long live the weekly reader! what? oh, never mind.

Those early months when i was just beginning to read independently, those were heady days. After years of decoding the meaning of language, facial expressions, cartoon narratives on television, finally the written world was made visible to me and it was magic. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the reason children believe in magic is because they are still so close to the days when their literacy revealed itself as if through a secret portal.

Among the strong memories I have about those days was the summer Weekly Reader program. For some small fee that my parents paid through another of those childhood mysteries, the mystery of money, I received the occasional (I don’t think they were actually weekly) folded sheet of stories and puzzles that not only reinforced the magic of reading but added the gift of mail. These things simply came to our house with my name on them! Magic!

Then there were the books.

Oh, the books!

Once a month during the summer the Weekly Reader program sent an actual, real book to me in the mail! I later understood these to be similar to book club editions, hardbound with printed covers like a library edition only less expensive, with the Weekly Reader logo on the back. Every once in a while I see the Weekly Reader logo on the back of a used book, but one book truly stood out among them all: The Crows of Pearblossom by Aldous Huxley. I have already discussed this book twice, and even linked scans of the entirety of it to my flickr account for all to see. The recent rerelease doesn’t do the boo justice, but I digress.

Among days of swim lessons and water fights in the neighborhood, hanging out at the local park making lanyards and collecting returnable soda bottles for enough change to buy candy, the afternoons that seem most golden were those where I was sprawled on the living room floor reading the Weekly Reader over and over. It could not have taken me more than twenty minutes to read it but it felt like hours, and I would revisit each copy several times until the next one came.

In time came bigger books, and regular trips to the library to bring home a haul of books, and the Weekly Reader faded away. I was years out of college when I remembered those summers fondly and held idle thoughts about creating an adult version of the Weekly Reader. By then I’d assumed the Weekly Reader was a thing of the past, no longer around, and how sad for kids that they couldn’t have the same experience I had.

And then I got the news this week: the Weekly Reader had been alive the whole time, only now it was being shuttered by its new owners.

I don’t care how plugged in and tech savvy kids are these days, it’s still fun to get things sent in the mail, and a magazine dedicated to fiction and word fun… how is this a bad thing? Perhaps the Weekly Reader struggled in recent years because parents assumed (as I did) that it no longer existed, or that they didn’t feel their children would be satisfied with so meager an offering as few short pages of throwaway material. And if the program no longer offered Club Editions of books sent periodically to kids, perhaps that’s part of the problem.

They say that kids who grow up with books in the home – books that are theirs, that they own – do better in school than kids who don’t, and this has long been one of the problems I’ve had with the forced march of summer reading: kids check the books out of the library, and the lack of ownership makes that reading feel throwaway, an obstacle to overcome. I didn’t have many books at home growing up because we were sorta poor, but the ones I had I treasured and reread like crazy. I wish I knew what other books I received via the Weekly Reader summer program, but the fact that The Crows of Pearblossom stuck with me for over forty years is a pretty strong testament to the power of books on impressionable young minds.

While I may have been premature with my thinking some years back, the sentiment stands: how sad for kids today that they cannot have that same experience.

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i never read the encyclopedia brown books

At least I don’t think I did. Maybe I picked one up, struggled through it, and never went back. I can’t be sure, but I suspect I did because I’ve had a life-long dislike of detective stories that had to come from an early age.

Because those stories made me feel stupid.

Whether or not it was Encyclopedia Brown or the Hardy Boys or some generic detective stories I always felt cheated at the end. Either there was a key piece of information that I somehow glossed over early on, or the main character possessed the ability to wring out a logical connection between different clues that never would have occurred to me. Instead of a feeling of pleasant surprise and marvel I felt like the author was laughing at me for not figuring it out.

But I get it. There are people who love the thrill of following the clues, ruling out the red herrings, second-guessing motives. There is a secret delight in not knowing, a build-up of tension as the detective gets closer to finding out the truth at their own peril, and the release when it all comes together in the end. I simply found the exercise as excruciating as watching reruns of I Love Lucy.

Later, in college, I fell into the writings of Chandler and Cain and other hardboiled detective fiction because of the style. The mysteries themselves were incidental to the wise-cracking dialog and twisted metaphors the narrators used. In the end the mystery of who or why didn’t matter because the surprise of the double-cross was almost always a pretext for underscoring the main character’s folly. It was the detective who missed the key clues or trusted the wrong person and was made the fool.

