I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. A friend died in February. She was not just a neighbour but someone who had been a part of our lives ever since we started coming here. Being back for the summer means that her absence is a constant presence. We have been fortunate in our lives to not lose many people on a permanent basis along the way. Living abroad has meant the constant temporary loss of person and place, sometimes our selves. For my children the first big loss was that of our wonderful golden lab. After she passed we could not bear to be in the kitchen without involuntarily anticipating tripping over her as we cut vegetables and she was there particularly for the broccoli scraps. The habit of her presence only began to cease when we moved house and the substance of her being was not in the next place.
Similarly the process of empty nesting with first the one child, coincided with us moving country at the same time she did. So there wasn’t a her-shaped space in our new country, even as we created a guest room which wasn’t so much a guest room as a room for her when she could visit. Which covid quickly slashed the delusions of. With the next child to fly, a combination of yet another home and the continuation of covid, life was this weird limbo of presence and absence, being and not being. There was not so much specific as generalised absence and grief for everyone and everything that was familiar and real.
I wanted to combine this with some picture and middle grade books on death and dying and grief. Which of course means a few days delay while I research and search and put a poster together. Publishers have very homogenous and defined ideas of covers and what displays the essence of a book. Unfortunately for death this seems to converge on a blueish aqua. Culturally traditional colours such as black, grey or white are apparently not seen as right for the K-14 crowd.
“The Colour of Death” led me to this interesting graphic by David McCandless (see video below). Which makes me wonder where the dominant colour for the books come from.
Whatever colour death is, it is not anything in pastel hues. If anything it is the absence of colour, of everything. A vacuum. Which brings me to one of the best books on grief and the grieving process – which didn’t come up in my initial search with the keywords of “death” and “grief” – the extremely clever – visually and verbally – “Bug in a Vacuum” by Mélanie Watt.
I’m sitting on my balcony as the light and shade shifts after the rainstorms we’ve had in the last few days watching the clouds gather and separate and the shadows on the lake and in the lake. Where depth is darker and shallow is lighter. The depth of grief can never be lighter, and definitely not a light acqua.
Relationships are part of both mental and physical memory. And part of the grieving process is retraining my impulses to pop downstairs with some food, or to say hi or to see if she needs anything when I go down to do the groceries. To sit and hear memories of her life in Canada, the Congo and Australia and Switzerland. The unspoken lessons of growing older and less mobile and more removed from tactile life. With life experienced second and third hand through media and text. The lessons of the absence of choice in when to let go and the technicalities of a life lived and a life living well. The horror of the creep of the wish to die becoming stronger than the will to live.
And as we in turn age, these questions become less abstract and more real. When to cling on and when to let go, and who decides.
I’m super late in sharing this presentation I gave the the L2L (Librarian to Librarian) workshop that I co-organised in Dubai in 2023.
Having worked in the Middle East for the first time, and with a predominantly muslim demographic meant I needed to get up to speed on what ensuring our collection mirrored our students would mean. Here are some suggestions – I’m no expert and have suggested links to people who are and whose guidance in this area was invaluable.
Here is the slideshow with some suggestions of books to add to a collection.
Initially I thought of perhaps going through the DDC systematically from 000 to 999 and writing about some of the books I’ve loved / used / displayed, but then I spent the day yesterday re-reading Zen by Shabnam Minwalla and decided randomness, chaos and interest was infinitely preferable to order and sensibility.
There’s something amazing about books that manage to evoke a sense of time and place both through words and cultural references to music, poetry, quotes etc. And the books I’ve been reading and promoting for our middle school have been great at this. How many others sit with a book in one hand (or audio in one ear) and youtube open in the other to look up the songs you don’t know or listen to old favourites while reading?
I remember back when I first started out as an intern under KD at UWCSEA East making a libguide page (see “other interesting stuff” in the tabbed box) to support John Green’s amazing “The Fault in our Stars“. (cringe moment at how bad I was at that time in making good looking libguides!). When I introduce books with musical elements now to my students, I like to have some music playing in the background when they enter. Some more great ones include Ready player one, Red White and Whole, The thing about Jellyfish and Wink .
