Random Summer Reading Thoughts

Took the kids to Barnes and Noble yesterday afternoon to make some "Summer Reading" purchases. They have their lists from the schools they'll be starting in the fall (Godhelpme, middle and high) and want to get the required reading out of the way to free up thinking space for their REAL summer reading.

Austin's heading into English II Honors (whatever that means) and has to annotate his readings. He is at that point where I have spent much time - the place where you think it is offensive, at best, to write in a book. And I'll admit, although I have no problems marking up my professional reading, especially printed copies of articles, I still don't like to capture my thinking in my novels. Maybe that comes from having borrowed so many, or maybe it's some other hang-up about letting the feelings and thoughts enter and exit without needing or wanting to capture them. Don't know... Either way, Austin picked one from the required list and one sequel to a book he'd read earlier this year, and will pick the third sometime after making his way through these two.

Kori's list was actually at the house, so we pulled it up in the i(diot)Phone. She's such a fiction girl, so the SC Junior Book Award Nominees list was plenty for her to make her choices. Conveniently, the good folks at the BN had a table set up with stacks of them. She asked for the one that was missing that she most wanted (Anything but Typical) and sent the workerguy scurrying into the back for it. We picked up a few others and I slipped over to the table for the Children's Book Award Nominees, which was the designated list most of my friends from this year would be using to guide their choices. I snatched up four or five for my classroom and for the beginnings of my own summer list.

See, for the past three years, I have only read a very few novels, what with all the reading of M.Ed. things, and my Summer Reading will be stacks and stacks of books from my classroom library. Sure, there are plenty of grown-up books that I might enjoy here and there, but I need, need, NEED to know more books for helping matchmake them with my fifth grade friends. I have to find more books that compel me to keep reading so I can help my friends meet a book that will push them beyond the required chapter or pages or minutes. I need to find out which ones from the required list will be good ones for me to suggest when I run into my friends in the grocery store and harass them lovingly about what they've been reading. I need to read, and so very often, the truest books are the ones not written for adults.

So, I've read two so far this summer break, and I am remembering how hard it is to try to read a book through a kid's eyes. It's hard to remember that kids don't always read a book cover-to-cover in one or two blocks of reading time. They might hit a chapter or two, then wait a day, then read some more, then wait, so they might not notice that the author seems to be rushing through the story - they've had hours or days to exist with the parts they've read, so when they pick it up, they're ready to move forward. It's hard to remember that my younger friends might get stuck on a part that doesn't make sense, maybe because of some word choice the author made, or because they don't understand a reference, or because the stupid publishers keep splitting the words up in arbitrary places... I don't have that problem as much when I am reading their books, so it's hard to remember how much thinking that can take. It's so hard, in fact, that I found myself wondering why I would even try to be a kid-reader. Duh! In order to make the most of a book, I need to read it through my eyes. Of course! I find myself thinking critically about the complexity of the novels, of how I want the author to develop the characters more, or how I wish they wouldn't leave out such big blocks of time, or blah blah blah, and that makes me realize that some kids will be doing the same thing, even if some are not. I need to be aware of what I am thinking when I am reading and not always second guessing what a kid might be thinking. They want to know what I think of a book when I recommend one to them, not what I think they will think. They want to know what a book made me feel, not what emotions I think it might evoke in them. They want to know what my relationship was with the author. They want to know why I think they would like it, which means that I know THEM, not just the book. THAT is what I need to remember as I read this stack I've started.

Once I got that straight in my head, I opened myself to a realization: what I am learning about myself as a reader is that I bring my relationships with others to every book I read, and that is what makes books great. All that text-to-text and text-to-self and text-to-world connecting and the labeling thereof is one thing (and Austin has to label the connections he makes in his annotations - UGH) but I think we might be ignoring or missing out on one important connection we make when we read: Text-to-others. (And yes, I am making this up as I go, so please, friends, tell me if I stole this from someone else in my subconscious readerbrain.)

Take the book I just finished this morning: Heart of a Shepherd by Rosanne Parry. I found that I wasn't so much imagining how I would feel if I were the main character (Brother) or how he was feeling or thinking. Instead, I realized I was thinking of friends I have who might read this and what they might be feeling as they read it. I thought of a young Catholic friend I taught this year who would understand all the references to the Mass and to serving as an acolyte, and how that would draw him closer to Brother. I thought of my grownup friend from California and how I had never heard of Basque before I met her and how she would connect to those references. I imagined the life my pre-school nephew might lead, being the son of a Lt.Colonel, knowing that his dad might have led some neighbors into battle and sent them home in pieces, and how that might make him feel if he read this when he was older. I couldn't think about how I connected to this text without thinking about how others might. I had all of those people with me in my bed this morning as I read the final chapter and wept and wept. If I had allowed myself to read this book analytically, or critically, or from a how-would-I-teach-this-book lens, I would not have. Because I invited my relationships into the book, I could feel the story, know the characters, and imagine the life Brother was leading.