Even later when I studied various forms of narrative storytelling I learned the structural underpinnings and the formula for the mystery became clear as day. TV shows are the most transparent when it comes to formula, telegraphing their plot developments in neat little packages. Movies, too. But as I became more adept at seeing the solution within the structure many people around me continue to marvel, as if the solution could only be gleaned through some supernatural power. I remember good friends who were willing to put down money (the cost of my movie ticket, plus snacks) that I couldn’t guess the twist in the movie “The Sixth Sense” because they, as wise and experienced as they were, were unable to see it coming. I remember leaning over in the first five minutes and guessing the movie’s big reveal a full two hours in advance. I didn’t do it to be obnoxious, but I also didn’t understand how they could have missed it. Structurally, it was pretty freakin’ obvious.

I suppose if I hadn’t been so easily frustrated with detective stories at a young age I might have developed a better sense of plot structure at an earlier on. It would have been nice to not feel like stories and storytelling was such a mystery for most of my school years, or that I was somehow stupid for not being able to guess a whodunnit.

Donald J. Sobel, the creator of the Encyclopedia Brown series of books, died this past week at the age of 87. The 56 books in the series have never been out of print and have been instrumental in helping generations of fledgling readers achieve a mastery of reading. I would personally be proud of that as an accomplishment, though it would have to be some other genre than detective stories.

Because I would hate to make some young reader feel the way I did when I was young.

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“It’s just more. It’s not better.”

Toni Morrison said this the other night on the PBS NewsHour. Here’s the context from taken from the interview.

JEFFREY BROWN: One more thing about this book, about “Home.” It is — one thing that’s striking about this new novel is, it’s a very stripped-down form of storytelling, more than I think in the past for you. Was that a conscious effort?

TONI MORRISON: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: It was?

TONI MORRISON: Sometimes, my editor would say, more.

JEFFREY BROWN: More?

(LAUGHTER)

TONI MORRISON: And I would say, it’s just more. It’s not better.

I can write forever about anything of a character. But I wanted this to be — it’s harder to write less to make it more. And that’s what was engaging to me when I was writing this book.

I have to say, I’ve been feeling this for some time about a lot of fiction. Adult fiction, YA fiction, Middle Grade fiction, all of it has been feeling rather bloated around the middle. I don’t know where writers pick up the literary equivalent of a spare tire (perhaps it’s MFA programs?), but whatever it is undermines a lot of good books that always leave me feeling like they could have been just that much better with a trim.

It is the middle of many books that are the problem. And from a writer’s point of view, middles generally are a problem. Starting out, you pretty much have to know where you’re beginning and where you plan to end up and then somehow connect the dots. There are various philosophies about this – the general divide is between “pantsers” who write but the seat of their pants, so to speak, and “plotters” who detail every step of the way – but no approach I know of has an advantage over the other. I have followed detailed outlines and I have winged it and it both cases revision has shown that many of my problem came from a flabby middle.

The one revelation I had about middles came when I was working on my creative thesis in grad school. I was working the story from both ends inward, a path I chose because I wanted to have the story elements “mirror” each other in a balanced way, when I got to the point that, in my mind, was one of those “cross that bridge when I get to it” moments. I had always assumed that the incidents and characters would help define what I needed to do to bridge these moments but I suddenly felt stumped. I was certain I had reached the point where I had no middle act, that the story required an additional element that seamlessly fused the two parts… and that I’d have to go back and weave these new elements into the two halves I’d already created.

Then a voice in my head asked: Do you really need to say anything more?

All it took was some slight changes to account for a leap of time and the two parts melded as if I’d planned it all along, and in my subconscious maybe I had.

Now, it goes without saying that I’m no Toni Morrison, but she’s right about the fact that it is harder to write less and make it “more.” Economy of language, or dialog, or scene and symbolism, boiling down those words into a condensed space makes it all the richer. It is easier to sit and write and throw it all out there on the page, much harder to weed and trim and make what’s already good that much greater.

Less is more. It isn’t a new thought, but perhaps it could become a renewed pledge taken to reassure readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s Number 1 Rule of Creative Writing 101:

 Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

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comics are (literally) history

I think, I hope, we’ve moved beyond the question as to whether or not comics and graphic novels are legitimate reading for kids and teens. But just in case another case needs to be made, or should you find yourself needing just one more piece of evidence to get the last word, I’m throwing this idea out there:

Comics existed before most people even owned books.

