Esperanza Rising, by Pam Muñoz Ryan

I enjoyed Esperanza Rising so much. I had never read it before, but heard about it from my sister when she read it for class in 4th grade. I remember her coming home from school and telling me excitedly how Esperanza means "hope," so the book's title really means "Hope Rising." She really loved the discovery that the title had more to it than she thought at first. I notice the author ended her note by explaining what Esperanza means, and I think talking about this would be a good way to introduce the book to the students: looking at the cover, talking about the title, asking the students if they know what it means, and seeing if knowing what "Esperanza" means changes how they interpret the cover and make predictions about the story.

I noticed the book shows how people are separated by status, wealth, and ethnicity everywhere. The characters expected to leave it behind in Mexico, but then discovered it all over again in America. This book also gets into issues with immigration: citizens not being treated like they are really citizens (much like the Japanese-American and Native American "relocation"), and "trouble-makers" being shipped away regardless of citizenship because of a threat to powerful companies and supposedly to the job market. I'd like to look up some recent immigration issues and relate these to the events in the book. Also, I wonder what farm-camp-labor looks like these days: seasonal migrant workers? And what about our use of cheap labor abroad, where American law doesn't reach?

Finally, in the story and the author's note, she talks about how her grandma and so many others were very survival-focused. They worked hard for little because they wanted to feed their families, and to provide them with the opportunity for something better. They put their hopes, their esperanza, for the future into their kids. This story of working for something better reminded me of all the stories my grandparents have told over and over about our immigrant heritage, and how our great-great-etc-grandparents broke their backs, washed clothes and rocked babies simultaneously, shocked wheat at the speed of lightning to keep their jobs, and were treated badly by the people who were already established here, just in the hope of giving us something better.

They planted trees they knew would never give them shade in their own lifetime, but which they hoped would be tall and breezy for their children's children and hopefully on down the line. They maybe didn't have the same struggles as Esperanza's family, but they did struggle in their own ways and rarely saw the results of their efforts. I think I would like to somehow tie in students' own immigrant stories to Esperanza Rising. Maybe they don't all know their own immigrant stories, especially if their families have been here a long time, but I'd ask them to interview someone in their family or someone they know who remembers or has an immigrant story to tell. I feel like there's more I could do with that, or like I should perhaps make the topic broader, like "family stories" rather than strictly "immigrant stories," but I don't quite know yet.

I know some people forget that most of us here are immigrants, and some get these weird attitudes of "if you're not American, then stay out of America!!" What does that mean? What is "American"? Just because someone got here 100 years after your ancestors, that makes them less American, or non-American? Is this some form of hazing? "You can't join the team and wear the colors til you've been humiliated and demeaned like all the rest of us were"?

Wow, I've now used my full quota of question marks for a week or two. :) Sorry if this is overly ranting. This topic gets me really ired up.

Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson

This is probably my favorite novel so far. I found Melinda very relate-able and her high school to be very realistic (at least compared to mine...). I remember many of our teachers just clocking in their hours, avoiding real discussion, avoiding controversial topics that are actually of interest to us, and sometimes even crushing our opinions if we spoke up. Sometimes there was an illusion of students having a voice, but too much disagreement revealed the truth.

I think Melinda's experiences with isolation, identity, fear of speaking up, and just trying to survive high school are all things that students can relate to. I'm sure even those kids who seem to have it all together wrestle with some of these things. Also, the topic of rape and what constitutes rape is so relevant to teens and so non-discussed. At one point, Melinda says that the student's aren't scheduled to learn about sex until 11th grade, and that sounds totally ridiculous. Adolescents learn about sex on their own long before that, from TV or friends or wherever, and waiting until 11th grade to talk about it (and then probably only in terms of science and anatomy) is way too late. Especially for Melinda. This is such a sad commentary on "sex education" in schools now. It's so anatomical while avoiding the serious realities. Speaking of reality, that seemed to be a major theme of this book - the lies of school compared to reality.

I really enjoyed the symbolism of the tree throughout the novel. I like how it tied into her working out her identity and realizing that she doesn't have to make (or "be") a perfect tree, a perfect person. She doesn't have to pretend things are fine, and she can confront the damaged parts of herself and start to grow again. The fact that her English teacher beat symbolism to death in The Scarlett Letter in class is kind of ironic: in this book chock full of symbolism, the students were sick to death of analyzing symbolism. I thought that was funny. =P I also like how this story was written in little chunks. I wish I knew what to call them - not vignettes. Anyhoo, I think the little sections keep the reader's attention better, and curiosity about what IT is and what IT did definitely keeps interest high during the story.

