migrant's children who are left behind.

As I move into my next unit in Contemporary Nonfiction, I will be asking students to form their reading notes around these three questions. Whether they are reading The Tipping Point, Freakonnomics, Fast Food Nation, Nickel and Dimed, or Enrique's Journey (a choice I will now be offering), they can start with their own unique responses to these questions.

Nonfiction, as Bob Probst says, should change us, but I believe that before it can transform us, it has to motivate us to change our thinking. I used to think that nonfiction wasn't imaginative or whimsical enough, not exciting enough. I was wrong. Great nonfiction like Nazario's makes me imagine all the possibilities, every perspective. It takes me out of myself and puts me into the world. Now that I have started to have this experience more deeply, I can take my own students on a similar journey.

Walking the Talk

Recently, I read a blog post shared by Grant Wiggins about the enlightening experiences a district coach had when she decided to shadow a student for one day. While I might not be able to shadow a student for a full day, I did try my hand this week at doing the same assignment my students did.

 

Right now, we are reading White Noise by Don DeLillo. (I'm reading it for the first time with my students.) As our first marking period is coming to a close, I see that my AP students are juggling a lot. So I told them that in lieu of their usual metacognitive journal entries, they should come to class with some post-it annotations to discuss the reading.

 

I arrived at this decision after trying my hand at doing their homework. When I sat down to write my own journal entry on the reading, it turned out to be 4 pages long. (Most of my students' journals span about 2 pages.) Rather than assigning and reading their journals, I divided the students into groups of 4, giving each an excerpt from my journal and then asking them to annotate, rotate, respond and then discuss the reading, using their short notes, their novels and their comments on my journal entry to guide their discussion.

 

The next homework assignment I plan to give myself is to write an argument, which I will post to this blog upon completion. Constructing an argument on a topic of my choice isn't something I usually do, though I frequently assess how my students do it. I figure it's time to walk the talk, and this time around, I will actually time myself. How long did it take from start to finish? How should this inform me when I am assigning work to my students?

 

Doing some of my students' work not only helps me model the critical reading and writing skills I aspire to engender within my students; it also gives me a clear gauge on how much time the work actually takes, and how I might need to manage my expectations regarding how much time my students should be dedicating to work for my class. 

 

 

Three Big Words that Change My World

Three years ago, I dropped my oldest son off at school for his first full day of kindergarten. As he jumped out of the car and onto the sidewalk, he yelled out three words that will forever be sealed on my heart:

"Here goes everything!"

I'd never said those words to him before. They were new to my ears. They were his own. But they encapsulate everything I feel about the start of a new school year. As a teacher and as a mom, here goes everything.

Here go my children. Three out of four of them are in school this year. Where'd the time go? I send them with love and prayers out into the world, into the classrooms of amazing teachers who care for them like no one else can.

Here goes my cash. Classroom libraries, bulletin boards, organizing the space of my classroom, decorating to make my workspace inspiring and productive, all of that takes money. Which I am glad to spend. So, so much money has gone to causes that matter so, so much less.

Here come books! I can't wait to read everything I can this year. I can't wait to see what my students have read over the summer. And most of all, I can't wait to witness how those books change our lives and change our worlds.

Here goes a little bit of sleep -- but not much. It was nice to sleep in over the summer, and I know that some days I won't get as much as I want. But this year, I'm making a conscious effort to unplug at a decent hour and go to bed. I'm not much use to my children or my students if I don't get the sleep my brain needs to be great at what I do. Contrary to the popular saying, sleep is not for suckers. (And, side note, lunch is not for losers. I try to lunch with colleagues at least once or twice a week. It's not just congenial -- it's collegial.)

Here go my feet. Each day this year, I am committed to exercising for 20 minutes. This might be walking in my neighborhood after dinner, around the grounds of school at lunch or at the end of the day, or even (gasp!) visiting the gym at school to use the equipment there. They might see me in sweatpants. So what? I need to model more healthy habits.

Here goes poetry! I'm committed to writing one small poem every day. They're silly. They're venting. They're for my eyes only. And they make me feel like a writer. I am a writer. And I am a poetry club advisor. I can't give what I'm not getting.

