Middle School YA Lit?

Okay, I admit it: I am a snob and lazy. As much as I know I should read more "middle school" YA literature, I just find it hard to do. I was never a middle school teacher and haven't spent any extended time in a middle school since I was in eighth grade (1982, I think). I love high school! I love YA and Alex award winners that push the boundaries. So, what do I with middle school YA lit?

I received a copy of Torrey Maldonado's Secret Saturdays recently and picked it up after a very happy reading of The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate--which I loved.

However, I just am having a hard time with Secret Saturdays.



His book has gotten some good endorsements, and two very good reviews on amazon.com, but I am not loving it but I think it is because I (a) don't know how middle schoolers, especially sixth graders talk; (b) don't know how urban, big city middle schoolers talk; (c) don't know how middle schoolers think.

I am just over halfway through and am curious to learn the mystery of the secret Saturdays. I do think this novel, subject-wise, would resonate with many students: bullying, self-image, doing the right thing, single-parents.

I am curious if anyone has read this book yet and can tell me if it is authentic.

Little Brother

Finally got around to reading Cory Doctorow's spin on privacy and security in the age of the Internet, Homeland Security, and the Patriot Act. An intriguing read, but I had to really drag myself through it. I don't think the writing's that great--I couldn't pin down W1n5t0n (aka M1k37, aka Marcus Yallow) as a character, couldn't imagine him (see him in my head), couldn't really come to care about him. The pacing was up and down, and I just couldn't wrap my head around a lot of the techno-speak about hacking, arphids, and LARPing (although the VampMob sounded very, very cool. I want a cape, or a Gothic Lolita maid's dress, and some elaborate kabuki eye makeup).

Reviews of the book and lots of other good stuff (including free downloads of the book) can be found here: craphound.com/littlebrother

I will say this, though: reading Little Brother makes me want to go and read George Orwell's classic 1984. I'm not ashamed to say, I've never read 1984. But now I want to. In the back of Little Brother, Doctorow says:

This book couldn't have been written if not for George Orwell's magnificent, world changing Nineteen Eighty-Four, the best novel ever published on how societies go wrong. I read this book when I was 12 and have read it 30 or 40 times since, and every time, I get something new out of it. Orwell was a master of storytelling and was clearly sick over the totalitarian state that had emerged in the Soviet Union. Nineteen Eighty-Four holds up today as a genuinely frightening work of science fiction, and it is one of the novels that literally changed the world. Today, "Orwellian" is synonymous with a state of ubiquitous survelliance, doublethink, and torture.

I can't wait to go read 1984 and see how Doctorow played off of and appropriated Orwell's ideas for today. This is what I love about young adult literature, especially YA lit that is inspired by and dialogues with older classics. It keeps the conversation going, showing how themes written about in books published decades and centuries ago are still relevant today. I think if YA lit can make teens (and adults) want to go read and discover the classics--well, that's saying something.

Saw this bumper sticker on car today. Must get.

Found it here: http://www.bumperart.com/ProductDetails.aspx?SKU=2004082101&productID=8801

Wonder if I could make my own: (Some) (Not Enough) English Teachers Are YA Novel Lovers

A Real Life Lesson: Students' Inability to "Find" Books to Read

Today is one of my favorite days in our summer reading program: Barnes and Noble Day! We set aside money each year to take the high school students to Barnes and Noble to buy books. Each student is allowed up to $15 to pick any type of book he or she wants. I encourage my YA lit students to help--letting the class out 1.5 hours early. I provide my students with tape recorders and flip cameras to "record" their conversations with the teens: What book are you looking for? What type of book do you want to buy? Do you have any favorite authors?

The questions start there, but what my students quickly find out is that it can be hard for them to help the high school students find books. One female student stared at the teen section shelves.

"Can I help you find something?" I ask.

"I want a scary book," she replied.

"Okay," I say. "What type of scary would you like? Monster? Vampire? Blood and guts? Teenagers involved?"

NOTHING. Not a sound.

It was clear that she had no idea what type of scary she wanted. I pressed on.