I guess what I am thinking here is that I need to help my readers find books that connect to them, to their experiences, to their schema, but maybe I need to spend some extra time helping them build relationships with each other so they can take each other home with them over the summer and over their lives. If they know about more than just themselves, if they know their friends and their friends' stories, if they can imagine that theirs is not the only point-of-reference, then they can grow in their own understanding of books by taking those friends' lives into account when they are reading.

So, as I start my next book this evening, know that one or more of you, dear readers, might be curled up beside me as I invite you in for my experience with the new text. Looking greatly forward to seeing who shows up in my head!

I'd rather be naked

Before you get excited about the title, know that this is still a PG-rated place. No nudity here, unless you let it pop into your mind, and I strongly suggest you don't.

My family is at the neighborhood pool. I am not. There are several reasons for this, which I suppose you could call excuses, but I'll share them with you.

One: It is hot out there. It is not in here. I love the outdoors, but I have perspired enough in the past 24 hours to last a decade. Fifth grade celebration (which is not a graduation, but by golly it felt like one after two hours in the seriously under-cooled theater) and the extended recess yesterday afternoon had me fanning myself so much yesterday I should have sore triceps today. (I love that as I was pushing the last little bits of paper before it started that my little people knew instinctively that I could not fan myself with the laminated Uncle Sam poster while gluing a script to construction paper, and three of them leaped into action, creating my own personal fan system. God bless them for knowing their old woman teacher.) All of that to say, I am paying for this air conditioning and I do not mind one bit being in it.

Two: Swimsuits are bad, bad, bad news for women who do not have perfect bodies. Guys, I promise, not one of us is judging your middle-aged white bellies or your hairy backs or your scrawny bird chests. We are too busy worrying about who can tell how much skin we have that our swimsuits won't contain, or how European we look despite our best hair-removal efforts, or the number of jiggles-per-step our thighs now make. Really. It is almost hard to have fun knowing that you feel like a marine mammal pretending to be human. It is especially hard when you haven't always had a waistline bigger than your hips or bust. Combined. I tried to put on a suit to go join my family. I couldn't get my biggest one-piece on, and the tankini that fits actually makes me look bigger than I do naked. This can not be the phenomenon the manufacturer expected for me.

Three: I like being here by myself. I like napping. I like (well, don't get annoyed by) doing laundry and tidying up when I am home alone. I can clip my hair out of my face and take off my more uncomfortable garments when I am at home on a Saturday afternoon and love knowing that I do not have to go anywhere all day. Heck, I can soak in the tub and pretend it's a pool - and not have to worry about how I look (see "Two" above).

So, I guess I am saying it is summer and I would rather be naked. Is that so wrong?

Are all readers created equal?

Some of you who frequent this space might not know that I am in my capstone course for an M.Ed in Language and Literacy from USC. (Okay, most of you who frequent this space are in that same program. But I like to pretend I have other readers.) It is not a thesis program (hence, the M.Ed. and not the M.A., I am guessing) but we have a culminating academic paper due in, um, 11 days, which is to be a synthesis of our understanding about one of the tenets of literacy instruction we've explored and embraced over these 33 hours/ 3 years. Am I the only one who thinks this is actually a thesis program? Hey, we've been doing academic vocabulary in our district - see that "thesis" root in "synthesis" up there? Yeah. I am to express belief and support it with evidence from the Body of Works we've studied...

Anyway, I digress. (Not shocking.) And I am on this site writing some random ponderings instead of in Word writing the bloody paper. (Also, not shocking.) But not really...

See, I just finished rereading a couple of articles we read at the beginning of our program, way back in the summer of 2008, right at the peak of my mourning and during a time when I still wasn't certain if I would be teaching the coming fall. Both were about Louise Rosenblatt: one was her thoughts on reading occurring in the transaction between reader and text, and on the efferent and aesthetic stances of readers. The other, on her theory in practice at my pal Emily Grace's AMAZING elementary school. As I read these articles with my older and (perhaps) wiser eyes, I experienced something new (as Louise would have predicted). Actually, I think I experienced some of the same old things, just with a different perspective grounded in having experienced more living and teaching and mothering.

Here's what I read today: School too often interferes with growing readers by trying to grow them too quickly, at someone else's arbitrarily inflicted pace and under someone else's definition of "growth."