Finally, here goes my heart. I spent too many years on the first day of school valuing what matters little. I've got the best job going. I get to work for the future. I get to model humanity and humility. I get other people's children on my watch. For my children I want kindness, tenderness, compassion -- you can't get to Bloom's taxonomy if you haven't covered Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

 

Here is to a wonderful school year. Here goes everything!

5 Reasons to Dump a Book

I confer with students often about their reading lives, and the hardest conversation to have with them is the one in which I encourage them to abandon a book they are reading. It's a tough conversation because students often see me as a lover of books and get a bit confused. This is their English teacher ... advising them to dump a book? Seems rather incongruous, but it's true. Better to dump a book and move on than to stick with one that's not good for you.

 

I know -- this isn't advice I can give about the books I assign.  Some texts we study are full-class texts, and not all my students love them. In college and in the workplace, they'll do their share of reading what is assigned to them. But I value choice on the horizon of my students' lives, and offer it to them as often as possible. They spend ten minutes each day in my class reading what they choose, and I want what they choose to be what they like.

 

Over the course of this summer, I have read (to date) 23 books. I've dumped five. These are:

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

 

In reflecting upon why I abandoned these, and in considering why I encourage students to abandon books, I've teased out five core reasons why I ultimately dump a book:

 

1. I don't care about the main character anymore.

Mae Holland and Lenny Abramov, I apologize. We can't be friends. Lenny, you need to read up on social cues. I gave up on you halfway through the book. You need to realize that while you can't do better than Eunice Park, staying single is a valid life choice. Maybe you do realize this later on in the story, but I couldn't wait for you to have the aha moment anymore. Mae, while I connected with your vulnerability and your seduction by the culture of transparency, I think you were happiest out kayaking, and that is how I will think of you. Maybe you do go kayaking more and stop drinking the Circle Kool Aid. Maybe I'll find out one day. Not today.

 

2. I don't care about how the book ends.

I absolutely loved the way that Grasshopper Jungle opened. The tone of the narrator, the language play, and the humor all pulled me in. It was like a great first date. And then the plot line jumped the shark and got very, very weird. So, yeah, I really don't care where the story goes now. Another thing to note about my reading of this text was that I checked it out on 3M Cloud reader from my local library. I had it for only two weeks. Usually when I read books this way, that two week time limit motivates me to read quickly. This was the case with This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz as well as And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. Not so much with Smith's novel.

 

3. The author is preachy or gratuitous.

As I listened to the opening chapter of Bel Canto in the car, my mind kept wandering. Here's the deal: if the crux of your scene is a terrorist group holding a throng hostage, I don't care about backstory or description. How can you expect me to love the language if it's not contributing to the suspense of the scene? I should not be thinking about my grocery list during a book -- not a good sign. And Dave Eggers, please stop making your readers feel like total nincompoops. (It's the reason why I abandoned A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, too.) I'm sorry I like to use my smartphone, but is there really a need to be so didactic in your tone?

 

4.  Peer pressure.

Recently, I had a discussion with my niece about The Fault in Our Stars. It was one of those secret side discussions in which one does a paranoid turnaround to see if anyone overhears. Because neither one of us liked TFIOS. We also found Looking for Alaska to be an emo book with lots of loose ends. For the most part, I value peer and colleague referrals when it comes to book. The majority of the time, I read and like the texts they recommend. But sometimes I don't. I read The Circle because some really smart people I know were reading it too, but admiration can't sustain me. I dumped it. That doesn't make me dumb. 

 

5. I plan to return to it later -- or it just turns out that way.

Sometimes, the content of a book challenges us. Or the timing is not on our side. This week, I tried to read Train Dreams. Under different circumstances, I might really appreciate this text. But I would like a quiet place with time to read it in one sitting. That's not happening in my house this week. As I write this, I am about 70% finished with The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider. I bought it for $1.99 when Amazon was running a deal on it. I gave up on it about halfway through. It was YA, and it was good, but it wasn't wowing me. Well, earlier this week, I found myself in a waiting room with NO reading material (aka: Hell). So, I took out my phone and returned to Schneider's novel. I thought I had abandoned it, but as it turns out, I paused it. And the place where I picked it up happened to be a turning point, where things got more interesting.