So the word itself, cartoon, comes from the Italian cartone which was the stiff paperboard Renaissance artists used to sketch out their paintings. Da Vinci’s notebooks are full of cartoons. All those frescos in the churches, they began as cartoons drawn on the walls. Historically, the cartoon was a representative drawing done in preparation of a finished work. These cartoons were illustration, plain and simple, and they came from a long line of visual representation starting with those cave paintings in the south of France.

You see, man’s earliest attempts to communicate story came in pictographs. The pictures, spread across cave walls, told a sequential narrative about The Great Hunt or The Battle for Berries or Hunter Tripping on Rocks. These forerunners of the cartoon predate cuneiform and hieroglyphs and other forms of symbolic language. The pictures told the story in much the same way that a wordless picture book or graphic novel does today. Depending on the sophistication of their brains, it would be curious to take a modern wordless picture book back to cave-dwelling man and see if they understood it.

Though it can be a bit of a stretch to call the cave paintings and fresco sketches cartoons they are nonetheless historical artifacts that show that there was a way to “read” before there were words. Up until the Renaissance these cartoons were historical in nature (the Greeks and Romans would illustrate battles from Mythology, they believed them to be historical at some level), but I recently came across what might truly be the genesis of the graphic novel in The Bayeux Tapestry.

Art history majors (and anyplace where the arts are still considered important and taught) know The Bayeux Tapestry to be an illustrated telling of the Norman Conquest and The Battle of Hastings which took place in 1066. The Tapestry itself dates to the 1400s which easily predates the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus by Art Spigelman and the groundbreaking work by the father of the American graphic novel, Will Eisner, by a good 500 years. Cartoons and the sequential narrative are not new.

Last week I was reminded of this when the website Open Culture featured an animated version of The Bayeux Tapestry. I don’t often post media within the blog, but this is worth the diversion.

The tapestry itself is a collection of narrative strips – or panels, to use a modern comic term – that read from left to right and top to bottom, just as if you were reading a book. Because you are, you’re reading a graphic novel from 1476, and the best part about it, it’s non-fiction! It’s not only a cartoon, it’s historical!

I hope this puts a cork in the comics-aren’t-reading argument so we can move on to more important discussions. Like what makes a good comic or graphic novel – and why are there so many mediocre ones out there for kids these day?

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in the land where action & the hero’s journey meet. and bore.

A New Year’s Eve cold and a truckload of graphic novel reading has kept me quiet lately. Well, it’s kept me from blogging and talking with a normal voice around the house at least.

A good deal of the things I’ve been reading have been as a Cybils Graphic Novel finalist judge and I really cannot talk about those books because them’s the rules. I have been keeping a sort of “diary of a judge” post running as I go so that on the 15th of February I can let the world know what was going on during the process. Not me giving away secrets about the other judges or gossip like that (like I’m clued in enough for gossip) but the process of how I came to the decisions I made. Or am making at the time. It’s weird to talk about the future in the past tense when it’s happening in the moment.

But to be fair, I have been reading a lot of other things as well, I just haven’t had a chance to write or review them. Which means that down the road there’s going to be a flood of catching up I’m going to have to do. That said, there are still some general things I can say about all the reading I’ve been doing lately. Hopefully it won’t sound too vague.

One thing I’d like to see less of are graphic novels about characters with powers or who fight crime. If there’s one thing that makes the graphic novel novel is how it differentiates itself from comic books. It’s just too easy to use the inherent action of superhero comics to give a story a false sense of plot and character development. Far too often the main character’s growth is patently shallow, and if you removed the action sequences (which more often than not have little to do with any inner character growth at all) what you have left is a laughable pamphlet that reads like a 1950s sitcom plot synopsis. “When the Beaver attempts to tackle a problem on his own he quickly discovers there is strength in numbers.”

What are monsters? What do they stand for? Aside from scaring us, or our hero, there has to be a reason they are there. Either they represent a surrogate for a tangible fear or they express a larger concept or idea. If they are merely obstacles to drive a plot or provide a character something to defeat, if they aren’t organic to the story, what’s the point? And if they are symbolic of the main character’s struggle, is it perhaps too much to ask that they be incorporated into the story in a way that they aren’t so heavy-handed, leaden, or obvious?

