Last winter I read The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, a sixth grade teacher who uses an independent reading program in her classroom as the foundation of all her teaching. It changed the way I plan to teach English more substantially than any other thing I've ever encountered, except Monica (who agrees with her point, incidentally).
This summer at Bread Loaf I met another high school teacher who had had the same revelation, but thanks to a different book: Book Love by Penny Kittle, who holds the same beliefs as Miller but teaches high school, and thus provides a lot of helpful guidance for the kind of classroom I'll be hosting in a week and a half. Well, all her kids are American it seems (she teachers in NH) but I'm sure similarities outweigh differences. I read Book Love when I got home, and I'm ready to start the year with independent reading front and center.
Well, not quite ready. I need to read some young adult (YA) books so I have some recommendations to make to students. This is a task I have been working all year to come up with reasons to avoid. I have done gymnastics to justify reading only what I want to read, because isn't that the way to model active and enjoyable reading for my students? Yes, but more than that I need to be able to connect them with books that match their ability level and interests.
I'm taking Kittle's recommendations. She has a list on her site that includes books she suggests for a Book Love classroom. I've started this week with the ones that are in my library and available currently.
1. Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is the author of the famed Speak that we actually read in the tenth grade classroom in at the Ramallah Friends School. I think it was not the right choice for those kids, at least not in class, but Anderson is a very well-loved YA writer, and most of the tenth graders (the girls, at any rate) loved the book. This book is about a high school senior and her struggles with her friend's death, and her own struggle with anorexia. Both Speak and Wintergirls do a wonderful job of conveying the struggles inherent to adolescent girlhood, but both finish with too-rapid uplifts. The girls start to heal, emotionally and physically, in the last ten pages of the book and by the end we get the impression that they are solidly on the path to health and happiness. Perhaps this rosy ending is a requirement of the genre - you don't want to be too harsh when your readers are also in this adolescent hell. But I think it makes the story feel cheap, when before the quick-mend, it felt compellingly real.
2. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. This 2001 book which I never read is wonderful. I cannot level the same criticism of the ending as I did for Wintergirls. The end is also sudden, but fittingly. Struggle aboard a lifeboat does end suddenly, and the return to normal society is jarring and lacking the catharsis one imagines at sea (jeez, listen to me, talking like a regular castaway. I have no idea of course. But this is what I'd imagine). I wish this one had been longer. I wish I could have gotten to know Pi even more than I did during the first 100 pages of the book. Kittle talks about what it's like to "reluctantly close a book" and that's how I felt yesterday when I closed this one.
3. A strange parallel to Life of Pi has been Escape from Camp 14! One man's remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden. Shin, the main character, was born in a labor camp in North Korea and escapes when he's in his twenties after so many years of horror. Both this and Life of Pi are stories of individual struggle and hardship. This one, which I've listened to as an audiobook, feels like a podcast because it's non-fiction, and Harden, a newspaper journalist, is straightforward and no-frills in his style. Shin is strangely inhuman by our standards. He doesn't know love, loyalty, nostalgia, or warmth in the camp. He grows up having no conception or awareness of God. He has not lost anything precious because he never had anything precious. Contrast with Pi, who has lost everything - a wonderful childhood, his family, his comfort and safety. Well, he has Richard Parker. My goodness, even writing these few sentences makes me want to go back and read it again.
But onward! I think that books 2 and 3 on this list will be too hard for pretty much everyone in my class. Next on my list is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which is decidedly YA. Then I hope to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, which I think is also going to be appropriate for less confident readers.
It's been interesting to read this memoir from North Korea when that country is in the news so much this week. I can't pretend to understand all this stuff about nuclear disarmament or economic sanctions. I keep thinking of the North Koreans that Shin encounters in and out of the camp. Where are they in the conversations in the news? I suppose they are in the pleas not to go to war. This article helped me get a sense of what's happening.
This summer at Bread Loaf I met another high school teacher who had had the same revelation, but thanks to a different book: Book Love by Penny Kittle, who holds the same beliefs as Miller but teaches high school, and thus provides a lot of helpful guidance for the kind of classroom I'll be hosting in a week and a half. Well, all her kids are American it seems (she teachers in NH) but I'm sure similarities outweigh differences. I read Book Love when I got home, and I'm ready to start the year with independent reading front and center.Well, not quite ready. I need to read some young adult (YA) books so I have some recommendations to make to students. This is a task I have been working all year to come up with reasons to avoid. I have done gymnastics to justify reading only what I want to read, because isn't that the way to model active and enjoyable reading for my students? Yes, but more than that I need to be able to connect them with books that match their ability level and interests.
I'm taking Kittle's recommendations. She has a list on her site that includes books she suggests for a Book Love classroom. I've started this week with the ones that are in my library and available currently.
1. Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is the author of the famed Speak that we actually read in the tenth grade classroom in at the Ramallah Friends School. I think it was not the right choice for those kids, at least not in class, but Anderson is a very well-loved YA writer, and most of the tenth graders (the girls, at any rate) loved the book. This book is about a high school senior and her struggles with her friend's death, and her own struggle with anorexia. Both Speak and Wintergirls do a wonderful job of conveying the struggles inherent to adolescent girlhood, but both finish with too-rapid uplifts. The girls start to heal, emotionally and physically, in the last ten pages of the book and by the end we get the impression that they are solidly on the path to health and happiness. Perhaps this rosy ending is a requirement of the genre - you don't want to be too harsh when your readers are also in this adolescent hell. But I think it makes the story feel cheap, when before the quick-mend, it felt compellingly real.
2. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. This 2001 book which I never read is wonderful. I cannot level the same criticism of the ending as I did for Wintergirls. The end is also sudden, but fittingly. Struggle aboard a lifeboat does end suddenly, and the return to normal society is jarring and lacking the catharsis one imagines at sea (jeez, listen to me, talking like a regular castaway. I have no idea of course. But this is what I'd imagine). I wish this one had been longer. I wish I could have gotten to know Pi even more than I did during the first 100 pages of the book. Kittle talks about what it's like to "reluctantly close a book" and that's how I felt yesterday when I closed this one.
3. A strange parallel to Life of Pi has been Escape from Camp 14! One man's remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden. Shin, the main character, was born in a labor camp in North Korea and escapes when he's in his twenties after so many years of horror. Both this and Life of Pi are stories of individual struggle and hardship. This one, which I've listened to as an audiobook, feels like a podcast because it's non-fiction, and Harden, a newspaper journalist, is straightforward and no-frills in his style. Shin is strangely inhuman by our standards. He doesn't know love, loyalty, nostalgia, or warmth in the camp. He grows up having no conception or awareness of God. He has not lost anything precious because he never had anything precious. Contrast with Pi, who has lost everything - a wonderful childhood, his family, his comfort and safety. Well, he has Richard Parker. My goodness, even writing these few sentences makes me want to go back and read it again.But onward! I think that books 2 and 3 on this list will be too hard for pretty much everyone in my class. Next on my list is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which is decidedly YA. Then I hope to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, which I think is also going to be appropriate for less confident readers.
It's been interesting to read this memoir from North Korea when that country is in the news so much this week. I can't pretend to understand all this stuff about nuclear disarmament or economic sanctions. I keep thinking of the North Koreans that Shin encounters in and out of the camp. Where are they in the conversations in the news? I suppose they are in the pleas not to go to war. This article helped me get a sense of what's happening.
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