And here is a list of more from “Middle Grade Carousel” many of which ended up in one of the displays this year. Another display that worked really well for my “Swifties” was to match the song names in her latest album to other “related” titles (in the broadest sense of the word). There were chocolates on offer!
And that’s all for today. Please reply with your favourite fiction or nonfiction books on music!
PS
Two things I meant to put in and then forgot about:
uplifting music
According to a study conducted by cognitive neuroscientist Jacob Jolij of the University of Groningen, Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen is the most encouraging track in the world.
The research analyzed various factors, including the beats per minute, the key, and the chords of the song. Here are the top 10 songs that put you in a good mood (and the youtube versions):
Queen, “Don’t Stop Me Now”
ABBA, “Dancing Queen”
Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations”
Billy Joel, “Uptown Girl”
Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”
The Monkees, “I’m a Believer”
Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
Bon Jovi, “Livin’ on a Prayer”
Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive”
Katrina & the Waves, “Walking on Sunshine”
seismic music
Something that combines a bit of geoscience and music – according to seismologists at the British Geological Survey (BGS) earthquake activity was clocked during the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in Edinburgh and the most seismic activity was caused by the song “… Ready for It?” .
I’ve always been a huge fan of picture books. I’m the librarian that will read “Maia and what Matters” to a group of Middle School teachers and struggle to continue through tears. I spend a reasonable chunk of my budget on picture books (or as some librarians like to refer to the “sophisticated picture books (SPB)” I’ve never see a book deal with anxiety with as much compassion and understanding as Mel Tregonning’s “Small Things”. I maintain a libguide for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) that relies heavily on the work of Dr. Myra Bacsal and her SEL booklists.
So what is the problem? I’m worried that publishers are becoming complacent about plugging the gaps in information / knowledge / awareness of really big and worrisome things by having a picture book in that space. A case in point is my (and most librarians) quest to curate books related to the Sustainable Development Goals. And I’m afraid even the UN with it’s SDG book club plays into this.
It is easy enough to find a picture book about Wangari Maathai, about the plastic bags of Gambia. It is way harder to get a good (recent) nonfiction book geared at 11-14 year olds on deforestation or plastic bags for example. It seems the nonfiction publishing cycle is around 8-10 years (I found plenty from 2009-2011) between updates whereas the actual issues are accelerating faster.
As mentioned in my previous blog – a big change has occurred in the presentation and design of nonfiction books, so it is important not only from an “up to date facts” point of view that we have these books, but also from an “enticing to read” point of view. When new books exist in a space (trees in this instance) they are truly fantastic. Like “Can you Hear the Trees Talking” by Peter Wohlleben – the young reader version of “The Hidden Life of Trees”. But that’s not really about deforestation, just a very positive reminder of why trees are so awesome and special and worth saving. Or Annick Press (one of my favourites) with Kevin Sylvester’s “Follow your Stuff” an exceptional book for the humanities tracing common items including T-shirts; Medications; Technology; books through geography, production, labour and economics.
The last thing I was looking for included something on sustainable cities and homes. The books in my collection were from 2007 and sorely needed updating. As is the case when a book is older than the students reading it. It’s a fascinating area. It’s something that most major cities in the world are pouring money and resources in. But you can find lofty tomes, heavy text books, coffee-table photo books and very little else. A fellow librarian pointed me to “No small Plans” which looks amazing, but very specific to Chicago, and not so easy to get to China.
Rebecca Sjonger has written a new series of books around the UN Sustainable Development Goals which combines goals and is an overview. I’d argue that’s a good beginning, but actually each goal merits a well researched, curated and presented book for each of the different levels of education. Our world in Crisis is another recent series that covers pollution, poverty, health & disease, civil war & genocide, immigration and terrorism in an age appropriate but informative way.
So there is a huge amount of hope and great steps in the right direction. But if we want to keep middle graders curious and inquiring beyond the hook of picture books, we need to keep feeding them nonfiction of this high calibre in all and any direction they want to research further.
I want it to be that the picture books are the appetiser and a couple of Youtube videos are the amuse bouche but that excellent nonfiction books are the main course, supplemented by databases (for context) and news (for the latest updated information).
