Columbus Day

Last Monday was Columbus Day and the kindergartners spent some time learning about Christopher Columbus and his famous voyage. As a few of them waited for the bus in their Columbus style three cornered paper hats, I asked them a few questions.

"Do you know who Columbus was?" I asked.

"Yes," said Richie, "he was a guy and he discovered America."

"And he had three boats," offered Rocco.

"Why did he need three boats?"

"Cause," said Rocco, "he had a lot of stuff."

"Yeah," said Richie, "and a lot of friends who wanted to go with him."

Hmmm. "Do you know the name of his boats?"

"I do!" said Rocco, raising his hand (guess he forgot we weren't in class). "The Nina , the Tita and ...." He stopped to whisper a question to Richie. "And the Santa Margarita."

A girl sitting in the back of the line overheard him. "No, it's the Ninja, the Pinta and the Santa Marina. And everybody thought they were gonna go over the end of the world."

"You're right -- almost." Then the bus arrived and we had to put an end to our discussion. So goes a little slice of world history according to five year olds. I keep wondering when the teachers are going to explain Amerigo Vespucci to the kids. The only problem is, Vespucci didn't have a holiday named after him -- just a country and a continent.

Banned Book Week Hits Home

In honor of Banned Book Week, every September I do a unit on banned and challenged books with my sixth graders. I begin by showing them some books that have either been challenged or banned. Then I ask the kids what they think the books have in common. I offer a Hershey bar to anybody who has the right answer -- a giant one. The kids drool. "They all have words," offers one boy. "They have pages," offers somebody else.

"Obviously," I tell him. "Go deeper, beyond the parts of a book." Their answers range from "They're all fiction" to "They're all award winners." None of them ever get it right. Just in case, though, I have that giant Hershey bar on hand. I hold it up. Often. Honestly, I'd love to give it away sometime.

After many wrong answers, I have to tell them these are all books that have either been banned or challenged. We discuss the difference between a ban and a challenge. Then I pass out a bibliography of the top one hundred banned or challenged children's books of all time. The kids tally up how many they've read from the list. The list ranges from Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree to Harry Potter. Then we get to the more pressing questions. The biggest one is always "Why?" The next biggest question is "Who are these people?" I break the kids into small groups and they make a list of possible reasons for banning books and a list of who the censors might be. We discuss it. Then we delve into the repercussions of censorship. The kids enjoy the discussion. Later, they creep up to me and whisper "Can we borrow any of those books?"

"Sure," I whisper back, "Help yourself."

Okay, the topic of banned books makes for a lively discussion. And I admit, it hooks the kids and gets them reading. By sixth grade, their interest in reading is often waning. I'd stand on my head if I actually thought it would get them to open a book.

Now I work in two school libraries. A few years ago, the district where I worked changed over from a once a week special schedule to a six day rotation for the special area teachers. So, I'm now in one school for four days out of the cycle and in the other school for two days out of the cycle. Last Friday, when I came to one of the two schools, I found two copies of Judy Blume's book, Blubber on the desk with a note attached to them. "Remove these books," it said. "Some bad language."

It sounded like a joke. The day before, I'd finished my unit on banned and challenged books with my sixth graders. Now I was looking the issue straight in the face. Since it was the end of the day, I didn't get a chance to speak with the principal who wrote the note. I will speak to her though. Next week I hope.

Yeah, I know it would be easier to just remove the books from the shelf. Don't rock the boat. Keep everybody happy. And certainly it sounds innocent enough. I feel pretty certain that some student brought Blubber home and began reading it, came across the bad word, then showed it to her mom. Her mom showed it to the principal who decided that the best way to handle it was to remove the book from the library. There, problem solved. But this is no way to deal with the problem. Do we cave in to every parent who doesn't like a book and wants it removed from the library? No, of course not otherwise we may not have a library that consists of anything but pablum. The principal is honestly a very sweet and kind person. I like her very much. She probably thinks she is doing the best thing on behalf of the students. She's wrong. Once we open the door to censorship, there's no telling when it may stop. What's next? Fairy tales? Poetry? Really, I do hope we can find a peaceful resolution. I hope I don't have to contact outside groups. The ALA offers support.

So, anybody care to share their thoughts? If you were in my shoes, what would you do?

The Listening Walk

Each fall, the first grade teachers in the school where I work usually take their students for a listening walk. The walk usually coincides with a unit on the five senses. They don't go far -- around the perimeter of the school grounds or, if the teacher is feeling adventurous, perhaps all the way around the block. When you have twenty or so six year olds to keep track of, even a short distance can seem like a long way. Sometimes it's a lot like herding sheep. The idea is to get the kids to stop talking long enough to listen to the world around them. When they get back to class, the kids, with the help of their teacher, make a list of the things they heard and write sentences about them.

Most of the time, their observations are pretty mundane. "I heard some crickets. I heard the wind blowing the branches. I heard a dog barking. I heard a car. I heard a fire truck." Now and then, though, some real gems crop up. "Today I heard Mr. B. saying some bad words to the slide." Mr B. was the custodian and he'd had to clean some graffiti off the playground equipment.Occasionally, when the teacher isn't looking, some peculiar things also find their into a few pockets.