 

There are, of course other reasons to pause or abandon a book. Perhaps its emotional content is more than one can handle, its language makes it laborious or another better book comes along. There's no use suffering through a book or taking the medicine approach that "it's for the best" to bear the text. I'd rather help my students persevere in other arenas. 

 

This year, as I return to school, I plan to be more intentional and more articulate about these reasons. If students spend less time on books they're tolerating and more time reflecting on what reading works for them, I'll be helping them read for themselves and no one else.

Top Ten Picture Books of Summer 2014

This summer, to select titles for my family's daily picture book, I followed the #bookaday hashtag. Every one of the books on my top ten list was either a title posted by a member of my PLN or another title by an appealing author or illustrator. One important aspect that I feel is important to underscore is that I reserved over 100 books at the local library, then previewed and selected half of those for our daily picture books, and only about one in every five or six books we read was a home run for all.

Those numbers make the case for radically personalized learning. As a secondary ELA teacher, I believe this scenario makes a strong case for choice. As students get older, they should be allowed more choice, and often what happens is a narrowing of teacher selected texts rather than a rich classroom library. As a mom, I see that each of my children has his preferences, and I did my best to respond to those individually. Below is a list of the books we all enjoyed. Were there some I enjoyed that are not on this list? Absolutely. And I enjoyed reading them individually to the child who most liked them.

 

Lost and Found and How to Catch a Star by Oliver Jeffers

These were both hits with my rising kindergartener. They invited slow reading and lots of questions. I also think that the quiet temperament of the boy in these books matched up with my son's own character. Those text to self connections can't start too early.

 

Wild Boars Cook by Meg Rosoff and Sophie Blackall

This one came with us on vacation and was the nightly request of my rising first grader. I'd like to think that in a house where food runs out very quickly, there were some meaningful text-to-life connections. Perhaps that's wishful thinking...

 

Are You Awake? by Sophie Blackall

Malcolm Gladwell's term "stickiness factor" most certainly applies to this adorable picture book. This was requested ad nauseum and, by the time it got returned to the library, had been read aloud by every child -- and that includes my two year old.

 

I Dare You Not to Yawn by Helene Boudreau and Serge Bloch

Seriously -- everyone was yawning, no matter what time of day we read this. Of course, I favored it at bedtime the most.

 

Little Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Jenn Corace.

Having a tough time getting the kiddos to eat their veggies? Try a little reverse psychology with this book, where Little Pea must suffer through five pieces of candy for dinner every night before he can enjoy his spinach dessert. After reading this, we made zucchini spice muffins to make the best of both worlds.

 

Spoon by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Scott Magoon

This was another one that became a nightly request. And a daily request. We never knew utensils could come to life in such creative ways. And of course, the English teacher in me kept squelching the urge to make a personification lesson out of this. It's summer -- let's just enjoy the whim of a talking spoon family that gets to rest their heads on sugar packet pillows.

 

Winston and George by John Miller and Guiliano Cucco

If we ever doubt our own creative capacities, we can take solace in the story of how this book got published fifty years after it was written and several years after the death of its illustrator. Thank goodness that John Miller, now in his eighties, was cleaning out his attic and came across his old work. The nonfiction/informational insert on crocodiles and crocodile birds was highly engaging as well.

 

I'm Bored by Michael Ian Black and Debbie Ridpath Ohi

I know I'm not the only parent who hears this title phrase throughout my summer. This book proves that boredom has the potential to be the breeding ground of imagination. In fact, while I did not intentionally choose this book to combat the "I'm bored" virus that invaded my household, I'm pretty sure my kids assumed I had.

 

See What a Seal Can Do by Chris Butterworth and Kate Nelms

Peppered with informational captions in smaller print on each page spread, this nonfiction read aloud was fun for all. The illustrations were so close to authentic photographs, and the narrative read practically like a nature show voiceover. I also appreciated that my rising third grader could take the book aside and read more of the captioning after we had read it all together.

 

In comparison to last year's top ten list, I feel like more of an expert in selecting books that my children would have interest in. I still search out the authors and illustrators my children love, but I also feel that tapping into my PLN made it much easier to find titles that I believed my children would love to try. By next summer, I'm sure the list will be different, as will my children, as will I!