What are your favourite books to support understanding the SDGs in Middle School?
This phrase is attributed to Peter Drucker and made famous by Mark Fields (although can’t easily be authenticated). I firmly believe it to be a reality both in business and education, and many a manager has been burnt by this.
I’m currently in Bangalore, having spent the last three days at the Neev Literature Festival where I had the honor to be invited back as a speaker / workshop leader and as a jury member of the inaugural Neev Book Award. It was touch and go whether I’d be able to attend, given that my passport has been tied up with either visa or customs arrangements since the beginning of August, but a little more than a week ago I got the go-ahead! I’m so glad I did. You see Neev is a very special place. Many schools claim to promote a culture of reading and spend vast amounts of money on classroom or central libraries. But sometimes to no avail as the individual teachers or heads don’t actually walk the walk.
Here the founder really and truly believes in reading, and has invested immensely to ensure that reading permeates the school – what other school hosts a free literature festival at their premises, flies over authors, illustrators, librarians, storytellers, interpretive dancers and then invites other schools and the public to partake of their largess? I was talking to their new head last night, about admissions, and she said they were in a luxury position where demand was greater than supply of school places and one of the ways they decided on who gets a seat was based on the families being able to demonstrate that they supported a reading culture at home! Imagine that! Not portfolios, or CV’s or admission tests. And it shows. Listening to the young students as they described their reading lives I was astounded at the depth and breadth of their reading.
I spent the morning today with a few of the visiting authors, and one – the wonderful Nadia Hashami, was telling me of a conversation with a reader who had read her book twice and was recommending it to everyone, and who had also attended her panel on “Protect or Prepare” difficult topics in literature – the discussions, chaired by Katie Day were around which topics could or should be out of bounds for children. This young lady’s take on it was that death was a part of life and had a place in literature as it was part of a normal life, however, she could not come to terms with rape and sexual violence because it was something that one would never want to be part of your life and which would never leave you or have a resolution. Astounding the maturity and empathy (some USA people could do with a little more empathy-powering literature obviously).
I had my own encounter with culture, which I’d like to reflect on. I did a workshop for 11-15 year olds using empathy mapping. I had the luxury of around 20 students and 90 minutes. So my strategy was to do a warm-up exercise by introducing the concept of empathy mapping using gender, and trying to take the view of the opposite gender based on what to Western sensibilities are rather sexist advertisements about mother/daughter bonding over dishwashing and father/son bonding over dude stuff like fishing and hanging out outside and drinking beers. It had worked extremely well in the international school environment I was coming from. But I hadn’t done my homework and had it “sensitivity tested” by my Indian friends … I quickly discovered that young Indian ladies (bar one or two) think that it is lovely to be able to bond with your mother over household chores, and that generally the students never needed to do chores, being of a class where chores were done for them by others! With a bit of prompting and help from my friends and the students’ teachers we managed to successfully complete the exercise and move on to phase 2 which was a reading of “No one walks on my father’s Moon” . It is a difficult text, despite being a picture book. However I like to use it, as even without an accompanying empathy mapping exercise, it provides a very powerful message of reconciliation and perspective taking.
This time the exercise really did work – on reflection, the “warm up” possibly did help the success, despite not being optimal, because the students just weren’t used to giving their own views and in the first half kept looking to the adults for the “right / expected answer”. We had some powerful contributions from the groups, and some very interesting movement from utter condemnation for the father’s behaviour to understanding and empathy for the context and actions. And also the feeling that they could use this in their personal and academic lives.
Here’s a copy of the presentation – I believe that empathy cannot always be taken for granted despite the great potential of literature and us very much wanting it to be so. Hopefully this helps us and our students to take a step closer into “climbing into someone’s skin and walking around in it”
I’m part of this club that I never want to be in the position to welcome others to, and yet yesterday afternoon I had to admit yet another member.
I don’t even know what to call it – I don’t want to name it – #metoo has connotations that I’d rather not introduce an 11 year old to, but maybe we need to.