Fight scenes. They make for good action scenes, especially in a visual medium like graphic novels, but can’t we do something more creative in conveying struggles? A battle of wits, a battle of logic, I’d even take a bake-off as a climax provided it was chemistry that ruled the day. Honestly, sometimes when I’m reading a graphic novel and a fight scene is ramping up I feel as if I’m watching a Chuck Norris movie… which is fine if I’m reading a Chuck Norris graphic novel. Sadly, I haven’t come across a Chuck Norris graphic novel yet.

Finally, I understand – honestly, I do – that a writer or artist can only tell the stories that drive them. But there’s a line between the universal story told personally and what is so personal that reads like therapy. I acknowledge that there can be some great literature and art from pain and grief, that deep emotions can be mined to stunning effect, but no one wants to feel as if they’re going through grief counseling and psychoanalysis as a bystander. Maybe that’s just me.

So aside from my weekly Poetry Friday posts and the occasional check-in I hope to be back to the Grimmoire and delve into some new territory here in the coming weeks.

For you regulars, I thank you for your patience, and or you occasionals, for your kind attentions.

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fake news flash! YA books popular with regular adults!

Okay, so, this might have been a rising trend, what, ten years ago? This might have been newsworthy a couple of times maybe five years ago? Now it seem like every five or six weeks (around the same sales cycles that Barnes & Nobles shuffles its stock) some newspaper runs a feature about this “crazy” new trend where adults are reading YA books. Wacky, right?

Today’s article of note comes from the Boston Globe, and the hook this time is that the poor adults can’t find Twilight at the local book store because it’s not with regular fiction but “in the back” with the YA novels. Which is cute, and quaint, and a little ridiculous. Ridiculous because literally ten years ago I was filing Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books in both YA and Sci-fi/Fantasy. Ender’s Game as well. And we had The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in fiction and YA. Maguire’s Wicked took it’s time leaving the adult fiction shelves but eventually was also shelved in YA.

The point, and the reason this is not news, is that savvy booksellers and retail merchandisers put books where people expect to find them. If you have a crossover book that straddles a couple of sections – Stephen King has been doing this for years – you put copies of the book in multiple places for the simple reason that for every person who asks for help finding a title there are three who don’t find it and assume it’s out of stock. You don’t give your retail customers a chance to walk away empty-handed, you figure out that there might be some customers who would expect a book to be in one place and don’t necessarily want to feel insulted that they didn’t realize there were strict marketing rules involved. Seriously, do retail booksellers want to drive people to Amazon, where they aren’t forced to guess a genre in order to find what they’re looking for?

Naturally, that’s not the whole story here, because once you start talking about YA book trends you simply must mention the most recent movie based on a YA series coming out, and perhaps ride the coattails of a couple other titles people have already heard of, and then interview a few local writers for their perspective, and call it a day.

I really shouldn’t complain that any books are getting media attention and perhaps boosting sales, but could we maybe stop with the blatant attempt to tell this same story as a means of selling news? YA, hot topic, braced by a very vocal, buzz-generating community, I get it. But how about instead of talking about the same books, or giving more publicity to established adult authors who have made the leap into the money pit of YA, why not do something radical: create a YA beat. Give some column space to talk about books and trends that haven’t been reported to death. Maybe an old-fashioned three-dot column with smaller news snippets, brief reviews, and the occasional interview.

Damn it, I want that job.

Dear Boston Globe,

It has come to my attention that you like publishing features about the books and trends in children’s publishing, but you tend to write only the most obvious stories. You may have had critics who would occasionally review a few titles here and there, but in an industry that is losing sales in every other area, children’s books is the one place where sales have steadily increased during the current we’re-not-calling-it-a-depression recession. And once full-function tablets and e-readers become cheaper than cell phones, it will be a youth-driven market that will fully define the future of publishing. Will you be positioned to break that news as it happens, or will you ride in the way-back of the family station wagon and give updates on the industry’s exhaust?

What you need is a children’s and young adult beat. Regular installments – weekly at least, not monthly or whenever someone decides to pitch a story – where people can go to find news and reviews of the literature that is shaping and entertaining the minds of the rising generations. You need someone who reads these books regularly, constantly, and talks about them openly via social media. You could become a valuable community asset that would lead the way in providing a resource for parents and young adults (they read the news too, you know, and they smirk at your current attempts to speak to them) to discover what is out there in the world of books. Think of the children!

Should this idea interest you, I am available to discuss it further. I have a varied background that I feel makes me uniquely qualified, and more importantly I possess the desire to see a real change in how books for children and young adults are discussed in the media.

What do you say?

I’m sure there are better, less back-handed ways to do this, but what can I say.