Since I talked above about the need to discuss issues surrounding sex and rape, I guess now I have to follow my own advice and think about how to do that with my own class. One website I found talked about discussing myths surrounding rape, like "women ask for it by wearing short skirts/what they wear" and "women enjoy rape." This last one appears to be one Andy Beast believed in the book or tried to use in his defense. With discussions of rape I'm thinking it might be best to bring in a guest who knows what they're doing and leads discussion like this all the time. I'm not sure where to start in finding an expert, but that's next on my search list...! Also, not to copy "Hairwoman," but I'd like to get into the symbolism in Speak.

Monster by Walter Dean Myers

I guess I tend to comment first on how the book was written, and Monster is no exception. It's definitely a different style of book - it was difficult at first to get into the rhythm of reading in screenplay format, maybe because some of the abbreviations were unfamiliar and I didn't think the commit them to memory until they came up again and I was confused. Also, sometimes the scene would cut after only a brief image, and I had to make sure I slowed down and visualized it before moving on. Still, after awhile I got into it, and found the mix of flashback and journal entries all really added to the story.

As far as the story itself, I noticed that I start out completely believing Steve's innocence, but as the story progresses, constant doubt is brought against him. There's the prosecutor, then his defense attorney, even his parents seem to doubt his innocence. While he's in jail, he notices some people manage to convince themselves that they're innocent and justify their actions. He wonders if he's done the same thing, convincing himself that he's innocent - this whole experience makes even him doubt himself. Then in the second half or so, he starts flashing back to conversations with Osvaldo and the other guys who already are up for jail time for involvement in the crime. Even these little snippets of conversations cast doubt, and the fact that they are never explained or concluded casts even more doubt. It almost seems like the author wants us to never know for sure whether Steve is guilty of helping with the drug-store crime. He's found not guilty by the jury, but the doubt still lingers. Now I get what was meant by the quote on the book's back cover: "An insightful look at a teenage suspect's lost innocence." I think that definitely sums it up. He isn't in jail for life, but it's like the jury will always be out on who he his: guilty or not guilty, human or criminal, boy or monster.

In teaching, I think it would be cool for students to experiment with screenwriting and/or making their own movie. I think it should be related to the book somehow - a topic, question, reaction to or alteration of the story in some way. There are also so many discussions that could come out of discussing the legal system and the flip-flop to "guilty until proven innocent," loss of innocence, identity, and predictions of how Steve's life will be post-trial. He's innocent, but his innocence is completely shadowed with doubt from all directions. Will he ever recover from that? Will his family and relationships ever recover from that?

Holes, by Louis Sachar

My favorite thing about Holes is that there are at least three different main stories all woven together: Stanley, Zero, and Kissin' Kate Barlow. At the start of the story, they only seem related by geography; they all were a part of Green Lake. Later on, their histories are revealed as intertwining, and so their present intertwining seems even more meaningful - like destiny has brought them together. The magical fable of the curse's history and the grim present reality collide in this story. I love the fairy-tale feel of the story.

Another thing I really liked were the images used consistently throughout, like common threads through the whole story. The peaches showed up everywhere, in Barlow's canned goods, on the lake, in the smell of the Sploosh. The same is true of the onions. Maybe this was to reinforce the sense of destiny in the story. The various pieces of the story were very intentionally linked with these images and with similar themes. However, other parts didn't seem so obviously related to the rest of the story, and I was puzzling over where the connection was, if there was one, between the pieces. One of these puzzling pieces was the racism in old-time Green Lake, in Kate and Sam's story. As in Toning the Sweep, the racism was not the main focus...it seemed to hang in the background. A discussion question I found online quoted Stanley talking about how the dirt made everyone at camp the same color, and it asked for a discussion of the significance of race in the novel. I definitely want to go back to the book and look through Stanley's story for any bits about race that I missed - I feel like I must have missed something huge, like I missed many of the messages woven into the overall story. I'd like to explore each piece alone, and see what the author seems to be saying about racism through them as a whole.

