Blog Archives

School Districts, Credit Unions, Calendars, Art, Books and Generosity

12/26/2018

For 33 years the Silver State Credit Union has partnered with Clark County School District, the fifth largest in the county, to hold an art contest. The use the images to create a calendar. Here is the link to the flier for the most recent contest. For the first time, both partnered with the UNLV College of Education to hold a reception for the winners.

It was a great event and a nice, public way to recognize the winner. The students attended with their parents and family, their teacher, and fanfare.

I was invited to the event shortly after returning from the annual NCTE convention. I immediately thought of Sandra Neil Wallace. During the convention Between the LInes: How Ernie Barnes went from the Football Field to the Art Galley, written by Sandra Neil Wallace and illustrated by Bryan Collier won the Orbis Award. I thought this years award went to a book that is about a man who loved both football and art. The book is described:

Ernie Barnes’s decision to choose a career in art over professional football offers readers a model of masculinity, a pathway for following one’s passions, and a window into the Black Is Beautiful movement.

Too often, we don't celebrate the professional possibilities of the arts. Anyone who knows Sandra can tell you how excited she was to winner and if you don't just look at the photograph below. It has been my please to present and work with Sandra and Rich Wallace several times over the last few years.

As I thought about the event, I approached Sandra who put me in touch with one of the marketing people at Simon and Schuster and Paula Wiseman Books, Sarah Woodruff. When Sarah heard about the event she help make 13 copies of Between the Lines available for the winners. It is a generous offer from Simon and Schuster and a great way to add to the celebration of the art and these wonderful artists.

It was fun to talk with some of the winners. I explained a bit about the book and took a few pictures for the blog. All of the winners are listed at the Silver State Schools Credit Union announcement. Unfortunately, I had another holiday event to run of to before the night was over. Next year, I will schedule it first and spend more time with the winners. Below you can get a glimpse of some of the winners with the book and their art.

In the meantime, I invite you to look at the other work of Sandra Neil Wallace and Bryan Collier. Two people who are making their way in the arts: one as a writer and one as an artist.

Until next week.

Promoting Reading in your Classroom by Melissa Gulden

12/19/2018

Melissa is one of the best teachers I know. When she was a graduate student at Louisiana State University, it was a joy to teach with her. She has great passion for her students whether they are still in high school or at college. She has had great success as a teacher and has reached many students. To her credit, she is not content to sit with the results of just reaching many of her students. Instead, she continues to try and figure out how to inspire more of them. Below, she tells an important story. A story of not having everything turn out just right. Frankly, it a story that those of us who have taught for any length of time are familiar with. We all have classes where we don't quite reach all of the students or don't reach them as successfully as we would have liked. I love Melissa's willingness to report when things don't go just the way we planned them. Even more, I love that she is still showing up every day and trying again.

Promoting Reading in your Classroom by Melissa Gulden

I started a new job at a different high school this year. I was hired for many reasons, one of which was to raise the test scores of a particularly low-achieving group of juniors, in addition to teaching the honors Freshmen (my fave!).

To call this school rural is an understatement. I have cows as my neighbors, the football field is affectionately known as “The Pasture,” and there’s an actual barn, where FFA students sell handmaid wreaths, poinsettias, and mandarins at Christmas time. I was the “new kid” coming in, and boy did they resent me.

So in I come with my brand-new bookshelves and my boxes upon boxes of all the Young Adult literature that I have amassed over my years of teaching. I also had recently framed my brand-new Reading Specialist certificate that I proudly earned during my doctoral program in English Education at LSU. I was ready for the year, or so I thought…

I’ve taught reluctant readers before, but this was a whole new ballgame. “I hate reading” was the mantra. And boy, did they mean it. I took the entire class to the library the first week to check out reading books—whatever they wanted—and it took longer than I imagined. Mostly, the students hung out among the back shelves and talked. Very few came to ask me for recommendations (they didn’t know me, after all), the rest picked out what looked tolerable to them. My brilliant idea of 10 minutes of reading time each day (which I had definitely lobbied for with my administration, by the way) was now appearing to be a form of torture, not a privilege.