 

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do we want teen boys to read, or not?

Sports writer (it figures) cum YA author Robert Lipsyte rattled the cages of the kidlit community this past weekend with his essay in the NYT Book Review essentially lobbing the teen boy reading problem back across the net into the “more boy books” camp. This naturally, almost assuredly, possibly deliberately, raised the hackles of those who feel that the problem isn’t books (don’t blame the books!) but in the way society raises the boys (we need to raise boys as feminists!). Here’s the one line that resonated with me out of the whole essay, the one most true, the one ring to bind them:

“We need more good works of realistic fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, on- or ­offline, that invite boys to reflect on what kinds of men they want to become.”

Forget everything else Lipsyte said for a moment (especially if it bothered you) and think about everything this statement embraces.

First and foremost it recommends we need books. Define that how you will, I would love to hear someone argue the opposite side, that we don’t need books anymore.

Second, the modifier good is in there. We don’t just need more crap, we need quality, and again there’s a spectrum there.  Suffice to say we know good when we see it, what defines good isn’t at issue here.

Third, following the rule of threes, comes the type of good books that we need: realistic fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels. Any naysayers out there? Anyone think we couldn’t use more quality nonfiction, solid realistic fiction, or good graphic novels? No? Let’s move on.

The next part is tricky: inviting boys. This gets tossed around and argued quite a bit, and it usually has to do either with cover designs or whether a girl is involved with the story. This is the “Ew, cooties!” argument, and the division is usually between “if it’s good, it shouldn’t matter” and “we need to teach boys to get over it.”  This is the point where I would think most pro-feminists would want to weigh in with just exactly how boys get to this stage of thinking. There’s an avalanche of advertising and marketing out there that is conditioning boys from a very early age to think of pink as a girly color and that stories featuring girls will contain content of no interest to them. There’s a ginormous world out there molding and shaping the ways boys approach their entertainment and free time, and you want to draw a line in the sand at books and dare boys to cross it? If we aren’t going to invite boys into books, if the stand is going to be pandering versus political, or if there’s just no desire to even bother, then how can we possibly imagine a world where boys even begin to come close to recognizing books as valuable?

Now comes the most interesting phrase out of the Lipsyte quote, to reflect. We don’t just want them to read for the sake of reading, we want them to find meaning and purpose in what they read, we want them to think. This is where I feel a lot more harm than good is done in the schools when there is a dramatic shift from reading for fun toward reading for meaning. I do think boys can and should be able to analyze texts and glean relevent meaning from a story, any story, but I don’t think books should be used to do this. This is where I get a little radical and run my post a little off a side track, but this is the crux of it:

Apply all the lessons taught about subtext and metaphor and literary devices via movies and television shows.

Why? Because we already know they spend more time with visual media than they do books. Because we need them to see that these lessons exist in the world outside the classroom. And because they will be better able to apply those lessons to books if we don’t remove them from the category of pleasurable pursuits. You can take any contemporary television sitcom and use it to teach racial and gender-based stereotypes for example – and there’s a LOT of examples out there, many of them hit shows, a lot of them negative – then have them read any work of fiction and they’ll spot them without effort. It doesn’t work the other way around however. Kids who are whipsmart at spotting literary devices in books view their favorite TV shows as somehow being separate or above all that.

Anyway, if we want our boy readers to be able to sincerely reflect on what they read in books we might have to actually teach them how to reflect somewhere else besides books first.

The last part of Lipsyte’s quote is a loaded gun: what kinds of men they want to become. You ask any boy what character from literature they would most like to be like, and what are the odds you’ll get a character from a fantasy novel, a hero with superpowers? Not very realistic. On the spot I can only think of one good example, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a boy wanting to be like Atticus Finch. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a guy (outside of fellow writers) who said they wanted to be like any male, author or character, connected with books. There are great men to emulate in the world, politicians and athletes and movie stars, but these are all men of action who give no appearance of having read any books.

So if we want to invite boys to reflect on the type of men they want to become, and we want them to do it through good, realistic fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels – and there’s nothing in that restatement I find objectionable – then we need more books that allow this to take place. This isn’t an argument of pandering versus bootstrap feminism, it’s about saying, simply, let’s put out more books like this and give them time to find an audience.

Boys and reading are like a teen driver and his broke-down truck by the side of the road. You can either give them a lift to the next town and help them one step further along the road to reading, or you slow down long enough to smirk at their choice of vehicle before driving off and leaving them in the choking dust.