In teaching, I definitely want to explore the above question about the significance of race throughout the novel. I would love to hear what my classmates and hypothetical future students think. I know they all have seen things in the story that I've missed. Also, I found some projects/discussions for Holes that I really like, talking about destiny, friendship, the significance of nicknames, writing a letter from Elya Yelnats to Madame Zeroni, explaining why he didn't keep his promise to her, creating a recipe for frienship, and creating a print ad for Sploosh.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

This was my first time reading The Giver, and it reminded me of several other stories: Ender's Game, with the kids started in battle training at extremely young ages, The Hunger Games series, with the futuristic setting and the control and the lies, and A Wrinkle in Time, with everyone in the same house doing the same activities at the same time. That's what I thought of when the book mentioned "sameness."
Speaking of sameness, I didn't realize that nothing was in color there until the Giver explained the "seeing-beyond" to Jonas. I had been painting color in myself automatically, though I realize Lowry deliberately didn't mention color until after Jonas started seeing it. She called eyes "light" or "dark" but never by a particular color. The realization that their world had no color was really a bummer and surprising. And that was only one of the many things that continued to surprise me. No music, no love, no choice of spouse, no emotions good or bad...the list went on and every time I found myself surprised that they didn't have each thing. I had assumed they had all these or at least knew what they were, and so at the beginning the overly organized, rule-driven society didn't seem too bad. But then the rules turned out to be governing emotions, removing choice and freewill and the right to life, and turning life into a lukewarm mass of not ever truly experiencing anything.
And the memories...the lack of them! If I try to imagine my life without memories, I don't know what there would be. There are my own memories, ones that I like to escape to or laugh about when they pop into my head, and there are the memories of my parents and their parents and the memories passed down from their parents..."and back and back and back." I realize my family and friends and everyone I meet are Givers, too, and Receivers. We all share memories of experiences with each other - passing on our histories, shaping our identities, adding to what we know and altering what we mistakenly thought we knew.
In teaching, I'd like to steal some topic ideas from the reader's guide in the back of my book: euthanasia and euphemisms. The "release" turns out to be a form of euthanasia, and the question in the book asks "What are some of the disadvantages and the benefits of a community thst accepts such a vision of euthanasia?" I like how this question was extremely open-endeed - it's worded in a way that invites more exploration, asking not just whether euthanasia is right or wrong but why. On a side note, I wonder where this is practiced/legal and why? And where did euthanasia begin? Then with euphemisms, I think it'd be interesting to explore how they are used in the media and in advertising, and compare those to the euphemisms in the book, "release" being one of the major ones. Finally, I'd also like to look at how memories shape our identities, and maybe look at emotions - whether it is better to not feel and be safe from pain as the people did in Jonas' community, or to risk the experience of pain in order to also experience joy and love. There's probably a more provocative way to state it, to get people talking, but nothing's coming to me at this moment. :)

Toning the Sweep, by Angela Johnson

I really enjoyed Toning the Sweep by Angela Johnson. The writing was so fresh, not flowery, and told the story of loss without getting melodramatic. I liked how Johnson didn't start by laying out the painful histories of the characters; instead, she let us get to know them naturally. We got the first impression of their personalities and then slowly were given more and more backstory from others and later information straight from them as they talked to the camera. I like how this didn't completely define the characters by the losses they've experienced. Instead, it was set up so those losses were clearly shown as parts of them but certainly not the whole. As the story progresses, the mother-daughter relationship grows, and it's hard to tell if the characters were changing or being revealed, or some combination of the two.
Part of this story that I thought was interesting was the need for ceremony and ritual. David talks about the ceremony of the powwow, and there's the toning the sweep to ring the grandfather to heaven. The fandango Ola and Roland danced also seemed like a ceremony; as Margaret says, "It's a celebration dance. A dance of life." I think it's true of all of us that we have ceremonies and rituals for all parts of life as our way of recognizing our beginning, transitioning, ending, continuing, etc...I automatically think of graduation ceremonies, funerals and wakes, picture taking at every first and last event, and...the dance of joy. This was something we did once in my family. We are definitely not dancers. However, we got some news about my dad getting a job her really wanted, and we all we uncontainable in our glee, so we got up and danced in circles all over the living room. I'd like to think that was a ritual, though it was spontaneous and never repeated. I think it sprang out of a desire to mark the moment, the transition, the shared feeling we had about the good news. Maybe that's really all any of our rituals come out of.

In teaching this book, I'd like to look into loss and ritual somehow. I could do some journaling, webquesting, and discussion activities that ask students to think about how they mark significant life events - what are their own rituals? I guess this feels a lot like our Dogsong ideas for students comparing their own coming of age to the inuit culture's.

I'd also like to have the students do a shift chart about the characters, so they can tangibly see the change that takes place in them. Students would describe characters when they first start reading, and do it again near the end of the book, so they can see the change.