I thought if I made it clear how much I value reading, then they might too. If they saw me reading, then they would read too. And if I made an assessment worth a lot of points, that they would take reading seriously. Instead, it was the opposite—barely any of them finished the quarter reading assignment because most of them didn’t finish their books! I thought the page requirement for juniors was reasonable, but I never bothered to figure out how well they could read and whether or not they would read. Their grades tanked. I needed to reassess the situation.

Confronting Difficulty

I did everything wrong. Everything I swore I’d never do, I did. Everything I learned from my gurus--Gallagher, Kittle, Miller, Beers—went out the window as I struggled to get these kids on board with reading. Didn’t anyone want to hear a Booktalk about my latest YA find? Didn’t anyone care what I was reading? These kids didn’t want to read the latest and greatest—hell, they didn’t want to read period.

What happened to all of the ideas I had this summer while reading Pernille Ripp and others who seem to have classes of 25 perfect angels? I had such good intentions and now I feel like I’m stuck. And it isn’t only my classes—there is a culture here. I subbed for a teacher the other day and when we finished reading Julius Caesar a bit early, I asked them to take out their outside reading books. They all laughed and said, “We don’t read!” On the contrary—they had just read Shakespeare. OUT LOUD! So why don’t they think they can read? Or, more importantly, why don’t they want to read? Don’t tell me an entire school population, or just those in “regular” English classes don’t want to read. Reading isn’t only for honors kids. My juniors read The Crucible out loud and they were animated and so fun! But ask them to read quietly for ten minutes and it’s like asking them to recite the Declaration of Independence. Backwards.

One of my students compared reading to “getting hit in the back of the head with a sledgehammer.” And he was serious.

But, lest you think none of my students enjoy reading, I have managed to put the right book in the right hands and make a good recommendation more than once. The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner are the most checked out books from my juniors. And while I realize these have been around for awhile and have been turned into movies, when students tell you they don’t read, and yet seem to be interested in a book, you let them read the book. Will they try to use the movie for their written assignment? Maybe. But if you require those ten minutes of reading, and you see the book in their hands and the pages turning, maybe, just maybe, they really are reading it.

And the most beautiful music to my ears? “Ms. Gulden, what do you recommend?” Oh the places we’ll go!

So I refuse to give up. I am not a teacher because I give up on kids. On the contrary. I may not be crazy enough to think that I will turn them into Literature majors, but I will continue allowing (forcing?) them to read for 10 minutes every day. I will take them to the library and give them suggestions. And I will keep my classroom bookshelves stocked with all the YA lit that Dr. Bickmore’s blog—and everyone else I follow—recommends. All the John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Lauren Oliver. The Natasha Preston, Kiera Cass, and Alyson Noel. All of it.

Because I am an English teacher. I love books and I love kids. And when I can get the right nook in the right hands…the magic happens. And if I can do that for even one student, then I will have succeeded.

Melissa Gulden is a high school and college English teacher in Northern California.

Until next week.

Bick's Picks for 2018

12/12/2018

I love this time of year and all of the holiday fun. Okay, I still have to grade a bunch of student work; I have all of those "end of the semester" meetings; I am consulting with graduate students: I need to plan syllabi for the next semester; NCTE proposals are due soon; ALAN proposals are due soon; and I am planning for next year’s ALAN workshop.

While I still have a lot to do, I love considering all of the books I have read this year. I made my end of year picks a tiny bit early. I was lucky enough to give a couple of presentations last Saturday at a Clark County School District event for middle and secondary literacy educators. The day's keynote speaker was Ernest Morrell. He was fabulous and I always learn something that helps me when I listen to his scholarship.