"If it was a movie, what type of scary movie do you think you would want to see?"

Still nothing.

At that point, another student came up and I grabbed a Lois Duncan book and asked her to read the back and let me know if this was the type of scary she was looking for.

This scene was being played over and over throughout the store. I could tell by my students' faces--and the way the high school kids looked lost.

After the bus took the high school students back to campus, my students stayed behind with me, voicing their frustration over not being able to help the kids (six of us tried to help one student--he ended up getting a nice sketch book instead of a book to read).

Gretchen Dougherty** writes, "One thing that I have taken for granted as a lifelong reader is how I choose books that are right for me and that I know I will enjoy. I noticed that this skill does not come naturally for many of my unmotivated and uncommitted readers. Non-readers are unfamiliar with different authors and genres, and they don’t know how to use the book itself to determine whether or not they might enjoy reading it. These students also have unformed ideas about the types of books that might interest them."

For students to know what they want or like to read, they need exposure to and many opportunities to read for pleausre--without the penalty of lost points for AR. Without a 10 question quiz. Without the mandatory book report. This problem is compounded for our students who are reading several grades below level. They don't like to let others see them reading "baby books." So, they often don't read, not realizing the consequences that lie ahead.

I hope that the experience today stays with my students as they enter their methods block this fall and student teaching in the spring--and their own classrooms down the road.




**http://www.otterbein.edu/education/JTIR/volumeII/dougherty.pdf

What Every Student Deserves

By the time the all of the preservice teachers in our program have graduated, they have had me for at least two courses (YA lit and Methods), so I apologize in every course if they hear me repeat my mantra: "Every student deserves an AP education."

I was lucky enough to go through middle and high school in the advanced/honors/ AP track. At times, like when considering whether or not to take a "harder" science, I opted out (i.e., had the choice) of AP Physics and went for the easy Marine Biology. I was in an insulated world--I had no clue and didn't think to ask what all my non-honors peers were doing in their classes.

And, it wasn't until my second teaching position that I fully realized the different (tracking) worlds in our country's high schools.

At that school (one with an IB program), not only were the "upper" track students given more resouces, so were their teachers. Who knew there were fewer resources for regular teachers like myself!? This is when I first started using YA literature in the classroom [provided with only the textbook and a a classic title or two, I raided the department closet and borrowed novels from my friend who taught pre-IB classes]. But, I didn't just teach them "for fun," I taught them using the same ideas and resources I had learned in my AP training at Duke several years before.

That became the foundation for my beliefs as an English/reading teacher.

So, when I teach YA lit classes, I bring literary theories to the table [there are several fantastic resources for teaching YA lit with literary theories; two I like are Lisa Schade Eckert's How Does It Mean? Engaging Reluctant Readers Through Literary Theory and Anna Soter's Young Adult Literature and the New Literary Theories: Developing Critical Readers in Middle School].

My students and I start with reading for enjoyment, move to reader response, and then dive in deeper with applicable theories. My hope is that these ideas will "stick" when they are classroom teachers and they will not resort to low-level, "right there" questions. Each week, I ask them to write reflections based on the novels we read and the discussions we have had in class.

The reality here (in Alabama) is that YA literature is not read in many classes. The state standards pretty much dictate what is read in each grade and the list is pretty narrow (and identical to what Applebee reported back in 1993). So, my students will teach the classics, whether or not their students are interested in or can read them. My hope is that they can convince their administrators to bring in YA lit as a bridge. And, I do have hope, based on my students' reflections:

"Overall this first week has taught me how to keep my mind open to different theories and connections within texts. Copper Sun, Sold, Little Brother, and Mister Pip contain themes that work across texts but also themes that are particular to their own. By applying literary theories to texts and by finding connections between young adult literature and classic literature an instructor can effectively teach their students ways of thinking critically and may even motivate them to enjoy canonical literature a little more."