One thing I don't want to leave unaddressed in this book is the racism that was part of Grandpa's death. Johnson describes mama as more angry at African Americans who were content with segregation than at the white people who had actually killed her father. I notice Johnson was also careful to not make racism the main focus of the book, and I'd like to explore her reasons for these two choices. I think it could make some good discussion, asking why she did this and also asking "who is worse - those who do evil or those who stand by and let it happen?" I think someone used that question in their Number the Stars unit ideas...if we had read that book earlier in the year in my hypothetical class, we could definitely provoke some discussion by drawing comparisons between the doers and stand-byers in both Nazi Germany, segregated America in the past, and elsewhere in history and in the present day. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this in world events as well as everyday situations. History repeats itself, and we're not excluded.

(above: Joshua tree at Joshua Tree National Park, CA.)

Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry

When I got to the end of Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and read the afterward, I was amazed how much of the details of the story were based on truth. Throughout the book, I had guessed that the main events - takeover by Germany, relocation of the Jews, people helping some escape, etc - were based on history. I was surprised that the handkerchief thing was real, as well as the story of the boy saying "All of Denmark is his [the King's] body guard." I can't imagine what guts it must have taken for him to say something like that to a German soldier at the time.
Another thing I kept trying to imagine with amazement was the bravery on the part of everyone. If I had been in their shoes, would I be able to lie straight-faced the way they did? Could I have jumped in the way Mama did, thinking fast and blabbering like an idiot to distract the soldiers? I noticed that a gender stereotype about the intelligence of women came up several times and was used to the advantage of those helping the Jews escape. When the mother was yammering about the casket and later Annemarie acted like an airhead, soldiers would say, "Stupid woman," and "dumb little girl." I don't think any guys could have pulled off the same stunt quite so well. Though I don't like the stereotype, I still think the women of the story used it to their advantage - they took advantage of the perceptions the soldiers had about them.
In the afterward, Lowry talks about Kim Malthe-Bruun, a young resistance leader who Peter seems to be based on. I wanted to learn more so I googled him:

• Lowry's typepad has some excerpts from letters written by Kim.

• Composer Param Vir explains on his website how his song "...beyond the reach of the world..." was inspired by Kim. He also has posted an excerpt from Kim's diary.

• A couple books: Heroic Heart: The Diary and Letters of Kim Malthe-Bruun and Kim, which appears to be in the original language.

• Parts of Heroic Heart are included in Children in the Holocaust and World War II: their secret diaries by Laurel Holliday, which looks like a good resource for further reading about how children's lives were during this time. The diaries are from children ages 10-18 from all over Europe, from Poland to Hungary to England. I'd like to take a look at this and see what I might use in my own classroom. I started reading the preview pages on Amazon, and already felt chilled - to think of being 10 years old and writing "Hitler has invaded Poland. We heard the bad news on the wireless..."
  

In teaching Lowry's book, I think it would be good to search for and read other information to learn more about the war and the Holocaust. Perhaps students could choose one of the things from the book that they found surprising and look for other true-to life examples. For instance, they might look for things similar to the handkerchief that destroys dog's smell, the pretend funeral, the rationing of coffee, the destruction of the country's navy. They could compare their findings to the book.
Throughout the book there is a recurring question of "what is bravery?" and I think students could explore this question themselves as well, maybe free-writing before and after the book about how they define bravery. Taking it one step further, they could ask a "what if?" question, answering something like how they would have acted in a chosen character's shoes or how they would act now if something similar happened in our country now.

Dogsong, by Gary Paulsen

I just read Gary Paulsen's Dogsong and several things jumped out at me. I really liked the square, grounded way of the sentences; the style of them seemed to fit the character's journey back to the way things used to be - a way of surviving off only what the land gives. In that time, there was a song for everything and everyone had a song, and in the story, Russel is returning to that way of life and along the way discovers his song.
It got me wondering what my what my song would be, and what makes up a person' song? All the ones in the story involved trials faced and things learned. I'd like to think every last one of us has a song, since every one of us has a story, and it seems the song just tells a person's story, plain and simple. There's no flowing artsy fluff of extra words, just "The deer was there. I was there. This happened. That happened." No melodrama, just the facts. The emotions were still there underneath the words, just not spelled out verbally. When people got up to sing their own songs they danced the emotions, and everyone seemed to understand because the story-song took them there, to the scene.
Another thing I thought was cool about the culture/old way was how death was viewed. When Russel goes to kill the polar bear, he knows he will die if it's meant to be or the bear will die if it's meant to be and provide Russel, Nancy and the dogs with food. Also, when Oogruk knows he's going to die he decides to do it looking out at sea. It showed total acceptance of dying...In the whole book, and apparently culture, dying is viewed as a natural part of life. It's done with acceptance and peace wherever or whenever it finds the person.
In teaching this book, I'd like to ask the students what they think about dreams. In Dogsong, the dreams Russel has and the reality he lives fold over into each other and become one. I think dreams are a very interesting discussion topic, and it would be interesting to hear other people's theories. I wonder, too, if dreams are viewed differently from culture to culture, and reading or researching other cultures in terms of dreams could be really interesting. Students could learn more about other aspects of Eskimo culture as well, and I think comparing it to their own culture could show them a lot about themselves and their own cultures.