When I started making picks in 2016 I thought I would pick 5. Well, I couldn't do it. Instead, I focus on the books that I can’t stop thinking about or talking about during the course of the year. It always seems to be more that 5. I admit I am a bit narrow in my focus. I tend to read realistic fiction with a focus on race class and gender, that are written for older adolescents. I also find myself reading more and more nonfiction.

I readily admit that excellent books are abundant in middle grades, science fiction, in fantasy and other genres. It is hard to read everything. I rely on others to guide me. It is worth reviewing the weekend picks that others have selected during 2018. Another place to look is at the recommendations suggested by others through other blogs. I recently had my attention drawn to Dr. Michael Macaluso’s blog post. He points to his top 10 resources for finding multicultural books. His suggestions provide excellent advice.

As you prepare for the holidays and look for gifts I hope you consider some of the books listed below. Without a doubt these are powerful texts. If you only read these 7 books in the course of a year, you would have plenty to think about. I love that The Poet X won the National Book Award, but I am a little bit proud of myself that it was on my list of my best books before the award. Many of these books received high praise during the year, and they deserve it. The one book that is under represented on this list is Too Shattered for Mending. It is Peter Brown Hoffmeister’s second YA novel and it is fantastic. It might be the one I would select above all of the others if I was forced to do so. I don’t have to so it will have to remain a tie among them all. I just think that not enough people have been exposed to this book yet. Maybe this post will help remedy this situation. Please read it. Read everything on the list, you won’t regret it. In fact, I think that after reading you will be looking to share these titles with others.

Pick #1 Jeff Zentner The Kirkus Review Goodbye Days

Pick #2 Elizabeth Acevedo The Kirkus Review The Poet X

Pick #3 Elizabeth Partridge The Kirkus Review Boots on the Ground

Pick #4 Aisha Saeed The Kirkus Review Amal Unbound

Pick #5 Nic Stone The Kirkus Review Dear Martin

Pick #6 Peter Brown Hoffmeister The Kirkus Review Too Shattered for Mending

Pick #7 Joy McCullough The Kirkus Review Blood Water Paint

Middle Grades Graphica—Some Suggestions for Your To-Read Stack by Mark Lewis

12/4/2018

This week we welcome back Mark Lewis as a guest contributor. His previous contribution was about YA adult literature that investigates Urban spaces. I hope you will revisit that post as well. Mark is one of the first scholars I meet as I began my work as and academic and he began his. We are constantly running into each other and I am always better for the exchange. Mark is also one of group of scholars alone with Dr. Rob Petrone and Dr. Sophia Sarigianides who have develop and strive to explain a youth lens. Their contributions are significant. Now, let's turn to Mark's new post.

Middle Grades Graphica—Some Suggestions for Your To-Read Stack

Recently, I have been reading a stack of graphica aimed at middle school-aged readers. As a young reader, I never was that interested in comic books—I was more into The Hardy Boys and The Black Stallion series—and only begrudgingly joined my friends to go see the latest Superman movie. Even as a middle school teacher, although not restricting my students from reading comics and graphic novels as part of their independent reading, I continually encouraged them to “move on” to chapter books. My use of quotation marks is to not only to indicate my exact words, but also as an indicator of how I viewed such literature—it was a bridge to more rigorous reading; one that should be burned once its utility was fulfilled.

Luckily, early in my doctoral program my advisor asked me to be a graduate assistant for his Teaching Literature for Preservice Teachers course, and on his syllabus was American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. Reading that exquisite story began the evolution of my perspectives on graphica, and I expanded my YA reading list to include more of it. I now find myself gravitating toward YA graphica selections, especially after reading the scholarship of and conversing with colleagues such as Stergios Botzakis and David Low. So, all this background is meant to push those readers who consistently bypass the graphic novel and manga section of their local bookstore or have as yet attempted to include such selections in their curriculum. Or, at the least, refrain from passing judgement on both young and adult readers who intentionally choose these books over others.