Now, some of you are trying to figure out how I got there, I am guessing. (Some of you might not have any idea what I am talking about, but read on, and I promise some of it might make sense.) This week, my precious babies (those both borne and assigned unto me) took MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) Reading. They sat at their little computer screens and answered all kinds of "comprehension" questions about passages, roots of words, literary elements, and such. Some of them did astoundingly better on this administration of MAP than they had in the fall. A good many of them flatlined within the range they had scored in the fall. My own personal fifth grader kicked its assonance, both in raw score and in fall-spring difference, especially unusual given that she didn't have much room to grow! With all this MAP on the mind and with my existential ponderings of my core beliefs which I call "pre-writing," I came to wonder what in the world is going on in our classrooms and lives that makes one kid's MAP Reading transaction produce results so very different than another's.

It occurs to me that MAP (and, indeed, PASS, SAT, and all other standardized testing) measures not "academic progress" but "dominance of efferent stance in experiencing this text." It also occurs to me that the brilliant things my students have said all year long about the texts we've shared and the ones they've read with friends can not be reflected by this test. Now, I don't teach Kori (thanks be to God) but I do teach lots and lots of little people who have been in her classes since first grade. She has sat alongside these chronological peers for the same "lessons" in reading and writing, math, science, and social studies. She has heard the same lectures, done the same activities and projects, eaten the same lunch, played the same PE games... In short, she has lived with these people school day in and school day out. But she looks infinitely "smarter" when it comes to the numbers she can get the test to produce.

And yes, y'all, that girl is smart. But I can't say that she thinks any more deeply than the people I teach. She is clever and witty, but no more so than many of my babies. She is quick to incorporate new concepts into her current understandings of the world, but I teach lots of kids who are that way. I am definitely not involved in her homework - never have been - and I don't even read to her anymore. (Sad!) Our family is as dysfunctional as the next. (OK, maybe not, but we do argue and keep a messy house and watch a lot of tv...) HOW DID SHE LEARN TO PLAY THE TESTING GAME?

The only answer I have is that reading is a part of her - a big part - and she has always been a reader, not just of texts, but of everything around her. She studies her environment, connects to it, makes everything make sense. But don't these other kids? Didn't their mommies take them to the hands-on museums and the Little Gym and all the other hyper-mom nonsense I've done? Most of them did. Some of them have provided experiences I never even thought of or cared to! But something in her multitude of experiences made language, made literacy make sense to her in a way that it doesn't yet to so many other kids. She can distinguish "paradox" from "oxymoron" and "hyperbole" because she constructed ideas of these concepts, then someone named them for her, and then she managed to remember the name long enough to recognize it on the test. Maybe her aesthetic stance toward life has enabled her to code-switch and recognize when an efferent stance is needed, and her aesthetic reading foundation has made the efferent possible...

It is hard for me to distinguish which of my beliefs about reading and learning were always part of me, which ones were confirmed by my participation in this program, and which ones I have only recently come to hold true. I do know this: learning is harder for some kids than others, particularly "academic" learning. Maybe it isn't even harder as much as it takes longer to take root. But our system fails those kids by making them jump right into demonstrating their understanding before they are ready to even realize that they DO understand. We fail them by spending too much of their life hours doing mundane and damaging tasks rather than helping them see what a life as a reader and learner has to offer. We spend precious hours teaching them how to use each other's expertise to further their writing and how it feels to record your thoughts and share them with the world, and then we have to spend countless more hours helping them learn how to respond to a prompt all by themselves without assistance of any resource other than a dictionary and a thesaurus. It's crap. Pure. Crap. And I don't know how much longer I can endure it.

So, to bring it back to my title - are all readers created equal? YES. Yes, they are, in that each is equipped with the capacity to acquire language and to use it to make sense of the world around them. Each is born to be loved and to experience life fully. Each comes to school looking for someone to help them further their understanding of the world. And we systematically blow it for so many of our kids by doing ridiculous things in the name of Education.

I don't need a test to show me which kids are readers and which are not. They all are. I see it in them every day, and I intend full well to help them see it, too.

Spring is in the air - and my bronchi

Blucko. I have an official case of the crud. My official self-diagnosis is a bronchitis/sinusitis combo, brought on by the public mating of all God's vegetation over the course of the past two weeks.

And so, I self-medicate. A little of this, a lot of that, hoping to find the right combination that will knock the edge off of my cough-till-I-pee-a-little crud-expelling. (Have I mentioned my affinity for the hyphen?) Today's drugs of choice include Robitussin DM and ibuprofen in addition to the daily cetirizine (Zyrtec) and Flonase (rather, its generic, manufactured by - no kidding - Hi-Tech Pharmacal).