Boy by Roald Dahl

When reading Roald Dahl's memoir, Boy, one thing came persistently to mind: Ripping Yarns. Ripping Yarns is a set of parodies featuring Monty Python's Michael Palin and Terry Jones. The parodies are based loosely on Tom Brown's School Days (1857), and the first parody to come out was Tomkinson's School Days (1976), which explores the tortures and intricacies of English prep-school. Being a comedy, everything is extremely over-the-top, particularly the hazing and punishments. All new kids must fight the school bear hand-to-paw, the teachers and students are equally tortured and frightened by the official school bully, and Tomkinson's escape is brought to a halt when the school leopard finally tracks him down.

Then comes The 30-mile Hop, during which participants must hop on one foot over treacherous mountain terrain for 30 miles. When Tomkinson (played by Palin) survives and is proclaimed winner of The Hop, they reward him by appointing him New School Bully. Everyone stares at him a moment, waiting to see how he'll adapt to this change from the crushed to the crusher, and then he stands up very straight, looks down his nose at a younger kid, and says something very condescending and threatening, to which all students and teachers look relieved. It's pretty hilarious, but strangely, according to Dahl's memoir, it appears to be only an extreme exaggeration of the truth. Every little bit reminds me of Dahl's experiences at prep-school - there's brutal physical punishment; sadistic, superior upper-classmen; and a cruel pecking order in which physical accomplishment is one of the few ways a person might gain a better place in the hierarchy.

Another similarity between Boy and Tomkinson's School Days is perspective. In both, the hero of the tale is a boy who tends to be a victim at the hands of the people who make up the system that's in place. Neither boy would enjoy seeing their handiwork in perfectly straight bruises across younger students' backsides, and so neither is sadistic Boazer material. This makes me wonder - have any of the dark, grimacing, cruel little Boazers written memoirs about their school days? I wonder if they recall with glory or shame the way they invested their every moment in administering fear. In their hypothetical memoirs, would they gloss over or skip over or rewrite their behavior? I wonder if they would suddenly stop dead in their tracks, pen halfway to paper and realize, finally, that they might be psychopaths. Could any of them bear to look inward for half a second and ponder "How did I enjoy giving punishment and pain? How do I sleep at night?"

On a totally different note on this story, I started wondering if tales of prep-school days became to Brits something akin to our up-hill-both-ways accounts of school in ages past. I get this image of a British family, sitting around the supper table: grandpa is relating a toilet-seat-warming-in-freezing-weather tale, and the kids are paralyzed with shock and awe, spoons hovering between their plates and their mouths. Then, later, they decide it just can't be real. No way. Meanwhile, I'm at my grandparents, eating supper, and grandpa brings out the treacherous-trip-to-school tale and I don't believe a word. No way. BUT now I see Tomkinson's School Days wasn't far off from the actual English prep-schools described in Boy, so...maybe...just maybe, the legend of "up-hill-both-ways" isn't too far off, either. Maybe grandpas and grandmas everywhere really did get to and from school by mountain climbing into the wind while towing a heavy lunch pail (or something very similar in difficulty). I'm starting to think anything is possible. Haha, and perhaps I can cheesily add that that is the magic of Roald Dahl and his storytelling. :)

As far as teaching the book, I think it would be cool to read something by Roald Dahl either before or after this, so students can see the connections between the author's life experiences and his writing. It could also be really neat to have students write a short memoir of a single experience they've had. They'd be learning about the genre memoir and how it's different from autobiography, and they'd be writing about something they know. Writing about their own experiences and then getting to share the stories with each other could be a really fun time. Plus, if they know from the start that they will be sharing their stories with each other, I think they'd be more interested in working to make the story clear and interesting for their audience/classmates.

Beginning...

Blog numero uno for Teaching Literature in the Middle School. Looks like the novels and the class are going to be really fun and I'm looking forward to trying out this whole blogging thing. Hopefully I will eventually use more specific words than "fun" and "thing." :P

P.S. Please do pardon my texty emoticons. I do like to use them.