To get you started (or, for those readers already reading graphica on a regular basis, some selections to add to your to-read list), here are some of the highlights from my book stack this past semester.

Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani
This story of female empowerment should resonate with many young women trying to navigate the pressures related to womanhood and adolescence in both school and society. I particularly appreciated that all the main characters were women, so that their voices prevailed and appropriately limited the voices of male characters due to the thematic focus of the story. Also, the illustrations are clean and expressive, reminding me of the work of Vera Brosgul and Faith Erin Hicks (who are, unsurprisingly, also First Second illustrators). The decision to switch from grayscale when Priyanka was in the “real” world to vibrant color when she (or other characters) entered the “pashmina” world created a surreal feel for the special world. This shift in color also helps the reader understand how entering the pashmina world heightened Priyanka’s senses and feelings for India. Finally, and perhaps most important, Chanani has written a story about young women of color with Indian/Indian American backgrounds—a character that is unfortunately rare in children’s and YA literature. I imagine that youth with similar cultural backgrounds to Priyanka and her relatives would appreciate the opportunity to see someone like them and their families in a story written for youth. The story also provides a window into Indian/Indian American traditions that would help youth of other backgrounds learn about Indian/Indian American culture, issues, and successes.

Louis Undercover by Fanny Britt (Author) and Isabelle Arsenault (Illustrator)
Be forewarned: this is a story about melancholy. The main character, Louis, is grappling with understanding his parents’ strained relationship while essentially raising his younger brother because of their relationship struggles. Yet, it is an important story about alcoholism, depression, and family dynamics that asks difficult questions of the reader. Louis’s endurance, along with his continued support for his brother’s endurance, is actually uplifting, and illustrates how one can find personal success in even the most difficult situations. Britt and Arsenault chose to use an oversize presentation—the book is roughly 10 by 12 inches—which I liked because it provided more space for Arsenault’s broad landscapes and larger closeups on the faces of individual characters. Arsenault also chose to use color only for the background and not the characters, which reveals their seemingly lack of definition, which greatly contributes to Britt’s character development through her narration. Again, this story is both heart-wrenching and up-lifting, which good stories tend to be. And, yes, the raccoon on the cover plays a role in the plot.

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang
When I first picked up this selection by Wang, I was sure that I would not enjoy it. The cover features a young couple, a royal prince and a girl clearly from a lower-class status embraced in a dance, enveloped by a sweeping dress. So, I assumed it was a typical fairly tale story of the unexpected princess. I was very wrong. Yes, the boy on the cover is a rich prince, Sebastian, and the girl on the cover is a poor dressmaker, Frances, but that is where the fairy tale similarities end. Sebastian enjoys wearing dresses and explores the Paris nightlife and fashion scene as Lady Crystallia, his alter ego, and Frances creates his extravagant dresses. As one might expect, Sebastian hides this aspect of his identity from his parents, who are determined to find a match in marriage for the young prince. Wang’s artwork is as beautiful as Lady Crystallia in her dresses made by Frances. The lines sweep the reader through the story and the color choices are vibrant. I think this story represents diverse sexual orientation positively, although I know that some view the ending as a bit unrealistic (as the linked Kirkus review indicates), but that one critique is not enough to avoid including this novel on your graphica shelf.

Sanity & Tallulah by Molly Brooks
This selection is the first in a series about the adventures of two girls living in a distant space station. Sanity is a budding scientist and Tallulah is her inquisitive, supportive best friend. They decide to create a three-headed cat—breaking the strict rules about such scientific experiments—which, of course, promptly escapes and havoc ensues across the space station. Despite their parents’ repeated directives to stay out of the way, the girls continue to investigate because of their belief that their cat-creation is not the root of the station’s malfunctions. I greatly appreciate the diversity of the characters, in terms of race, gender, and (dis)ability, as well as the presentation of women in science-based roles. The premise has great possibility to interest young readers, especially those that enjoy series and/or science fiction. In my opinion, Brooks’s made some questionable decisions in her artwork, as it comes across as overly one-dimensional and her choices on representing skin color might make some readers uncomfortable. However, such representations could present productive opportunities to discuss such issues around race and ethnicity, and her choices do not detract from the overall “cool” story and setting.