We can argue all we want, but there are boys all over the literary map who need lifts into town.

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gender bias once again rediscovered in children’s books!

In a new study that hardly qualifies as news, The New York Times reported that there is gender bias in children’s literature.

Shocking, maybe, if this were 1971.

The argument over and over is that girls will read about boy characters but boys won’t read girl characters. Publishers don’t want to eliminate 50% of their audience, but isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy?  All the usual complaints.

When these gender studies are done, has anyone bothered to parse out content to see if maybe there isn’t some negative gender reinforcement there? You want a boy to read a picture book with a girl protagonist, fine, stop making the story be about a Purple Plastic Purse or getting dressed up Fancy and going out to dinner. You want books to appeal to boys, then appeal to what boys want.

As an emerging reader I read Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline, but I didn’t read any of the sequels.  Why?  Because walking in straight lines and being led around town by a nun did not appeal to me. It wasn’t that it was about a girl character, it’s because it was about character behavior I couldn’t identify with.  If the story had been about a boy named Montague and a dozen other orphan boys being lead around Paris in two straight lines I wouldn’t have been any more interested.

That lack of interest extended to male characters as well. Babar the Elephant was a ba-boring simp.  Stone Soup… really? A soldier tricking a town into feeding itself?  And if I’m being honest, I never understood the fuss about Peter Pan. If you don’t grow up, how can you be a fireman or policeman or, as was my case, a swimming pool builder?  These characters didn’t appeal because of who they were, not their gender.

Munro Leaf’s Ferdinand appealed to me because there was chaos and character and action. Despite his pacifist ways, which might be seen as anti-boy, the fact is that there are bulls and bull fighting and the idea of finding identity.  Similarly one might look at Leo Lionni’s Frederick as a soft male character, a poetry collecting mouse who nourishes the soul, but here’s a secret: boys actually like poetry, until they get the joy of it killed out of them through education.

In David Shannon’s No, David! we have a boy behaving badly.  Or rather, we see a boy behaving like a boy. If we were to gender swap this story and only change the name and the appearance of the main character, would the book work?  Probably not, because the mischief David gets into is the personality of a boy who is curious to the point of destruction and it would read odd if what we were seeing was No, Doris.  The argument could be made that there’s a gold mine to be made in simply taking successful and award-winning books with male characters and creating new versions with female characters, but if it were as easy as that wouldn’t someone have done it already? If gender were truly the key to formula then girls would have their own Curious Georgina.

Dr. Seuss didn’t seem to have very many female characters, but one that sticks out for me is The Lorax.  Sort of a humanoid creature, he does nonetheless have a rather prominent mustache. Does the gender of the Lorax make any difference?  Not at all, which is interesting because I think if Seuss had feminized the Lorax there wouldn’t be any change in the message and I don’t believe it would be any less popular among boys.

Even when the story features a character without gender, say a garbage truck as in Kate and Jim McMullen’s I Stink, the appeal of that book is generated by the attitude and language.  Boys like reading about trucks, and things that stink, and the unashamed tone of the garbage truck simply calls out for boys to imitate it.  Is it biased to appeal to boys this way?  Does it reinforce gender stereotypes to not have a similar book where a garbage truck is behaving with more decorum and etiquette?

I think if we’re going to dredge up the old gender question in children’s books we need to look at what those main characters are doing and question the stereotypes they portray. Boys and girls behaving like boys and girls, both fictional and in real life, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And if there’s truly a problem with gender inequity it doesn’t appear that having fewer female characters has had an effect on girl readership.

So seriously, what’s the big deal here?

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summer reading & the failure of education

Time to get my annual anti-summer reading rant out of the way.

The conventional thinking about required summer reading is that without it kids will fall into the “summer slump.”  What I always see as the argument is that without summer reading kids “slide back” two months in their education, which then requires two months worth of review at the beginning of the school year to get students back up to speed.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with this thinking.  With this sort of 5:1 ratio of learning to loss do we see similar problems after a week’s vacation, where kids have to spend their first day back reviewing what was taught the week before the vacation?  In a six hour school day, have kids already forgotten what they learned in the first hour by the end of the sixth hour?

What about other subjects?  Surely without the regular reinforcement math and language skills slump over the summer as well, yet we don’t see the same push for these programs (though I do know they exist in some places).