I'm about to bite the bullet and try the much-lauded neti pot. I am a girl who greatly (overly?) appreciates the beauty of pus, that amazing combination of white blood cells, bacteria, and proteins that magically rids our bodies of many rank and raunchy invaders. I openly admit the pleasure I find in bursting big boils, popping pimples, draining abcesses and cysts... So you'd think I'd look forward to the potentially disgusting booger-ridden crud that will pour from my nostril if I find the courage to squirt saline up the other.

Here's the problem with THAT: I have always been mortified of drowning. (Thanks, momma.) I grew up at the coast, and I love the water, and I do know how to swim, but I am still a little anxious about putting myself in any situation in which I might find myself inhaling water. Know what I am saying? Why would I ever squirt volumes of water up my nose? Seems counter-intuitive to the whole breathing concept.

But I might be reaching my limit. Might give it a try.

Or I might just go see the doctor tomorrow and see what other pharmaceutical magic she has up her sleeve for me.

Squirrel Euthanasia

This story has so much potential for full development and pondering, but here are the nitty gritty details.

Casey Jones managed to catch a squirrel today, which is something our beloved Estherjen (RIP) never managed, but much attempted to do.

I was alerted to this accomplishment by the Boy, who was somewhere between mortified and delighted to report that the yellow retrieverhound was playing chew-toy with said rodent. Apparently there was thrashing about of the then-LIVE squeaky toy. And there was, apparently, squeaking.

Now it's one thing to find a mouse the cat killed, and likely toyed with for a while before it died, but this was timed right in the throes of the action sequence.

Anyway, I rushed to the aid of the rodent, sending the most-proud canine strutting joyfully into the house. As I arrived on the scene, I saw the 3D, HD version of one of those cartoons where a critter splats up against a hard surface. (Picture Skrat in Ice Age as he hits a glacier.) Arms splayed, one of them inverted in a completely unnatural direction. Back half moist with Caseyslobber, stiff. Frantic breathing, but total stillness otherwise. Beady eye glistening and wide open. Oh. My.

Honestly, my first thought was to call a wildlife rehabilitator. I am not even kidding. But then I came to my senses and realized that this poor guy was beyond rehab, or at least a prudent use of fiscal resources required to rehabilitate a dime-a-dozen creature stupid or slow or sick enough to be caught by my not-so-bright-herself mutt.

I knew it needed mercy. Husband wasn't due home for hours. I just wanted to hold it, which, boys and girls, despite everything I know about rabies and diseases and such, I did. Kori brought me an old rag; I wrapped it up and it allowed me to hold its busted little body gently, without protest. I thought about all of the life-on-the-prairie sorts of books I've read (what would Caddie Woodlawn have done?), and figured its little head needed a swift blow to ensure immediate ending to this suffering. (I did run through my mental rolodex of NRA members I knew...)

But, friends, I couldn't muster the guts. Maybe I could have, but my dear friend's beloved was willing to assist, so I didn't have to be this poor little fella's grim reaper. I almost thought I could have suffocated it, held its little nose and mouth shut, but it might have started to struggle (not okay!), and in light of recent SC news, well, you understand...

So, my neighbor is my hero today. My kids got another life lesson. And, here's the bonus, I learned a little about myself. I am only merciful-ish, and I am pretty sure I don't want to be a farmer.

RIP, little guy. And for cryin' out loud, little guy's friends, get the hint: Rat-dog lives in my yard! Go somewhere else!

Summer Plans

This cracks me up.

The Hayspartyof4 should be receiving our passports any day now. We needed to get them because the Senior Hayses are taking us on a cruise to the Bahamas (yeah, we're grateful, but...). Now, we 4 had already planned to go to Sandusky, OH to go to Cedar Point and ride a bunch of roller coasters and such, but since we will have passports, we have added Canada's Wonderland in Toronto to our itinerary. Fun.

Well, it seems that Rush is on tour this summer, too, and we thought it would be entirely too cool if they were playing in Toronto at all in July, and, of course, as fate would have it, they are. So, we are now planning our Cedar Fair Parks tour around the tickets we have now purchased for the July 17 Rush show in the YYZ. Too much. (No, we will not be attending the RUSHCON in town that week...)

Anyway, just wanted to mention that, as it makes me smile to imagine the memories we will be making with our little family this summer, both on a boat with their grandparents and in the Honda with just the four of us. I can't wait.

Anyone know of any crazy roadside attractions on our route from SC to Toronto to Ohio and back?

I love:

I have so little to say here, it seems. But in the spirit of trying to post occasionally, I'll just post this because I can.

I love: