Category: Education

Ethnic Studies Vanishing in Tuscon Schools

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The Tucson Unified School District is losing books on ethnic studies, which even includes Shakespeare’s The Tempest. More importantly:

“In a school district founded by a Mexican-American in which more than 60 percent of the students come from Mexican-American backgrounds, the administration also removed every textbook dealing with Mexican-American history, including “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement” by Arturo Rosales, which features a biography of longtime Tucson educator Salomon Baldenegro.  Other books removed from the school include “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures,” by Elizabeth Martinez and the textbook “Critical Race Theory” by scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.”

Banning books is never a good idea. Please stop.

Writing on Writing

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It’s almost two weeks into the new year, and your resolution is write more is lagging a little. If you need some writerly inspiration, check out these great books on writing. My favorite is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. She’s encouraging, offers solid advice, and adds more than a dash of humor throughout.

A couple of others I’d add:

  • What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by By Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter
    Pam was one of my professor in grad school, so I might be biased, but honestly it’s an excellent book with fantastic examples and exercises. I used it in an undergrad fiction class as well and loved it then.
  • Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
    More on the literary analysis side, but still very helpful.
  • Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
    A workshop classic. Lots of great advice about writing as a practice.
  • 2012 Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market by Chuck Sambuchino
    A fantastic collection of information on agents, publishing houses, magazines, and more. Plus lots of articles on craft. A new one is released every year, so make sure to get the most up-to-date info.

What are your books for literary inspiration?

Petition to Support School Libraries

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From the The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance:

“We ask that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provide dedicated funding to help support effective school library programs. Such action will ensure more students have access to the resources and tools that constitute a 21st century learning environment. Reductions in school library programs are creating an ‘access gap’ between schools in wealthier communities versus those where there are high levels of poverty. All students should have an equal opportunity to acquire the skills necessary to learn, to participate, and to compete in today’s world.”

Sign the petition here. Right now there are only about 5,000 signatures and the petition needs about 15,000 more. So spread the word! School libraries are an essential part of literacy development and deserve our support.

Just When You Thought Bridge to Terabithia Couldn’t Make You Cry More

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Since we have a new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, that means Katherine Paterson has stepped down. But her article on her experience as ambassador is just lovely. Just to get you started:

““Bridge to Terabithia saved my life.” The speaker was Trent Ready, a 6’7″ veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The 400 or so middle schoolers in the audience were staring up at the stage transfixed as he told them that reading a children’s book in the desert, during a time when he thought any day might be his last, had made it possible for him to keep going–to find beauty in the midst of the ugliness of war. “I just want you guys to realize how important reading is. How a book can save your life.”

Standing on the stage next to Trent as he made this plea for the vital importance of reading, I was as moved as the audience by his words. I’d been travelling as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature urging young and old to “Read for your life” and here was Trent delivering my message more eloquently than I possibly could have to this auditorium full of children. It was a culminating experience of two memorable years as Ambassador.“

My heart! The tears! The rest of the article is fantastic as well. Congratulations Katherine, and onto another great year of children’s literature ambassadorship!

(via The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance)

Links Galore

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A few more reading links for the day:

Studies Show Reading Is Cool

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Another reason it’s a great time to read and write children’s literature:

“In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published a study titled Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, reporting that the number of literature-reading young adults dropped 20 percent between 1982 and 2002—the greatest recorded loss of readership in the country’s history. The decline represented 20 million potential readers and Dana Gioia, NEA Chairman, called it a “national crisis.”

Panic ensued and a flurry of reading incentive programs sprung up around the country, including NEA’s own The Big Read which now operates in all fifty states and even internationally. Then, in a 2009 report, Reading on the Rise, the NEA proudly reported a 21 percent increase in young adult readership which began in 2002 and has continued through 2008.”