What is known is that without school during the summer there seems to be a measurable slump in literacy. And anecdotally when summer reading programs are in place (and generally must be enforced in some way) the slump is prevented. This would suggest that either we are failing to meet our children’s educational needs for year-round learning (an economic impossibility as I understand it), or a failure of education in general.

The failure comes in raising a culture of students who have no desire to read unless they are forced to through summer reading.

Seriously, if we raise a culture of learners to believe that reading is something that is programmed, and only to be done when required, can we really be surprised that reading drops off the minute their formal education ends? What’s a two-month slump between school years compared to the decades adults spend not reading because they aren’t “required” to?  If we as a nation have a problem with the populace being unable to parse their way through the doggerel of punditry and the inability to sort out media bias from true journalism, how can we expect anything less if we train young minds that reading is a programmed activity to be endured until graduation?

I won’t dwell on the problems of economic inequality and access; it’s too obvious to ignore the fact that towns with money for good schools and libraries and better teachers aren’t going to see the same problems as those who are lacking.

Let me make clear, I am not against reading, or even reading during the summer.  What I am against is the notion, practically a blind cult-like belief, that summer reading programs are a panacea to a far larger problem we are unwilling to address.  We hear the national conversation about education, about the importance of it, and yet will not accept any responsibility for the underlying problem: given the choice, many children would not choose reading as a free-time activity. Blame what you will – internet, parental influence, economics – but don’t blame the children and don’t place the additional burden on them to correct the problem.

Required summer reading is the band-aid to a gaping wound that is never completely dressed.  It becomes a flag around which people rally to make themselves feel as if they are tackling a serious issue when they are not. Kids should enter the summer wanting to read on their own, asking their teachers and librarians (and parents) to recommend books to them.

If we as a society have made the right choices in deciding how our children are educated, in how they consume media and prioritize their free time, then our children will enter summer not only charged up by the freedom to explore extracurricular activities but ecstatic about the possibility of being able to read anything they want as well.

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the end of summer… reading

I know I’ve mulled over the idea of summer reading before – and recently the issue of reading has cropped up again in a different guise in the New York Times – but as we enter the last days of summer the girls are going through the dreaded ritual of fighting us over the last of the summer reading and homework.  You know the drill: the bargaining to do X number of pages before lunch so they can spend the afternoon with friends, to read Y chapters after dinner.  And when the goals go unmet, and the unfinished work compounds, there’s the renegotiation, and the yelling, the promising, the anxiety, the tears that it’s impossible, that it’s stupid…

And you know what?  It is stupid.

I have been fighting this internally for a good deal of time, trying to balance what I know is right with wanting to be a good upstanding parent, and it’s been a disaster.  Forcing kids to read is wrong, forcing them to read from lists is doubly wrong, and forcing them to read over the summer is wrong times a brazillion.

The ideal is to be fighting kids to put books down so they go outside to play.  Kids should be calling each other up when they finish a book they love and trading them with each other like… whatever kids trade these days.  They should be begging us for book suggestions, and we should be able to supply them with titles to check out from the library, if not from our own shelves.

That this isn’t the way things are is a colossal failure both of our education system and our jobs as parents.

If schools didn’t kill the joy of reading from kids they would still want to read with the same excitement they had when they first learned how to read.  Reading doesn’t one day become uncool, adults MAKE it uncool.  They take something fun and make it work.  They use books designed specifically for classrooms that kill the joy of reading.  These neutron bombs of the written word kill the brain but leave the shell of the child alive and teach them to hate reading.  Then they turn around and say “Now THIS is an excellent work of fiction, and if you do not agree then you don’t know what’s good for you.”  In essence, further destroying any remaining joy in the process.

Parents fail kids by condoning this activity, by failing to model reading, and by showing a disdain for the books that do interest their children. Many parents don’t know what their children are reading if it isn’t on the news or featured in a magazine article, and few could name a book that won a Newbery or Caldecott medal (or can even tell the difference between the awards).  Then because the school says children must do their summer reading, and sends home a big list of books to choose from or in some cases assigns specific books, we parents march dutifully in step and break out the whip to make sure it gets done.

We fool ourselves into believing that it keeps their minds active to do so, and that reading is important, but it’s lip service and kids know it.  They know it and they lose respect for us because for once they can see that we aren’t truly serving as their advocates.  That’s why they fight it.

I say this now, knowing I’m only half the parental unit in this household and that I’m likely to wimp out: I will no longer support, encourage, or insist that summer reading be done as per the dictates of the schools.  Our girls read just as many – if not more – books on their own then the number required, year round, and I am no longer interested in attempts to kill their joy of reading.