The scenario. Last hours of the last day of a G6 camp. A young girl sitting to the side crying. As the nearest available woman I was asked to see what the problem was. She was really upset. Why? She’d had a great idea during one of the group activities that was ignored, but then wholeheartedly accepted when a boy reiterated the exact same idea minutes later. I affirmed her right to be upset, and angry and frustrated. And inside I’m thinking omg, how horrid that at the tender age of 11 she’s already being confronted with this. Or how admirable that she’s so aware – I think I was in my own private intellectual haze until at least university.
I told her there was a name for what had happened – sort of, and explained mansplaining. I told her there were other strong capable women out there who were ready to support girls like her and that I’d send her some articles. I told her that crying was unfortunately not the answer, nor was setting herself aside. I quickly taught her some calming breathing, and yesterday evening got in touch with a wonderful teacher at our school who runs a club for students around the themes of gender and identity. I spoke to a couple of teachers who had been at the stations where she’d been excelling in leadership – intellectual and physical and who totally “got” that what had happened was that she’d been taken down a peg or two by the wanna-be alpha males in the group. At 11. Yes. At the age of 11. It probably happens earlier, but perhaps the consciousness and self-righteousness and awareness of what has just happened doesn’t happen earlier (frontal lobe and all that?).
Recently I’ve been given to much pause of thought about learning and education, not the least following watching the movie “The imitation game” about Alan Turing’s code breaking during WW2 on the plane, followed by three days of intensive attending of presentations at 21CLHK. It’s taken a while to try and crystallise my thoughts, and they’re probably still not as coherent as they should be, but these are my main takeaways.
While Turing is attempting to build a machine that will, in the long term, take over the work of cracking this (and other) codes, everyone around him is desperately engaged in a race against the clock. And at midnight each day the clock is reset, all work they did that day is useless and they start again from nothing the next day. While I know that education is not exactly like that, I sometimes feel that a school year is like that Bletchley park day with a teacher racing against the daily clock, against the time-tabled period which they’re allotted to do one thing or another and then the bell goes or the summer holiday starts and we’re back at square one, but the child is handed over to the next person. I’ve said before this is fine for the “middle”. It’s the children at the extremes where this handing over is most acutely observed, either in a positive or negative sense as they lurch through the process of learning and hopefully becoming educated beings.
Far worse is not only is Turing not supported, but the mediocre middle are out to destroy not only his machine, but him as well.
Ironically it is always easier, and more appreciated, to work extremely hard at a huge volume of output, than to openly take a step back and reconsider the foundation upon which practices and assumptions lie.
I’ve often decried the lack of longitudinal research in education. Our current high schoolers, what do they “look” like now (from a literacy standpoint which is my optical focus) and what did they look like when they were in G4 (my area of concern for my BWB club). And my G4’s where did they come from? How soon did their literacy attempts start to diverge from the middle? How about the ELL students? We know that the process of learning a language to CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency) level is a 5-7 year process. So when they exit an ELL programme after 2-3 years we haven’t even scratched the surface.
I attended quite a few sessions / presentations at 21CLHK that were symptomatic and typical of this “information” age. A deluge of ideas and devices and applications, delivered at a rate exceeding the absorption of most of the (highly intelligent) brains present. I fear we employ the same methodology with our students. I know that I do. I get 40 minutes a week with my G5&6s and 20 minutes a week with the rest. Lessons and wisdom (in as much as I can claim to have any) needs to be imparted within a fraction of that to allow time for browsing of books. Teach the teacher they admonish. The teacher who has no time, as they race through a curriculum, that while enquiry based, demands 6 inquiries in 8 months. And where none of the units in G1 look at cars and planes or dinosaurs or dogs and cats or insects or space or the other obsessions a 6 year old has.
I can read stories. Stories that I hope will cut through the clutter and touch their hearts. And I can but try to shove the right books in the right hands before the next group of wonderful eager expectant hugging children walk in. I sometimes say to my more illustrious and famous ex-MBA friends that I’m paid in hugs rather than dollars, and its true. I can try to show, not tell, them that mistakes aren’t important, it’s what you do with them that matters.
