Spring Break: Musing, Ramblings, and Updates

Our spring break at UNLV is this week. I know a few more of you are enjoying the break this week as well, but most of you are into that last push before the end of the school year.  Often, at this time of the school year, I am reminded of the opening of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
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April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...

Creativity, or the organization of new thoughts and ideas has never been easy for me. I often felt I had good ideas, but the production, expression, and presentation of them was fraught with anxiety and my impatience with the process. I was a good reader and a poor speller. My writing could never keep up with my train of thought and, rather than track the idea, I found myself stuck on a word I couldn’t spell. Consequently, I frequently lost the idea. It wasn’t until much later as a teacher, that I could slow down and value the process. I taught, and continue to teach many students that are brighter than I ever was. I was probably at my best as a teacher went I could introduce an idea and then get out of the way. So, in that spirit here are some ideas.

Follow Jason Reynold in your Facebook feed (or go to his webpage) and follow his 30 days of poetry. Perhaps it isn’t exactly YA poetry, but who cares. It is national poetry month and we should read some poetry written by more than just dead white guys. His first poem of the series sunk into the center of my being and I generated a new urgency to speak to young people directly and for and behalf of young people to policy makers and gatekeepers.

YUSUF (for a young man Brendan and I met in Wellesley, MA)
 
In a crowd of his peers
Yusuf the tallest eighth grader
rose like an obelisk
stone and symbolic and
coded and misunderstood
by those that only see him
as a random spike
in the town square

he wanted to know
our thoughts on religious freedom
he wanted to know
if we’d ever had porkchops
hurled at our windows
if we’d ever had paper tacked
to our Mosque door
where the A in Allah
a tent
a home of warmth and respect
had been turned to missile-head
he wanted to know
what he should do

and I wanted to say
to Yusuf the tallest eighth grader
with legs of a grown man and
heart of anything but
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I wanted to say to him
so much
so much
wanted to say
sweet child
sweet child
don’t cry
don’t worry
the world is yours
but I could not tell him
to just be thirteen
I could not tell him
a lie

I find this beautiful and compelling. You should start by following each poem each day. In addition, It wouldn't hurt to follow Lesley Roessing. She has been linking to YA verse novels during this month. The ones I know have been fantastic recommendations and I can't wait to read the others.

​Next, I am blessed to have been helped by so many great people in the Young Adult and English Education Community. I was tempted to point you to my favorites among those who have contributed to the blog during the last year. I couldn’t do it. I learn from each contributor. The best I can do is to remind you of the contributor’s page where you can find the name and title of each contributor over the last two years. There is a wealth of information there that can help your own teaching and research and serve as a set of ready resources for your students and the teachers you know. I would like to thank the most recent contributors. The last month of so has help us travel the world, think about libraries, and consider new ways to reach or students. Thanks once again to Katie, Susan, Joellen, Emily, Askia, and Robert. (Their names are linked to their posts.) I would also like to give a shout out to both Gretchen and Paul, my co-presenters at Kennesaw Conference. Their insight and clear thinking scholarship keeps me focused and excited about doing this work. You can find a summary of our presentation here.

​I love it when I can see the evidence that a colleague’s ideas and work are flourishing and bearing fruit. I have been following Alan Brown’s work for several years. His work connecting Young Adult literature, sports, and boys is fascinating. It would be a mistake for me to summarize it here. The only thing that would happen would be to simplify the work and the project. Recently, however, his project has received some attention through the local media near his university, Wake Forest.  It came across my Facebook feed and I was thrilled to see his research and the project associated with it getting some attention. You can read about it in an article in the Winston-Salem Journal here. The Wake Forest News discusses it here. Robert Lypsyte, the author of The Contender recently visited the area as well. I encourage you to review his work and get a copy of his book, Developing Contemporary Literacies Through Sports: A Guide for the English Classroom that he edited with Luke Rodesiler and is reviewed here by Dr. Dawan Coombs.

Running across these articles about Alan’s work heighten my awareness of some of the sports related YA novels that have crossed my desk recently. My first day of spring break I read Mike Lupica’s new novel, Point Guard. I enjoyed it immensely and can’t wait to pass it along to teacher’s classroom library. Once again, I reminisced about some of the sports books I read in junior high school. I am quite sure that reading kept me healthy and lead me to levels of empathy and engagement that have stayed with me most of my adult life.
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Thanks for following. Until next week.