One of the most interesting and fun activities was completing the “Literary Theories/Critical Approaches to Literature” worksheet. This activity was done as a group, and it allowed me to interact and discuss the stories with the other members of my group. I found that one questioning idea led to another, and in my particular group, we were springing ideas off each other’s comments. This activity also made the information previously presented more interesting and helpful in analyzing the stories, a coming together of information presented with the selections read. I especially liked completing the hand-out with my group. Each member of the group was spinning his/her ideas off the other’s comments. Looking at the two stories side by side, developing higher order, open ended questions allowed for a good analysis of the stories. This also stimulated ideas for discussion for other activities that could be done in the classroom. It was, for me, an activity that I wanted to take more time to complete because I felt that there was a coherent bringing in of the previously taught information in a meaningful and helpful resource for next year’s classes.

I liked The Hunger Games best—I found the narrator most believable, and the story most compelling. [It] was an exciting, novel approach to a coming of age/hero’s journey novel complete with a fairly well-formed new world. I found many literary and social collective allusions in the novel, and could think of many different novels that it could be taught in repertory with Ten Mile River and Black & White.

Book Whispering

From Donalyn Miller's book, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child:

We have worked so hard to develop systems to teach reading, yet I claim that we had no justification for systematizing an act like reading in the first place. The only groups served by current trends to produce endless programs for teaching reading are the publishing and testing companies who make billions of dollars from their programs and tests. It is horrifying that the people who have the corner on getting children to read--children's book authors, parents, and teachers--get the least credit monetarily or otherwise.

I believe that this corporate machinery of scripted programs, comprehension worksheets (reproducibles, handouts, printables, whatever you want to call them), computer-based incentive packages, and test-practice curricula facilitate a solid bottom line for the companies that sell them. These programs may deceive schools into believing that they are using every available resource to teach reading, but ultimately, they are doomed to fail because they overlook what is most important. When you take a forklift and shovel off the programs, underneath it all is a child reading a book.

Keeping the Reader Alive

I'm doing some reading on struggling readers in preparation for one of the summer classes I start teaching on July 8th, so I'm finally getting around to reading Anne Reeve's wonderful book, Adolesents Talk About Reading: Exploring Resistance to and Engagement with Text. I love what she says about Sting, one of the adolescents profiled in the book, (and inherently, Sting's English teachers):

Some people's commitment to reading is robust enough to withstand years of boredom with institutionally required texts, but others, such as Sting, who seem to derive almost no nourishment whatsoever from English class, need access to what they can absorb....The school risks suppressing Sting's reading and writing energies completely when it tries to redirect them toward academic goals that make no sense to him. (p. 68)

We need to understand that for a student such as Sting, one of our goals should be to keep the reader in him alive through adolescence, even when that goal requires compromising our commitment to teaching school texts. The contribution we can make to Sting's future lies not in the particular texts we admire and promote but in protecting the reader within him. (p. 69)

I love this idea of "keeping the reader alive" and "protecting the reader within" the adolescents we teach. This is where young adult literature is so important, as well as paying attention to what adolescents' out-of-school reading interests are. It means letting go of the Shakespeare if you have to (although there are lots of good YA spins on Shakespeare [check out Alan Gratz's Something Wicked and Something Rotten, Caroline B. Cooney's Enter Three Witches, Sharon Draper's Romiette and Julio] and even grapic novel versions of Shakespeare's plays [I love Gareth Hind's gorgeous versions of Beowulf and King Lear], so you may not have to let him go entirely if you can engage resistant readers through different kinds/levels/choices of texts).

As English teachers, we must always remember there are readers inside of the kids we teach (I like how Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer calls resistant readers "dormant" or "underground" readers). We're doing a pretty good job of killing off those readers--or the idea that reading can be pleasurable--through standardized testing and test remediation for students who score low on these tests. Kelly Gallagher calls it "readicide," the systematic killing of the love of reading. It's happening, right now, in every public school in this country. As English and language arts teachers, we've got to do our part to show adolescents there are other, more personal, more meaningful reasons/purposes/values for reading than to pass a test, go to college, or be considered "literate" at the next cocktail party. We need to bring--with apologies to Justin Timberlake--"sexy back" to reading. And by that I mean bring back the idea in schools that reading can be pleasurable, leisurely, and fun.