And then the Social-emotional (SE) dimension. Back to Turing. By the movie depiction he was socially inept, cared more for his work and ideas and machine than for the people around him. The movie at least gave a nice nod to the ideas of development of relationships and collaboration and the notion that a good team needs more than just raw intelligence. I do badger on a bit on SE Learning and the need for books and picture books to aid discussions and self-exploration / understanding. I am confronted daily with students who struggle in this area, many of whom don’t have the “brilliant mind” that people like Turing had to perhaps compensate. The children who return a book and say – “it was an important book, because you know I’m also being bullied” and I look at them and I can see why their cohort would target them and how hard it is to protect them and turn the tide of otherwise nice kids performing macro and micro aggressions on children who are just slightly off kilter enough to merit the worst kind of attention.
And then you see an article like this one, announcing an OECD Pisa-like test for Social-Emotional skills. Please take the time to read and absorb the article and its implications. There is part of me that says perhaps the children who so desperately need interventions will get them. There is another (larger) part of me that knows that we do all sorts of other math and literacy testing that doesn’t lead to additional help so how on earth would we find the people, the expertise, the money, the time to devote to this area? And once it’s tested, and the tests are far reaching – even into the untouchable of untouchables in education – student’s homes, what will happen to the results? I’ve seen students desperately in need of having reading disability testing where parents have refused as they’re terrified of the stigma of a label even as innocuous as dyslexia as the child goes through school.
So I wonder, what can and should our responses be? Can we, should we, slow things down? Try to look at school as the whole process and learning as life-long – as we so often purport to do or hear the meaninglessly bandied phrase “life long learning” when all we actually do in schools is cut short every attempt a child makes at extending learning?
Chris Crutcher (author of Whale talk amongst other books) posted this on his Facebook in December (it takes a while to find amongst all his US-politics angst, so I will repost it here). I’ll leave you to think about it.
Almost everyone I know who dismisses the teaching profession wouldn’t last a day with this cool little dude (age 6!) – in a classroom where a whole bunch of kids see the world 180 degrees from him – before making him think he’s awful. This is the gamut range in EVERY classroom, k-16 and beyond. His teachers KNOW there isn’t an easy answer, but they come back and come back and come back, looking for what works; in an American educational environment crafted largely by non educators who would rather score high on mind-numbing tests of memory, than celebrate – and PAY for – creativity and expression and wildly different learning styles.
SO…this is for anyone who ever tells you teachers take that job so they can have three months off, or that “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” and for anyone who needs a great example of why it isn’t:
WORD FOR WORD
12-4-17
N. School is hard.
?
N. I want them to leave me alone.
?
N. Grown ups. They want me to do work, but I am too tired. Then they keep bothering me with words. I just want to stay one hour cause school bothers me. I hate school.
?
N. Boring. It’s so boring. I don’t want to go to school.
?
N. I want to stay home and have fun. I can teach myself. I like to use my brain and think and learn without being in a big building. They don’t help us learn, they just suspend us. I already know what they say. I’m just bored. Games help me learn. Building things help me learn. I study things and learn and not in a big building. Computers help me learn. They tell me stuff I don’t know. They don’t let me learn there at school. I have to sit there and listen. I want to learn non-fiction because I’m a scientist. They are wasting my time.
?
I could be learning. I want non-fiction so I can study. They read fiction stories but I like non-fiction books and computers. They’re making me dumb cause they don’t tell me non-fiction. They want me to be normal, but I want to be a robot maker. They try to make me normal but I don’t want to.
? Normal?
N. Sit there and listen which I don’t want to. That is so dumb. I want to do stuff so I can learn.
? If you were the teacher?
N. I would have kids do cool stuff like learn how to build cool bridges. I never got to go to the computer lab. They make me do dumb papers but I want to use the computer, cause computers know cool stuff. I want to learn everything, but school is holding me back.
?
It takes me away from studying and learning. (Chris Crutcher, Facebook, 11 December 2017)
This time the exercise really did work – on reflection, the “warm up” possibly did help the success, despite not being optimal, because the students just weren’t used to giving their own views and in the first half kept looking to the adults for the “right / expected answer”. We had some powerful contributions from the groups, and some very interesting movement from utter condemnation for the father’s behaviour to understanding and empathy for the context and actions. And also the feeling that they could use this in their personal and academic lives.
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 