The emphasis is mine, but the facts stand alone. Thanks to cultural touchstones like Harry Potter, more kids are reading and more publishers have recognize that this is a huge market that demands good writing. Also, in case you think technology is going to kill the book:

“In January 2010, the Kaiser Family Foundation published a comprehensive study of the media habits of more than 2,000 eight to eighteen year-old American children. The study found that the average time spent reading books for pleasure in a typical day rose from 21 minutes in 1999 to 23 minutes in 2004, and finally to 25 minutes in 2010. The rise of screen-based media has not melted children’s brains, despite ardent warnings otherwise: “It does not appear that time spent using screen media (TV, video games and computers) displaces time spent with print media,” the report stated. Teens are not only reading more books, they’re involved in communities of like-minded book lovers. The Story Siren, a young adult online book review authored by an Indiana graduate student gets 3,500-4,000 unique page views a day.”

The internet isn’t the end of the book. It’s helping teens explore books and connect with similar-minded readers. I find this all extremely hopeful for the next generation of readers and writers.

A New Ambassador

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Congratulations to author Walter Dean Myers, who has recently been named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature! Myers is probably best known for his novel Monster, which won the Printz and was a finalist for the National Book Award, among others. But his bibliography is very extensive; check out his website for the full list.

From a recent New York Times article about Myers:

“He will receive a medal at the Library of Congress next Tuesday. One of the first things he expects to say is that reading is not a Victorian pastime.

“People still try to sell books that way — as ‘books can take you to foreign lands,’ ” he said. “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”“

I love Myers’s assertion that reading isn’t optional. Reading is a necessary part of life and can deeply affect the everyday experience. I’m excited to see what Myers has in store as the National Ambassador.

(via The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance)

Public Works

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The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law has an interesting article about why there are no authors/books entering the public domain this year in the United States. In short:

“Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year, or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019….When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.”

The idea isn’t to destroy copyright entirely; that would be detrimental to working authors. But why shouldn’t Virginia Woolf’s works be available this year, or Rebel Without a Cause? If artistic works such as these could be more easily used in schools and libraries and in other works of art, isn’t that a good thing? I’d be okay with waiting until an artist/author/copyright owner is dead, but 70 years after? There needs to be some compromise.

The Need to Read

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Reading isn’t just a fun pastime or a way for high school teachers to torture their students. According to one study, t’s a neurologically transformative experience:

“They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative”. The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways.“

When you read, your brain is creating the world and people about which you’re reading. You develop new ways of thinking about the real world. With that, we can be more empathetic and creative people. Gail Rebuck sees this as a very necessary part of our past and future as humans:

“If reading were to decline significantly, it would change the very nature of our species. If we, in the future, are no longer wired for solitary reflection and creative thought, we will be diminished. But as a reader and a publisher, I am optimistic. Technology throws up as many solutions as it does challenges: for every door it closes, another opens. So the ability, offered by devices like e-readers, smartphones and tablets, to carry an entire library in your hand is an amazing opportunity.”

This is another reason I think the e-reader isn’t the destruction of books. It gives people the opportunity to have more books more readily accessible. But a paperback or library copy will expand your brain just as well, too. All you have to do is pick up a novel or autobiography or travel book and get your brain working. It’s all part of our evolution.

Based on Actual Events

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Steve Sheinkin won the 2011 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction for his book The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism, & Treachery. From his acceptance speech:

“But I realized there was more to Arnold’s appeal than the story, and it goes back to Arnold making people nervous. Why does he make people nervous? It’s not that Arnold is a bad guy—it’s that he’s a good guy and a bad guy. A hero and a traitor.

“As a country, I don’t think we handle contradiction very well. When it comes to talking about the American Revolution and our Founders—essentially, our creation story—we seem most comfortable sticking to two-dimensional portraits. It’s hard for us to think of the United States as a nation built on grand and beautiful ideals but with deep moral flaws woven in from the start. I think we’re afraid that if we try to explain this complex mixture to young readers, they’ll be confused, and maybe less patriotic. I’m convinced it’s one of the main reasons kids think history is boring.”

I love Sheinkin’s point about history being complicated, and how we avoid those issues when teaching history to kids. History is never about good guys versus bad guys. It’s about real people dealing with immediate problems and trying to solve them the best they can, or trying to succeed in their own right, or trying to avoid major collapse. It’s what we still do. The more books we have that deal with complex historical figures, the better. And, as Sheinkin says, this might help kids get more invested in history.

Make sure to click through for the rest of Sheinkin’s speech.