Likewise with summer homework.  Studies about the efficacy of summer homework are still being debated and anecdotally I can see that it does more harm than good.  It sends my older daughter into fits of hysterics that she cannot do it, that it’s frustrating, and she walks around saying she hates math as a result.  This is exactly how we kill kids off math and science and anything else we force them to do without providing them an internal incentive.  It doesn’t accomplish anything to have a child do any sort of educational work in a state of duress, and any advantages claimed by the pro-homework crowd are completely obliterated by the anxiety produced.

Last I checked, a child could not be failed or kept from social promotion in the schools for failure to do extracurricular activities which, technically, these are.  Extracurricular.  As in outside the curriculum.

I think I am prepared to go case by case, year by year, teacher by teacher to fight this.  Schools, if you cannot accomplish your stated educational goals within the confines of a school year, you are not permitted to extend your failure into my child’s summer vacation.  You either extend the school year or admit that your educational practices are failures if they cannot be retained or refreshed after a short break.

Furthermore, you may request that my children keep reading over the summer for their own pleasure, but you must honor and accept the books they choose to read.  What you have them read inside your classrooms I leave to you, but outside is no longer any of your business.

It’s taken me all summer to work this out but I now have nine months to prepare myself to execute it.  Maybe I’ll see if I can get anyone else to go along with me.

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the battle of the summer reading list

There’s about a month left in a school, which means the summer reading lists are coming home.

Joy.

What came home in my going-into-sixth-grade daughter’s weekly notices was a 12 page booklet of suggested titles – over 100 in all – broken down by genre and category, each titles annotated as either “challenging,” “more challenging,” and “most challenging.”

As if an emerging sixth grader isn’t going to see Jumanji on the list marked as a “challenging” title and not say “baby book.”  Taking into account that there are ids whose reading levels might not be as strong as their classmates, except in instances where a child has a true disability (in which case I would expect to see an entirely different list), acknowledgement of the “chore” of summer reading and the inclusion of a picture book on this list is an admission of failure on many levels.

Kids should want to read.

Kids shouldn’t have to be coaxed into reading by providing them “easy” books to meet a quota.

Summer reading should have a clear-cut purpose, with measurable goals, if it is to be assigned.

I recognize how lucky I am to have daughters who don’t have to be forced to read.  They are constantly asking me for new books.  I feel like a failure sometimes when I do not have a book at the ready, or cannot rush out that moment and go and buy them a handful.  My girls will use the town and school library to fill their needs willingly.  As a testament to their voracious reading habits, the challenge of the annual reading list is to find interesting titles they haven’t already read.

But worse, it’s finding titles they haven’t already read that are at their reading level.

There’s a lot of concern about literacy, and a lot of well-intentioned programs like summer reading to try and help pick up the slack, but in the end the system fails because it turns reading into a chore, allows lazy students to accept that they will be catered to, and offers no consequences for lack of participation.

Every summer, kids put off their summer reading until late August, scramble to get titles read and summaries written, and hand in their “proof” of participation at the beginning of school.  In addition to the four book minimum there is a grade-wide required book that is used by teachers at the beginning of the year as a point of discussion in class.  Having worked a bookstore I know for a fact there are a lot of kids (and their parents, mostly) scrambling to find copies of the required book that first week of school because then, and only then, are kids frantic enough to care about reading it.

Unless someone can enlighten me to the contrary, summer reading evolved from private schools looking to give their students an educational edge over their public counterparts.  It began in the high schools and trickled down (thank you Ronald Reagan) through the middle schools and into elementary schools.  It also spread out beyond private and into public school.  What began as a w/edge for the elite became “sound” educational practice.

Are their studies that show a child is better prepared for the coming school year as a result of summer reading?  Studies that show children becoming more fluent readers, more engaged readers, more willing readers?  We have this notion that kids are vessels, that the more we can pour into them, the better they’ll be.  Build a better sixth grader in just five extra books a year!  Ask me how! But what do they really learn from the experience?

We are learning, in our over-programmed world, that there is value in play, and that kids aren’t getting enough of it.  We give them a summer’s worth of opportunity and then attempt to structure it with a solitary, generally indoor activity.  It is a noble thing to want to promote literacy, and year-round learning, and to keep those minds limber.  We want children to be well-rounded and we want them to love reading and to love learning.

There has to be a better solution than summer reading.

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