Soupy Leaves Home by Cecil Castellucci (Author) and Jose Pimienta (Illustrator)
There are many reasons I would recommend this book, beginning with the historical 1930s setting, which exposes young readers to an important time period in U.S. history. I imagine teachers could pair it with other YA novels about the Depression Era, such as Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, to create a robust interdisciplinary curricular unit spanning both English language arts and social studies. The primary plot of a young girl, Soupy, overcoming an abusive father and finding intergenerational friendship is not only engrossing, but also informative about the issues associated with domestic violence—particularly how the issue was viewed in the 1930s and how perspectives on this issue have shifted in our contemporary society. I also like Ramshackle’s, the older hobo that befriends Soupy on her travels, wondrous view of life and the world. He plays an almost sage-like character that shows the hurting Soupy that beauty and hope still exist, which helps her understand what she needs to do to heal. Finally, Pimienta’s illustrations are fantastic. His use of a shifting color palette—often changing from panel to panel—functions to provide mood for the story and evoke feelings in the reader. His illustrations also serve as a vehicle to drive the plot since Castellucci took a minimalist approach to providing narrative text and character dialogue for the reader. As well, his sweeping landscapes and the magic realism of his illustrations show the reader the romanticism that is often associated with the “hobo lifestyle.” Soupy Leaves Home is an important contribution to graphic novels written for youth.

Grand Theft Horse by G. Neri (Author) and Corban Wilkin (Illustrator)
My final suggestion is this nonfiction selection that tells the story of the first person in California to be charged with grand theft horse in over 70 years. Gail Ruffo is a thoroughbred trainer who advocates for more humane treatment of race horses, and developed a training regimen that both prepared her horses for racing and protected their health. She was both trainer and part-owner of a young thoroughbred that developed a leg injury. Her co-owners wanted to push the horse to race despite her strident objections, so she decides to move (and hide) the horse without their permission. Their arguments gradually lead to Ruffo being charged with grand theft horse by the state of California. As the story unfolds, the reader learns about the issues of money, power, and privilege associated with our legal system, as well as the problems with the treatment of race horses. Wilkin’s illustrations are straightforward but expressive, especially the emotions felt by both humans and horses throughout the story. Anyone interested in advocating for the humane treatment of animals will enjoy this story.

s I hope my list has shown, middle school graphica is doing well in including stories about more than boys, superheroes, and monsters. These stories are diverse, both in terms of content and representation, and in providing appealing options for young readers of all backgrounds.
Mark A. Lewis, Ph.D.A
Associate Professor of Literacy Education
Loyola University Maryland
[email protected]

Until next week.

School Districts, Credit Unions, Calendars, Art, Books and Generosity

Promoting Reading in your Classroom by Melissa Gulden

Promoting Reading in your Classroom by Melissa Gulden

Bick's Picks for 2018

Middle Grades Graphica—Some Suggestions for Your To-Read Stack by Mark Lewis

Middle Grades Graphica—Some Suggestions for Your To-Read Stack

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator

Bickmore's
Co-Edited Books

Archives

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School Districts, Credit Unions, Calendars, Art, Books and Generosity

Promoting Reading in your Classroom by Melissa Gulden

Promoting Reading in your Classroom by Melissa Gulden

Bick's Picks for 2018

Middle Grades Graphica—Some Suggestions for Your To-Read Stack by Mark Lewis

Middle Grades Graphica—Some Suggestions for Your To-Read Stack

Dr. Steve Bickmore​Creator and Curator

Bickmore's ​Co-Edited Books

Archives

Categories

Blogs to Follow

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator

Bickmore's
Co-Edited Books