Last year, a teacher found one of her student's desk filled with wads of cotton. Upon further investigation, she learned the cotton came from a couple of tampons (unused, I should point out) three boys had found during the listening walk. At first they thought they were bullets of some kind. After taking them apart and finding nothing but boring cotton, they'd concluded they weren't bullets at all. In fact, they weren't sure what the heck they were. In previous years, kids have pocketed other things - lipstick cases, condoms, a rock somebody thought was a fossil but, in fact, was a dried out dog turd. This was the first time for tampons, however. There's been a debate about whether or they should put an end to the listening walk. But, as somebody pointed out, you can't stop kids from exploring their world. That's part of being a kid.

Exploring the world is also part of the writer's job. If something catches my attention, I stop to look and listen. I want to know more about it. If we lose our curiosity about the world, how can we ever hope to write about it? Last year during the holiday season, I was in Lord and Taylor's when I heard a child crying and screaming. Soon I saw a kid about 10 years old or so being led out of the store by two adults. Wondering what all the noise was about, of course I stopped and stared. One of the adults holding the boy's arm glared at me. "Hasn't anybody ever taught you it's impolite to stare? He's autistic! Get a life!"

Well, I do have a life and much of it involves examining things closely. Besides, I had no way of knowing he was autistic.

Don't Eat the Still Life

My art instructor has been after me for ages to work on a still life at home. I go to my painting class once every Saturday almost without fail and I love it. But, if I want to improve markedly, I need to spend more time painting. Same goes for writing or any other creative endeavor.

Last week I finally set up a still life at home -- a simple bowl of summer peaches. I think peaches are gorgeous. I love their fuzzy nap and the way the pinks and reds fade into the yellows. For me, they are the most beautiful of all summer fruit. Anyhow, I did a drawing, then a grisaille underpainting using raw umber. After my underpainting dried, I spent a few days laying in my first skin of paint on the peaches. Since I had to work last week, I set the bowl of peaches in the fridge to prevent them from going bad.

This weekend I took the bowl out of the fridge to resume work on my painting. Alas, only one peach was left in the bowl! Grrrrrr. "Who ate my still life?"

Husband raises his hand. "I did. Weren't you finished with them?"

"No. I only painted the first skin."

"Oh. Sorry. I really thought you were done with them. They were going to go bad."

Well, fortunately, peaches are still in season so I can use replacements. It's just that they'll look a little different. Next time I guess I'd better post a note. "Don't eat the still life."

Remembering September 11th

An anniversary is coming up, a sad one that's hard to think about. It's a day when I'll always remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. I teach on Long Island and I was at work that day, organizing my card trays. My friend Barbara, came down to my room. "A plane flew into the World Trade Center!" she announced.

We turned on the television in the library to see a burning tail piece sticking out of one of the towers. A shocking sight, to say the least, but we figured it was probably a bizarre accident. What we witnessed next, though , was even more horrifying -- another plane flying into the second tower. Clearly, this was no accident. For the rest of the day, our school was in lockdown, meaning nobody could enter or leave the building. The teachers whispered to each other in the halls. "What's wrong?" the kids asked. "What happened?" How could we tell them? Would they understand? What if somebody's mom or dad worked there? No, we couldn't tell them -- not yet.

For weeks after the attack, an eerie silence settled the parkways and streets of Long Island. The roads that were usually jammed bumper to bumper with traffic were almost empty. Homemade signs dangled from the overpasses -- Pray for the missing EMTs, David come home, Pray for the missing firefighters.

A figure model from my drawing class lost both of his daughters in the World Trade Center. They worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, on the top floor of one of the towers.

A young woman who babysat for our boys when they were small lost her husband. He didn't even work in the WTC. She talked to him on the phone as smoke engulfed the conference room where he was trapped. "I love you," he told her before she lost contact with him forever. He had been there for a one day meeting.

A newlywed music teacher my husband worked with lost her husband. She was in denial about it for weeks, claiming he was probably lost and disoriented but, sadly, nobody ever found him.

A friend of ours had just stepped off the subway when the second plane hit. He worked across the street from the WTC. He immediately got back on the subway and took the train home. Later he found he'd lost 10 of his colleagues, including his golf partner. For a year afterward he had trouble sleeping and suffered from depression.

Almost everybody on Long Island lost somebody that day -- a soccer coach, a fire fighter, a police officer, a cook. A friend of my husband's niece -- a Suffolk Co. Police officer -- was on the site with her cadaver dogs in the weeks following, looking for bodies. She can't even talk about what she found. Let's just say, she didn't find any bodies in tact.

For some strange reason I still think of the time we took a plane from Islip Airport on Long Island to Newark, the first leg of a longer flight out west to ski. It was a small, twin engine plane with about 40 passangers aboard. The pilot decided to give us a thrill and fly a few loops around the WTC. We could see people sitting at their desks working, people standing and talking while drinking their morning coffee. It was strange but thrilling at the same time. Now I often wonder how many of those people later lost their lives and, if they survived, what their lives are like now. I know that ours will never be the same.

We lost more than lives that day. We lost our innocence and the feeling of security we had always enjoyed.

The Habit of Reading

So, here I am staring down the road at the advent of another school year and wondering, as always, where the summer went. When I was a kid growing up in Michigan, the summers seemed to stretch on forever. Perhaps it was because we lived at the western edge of the time zone where the sky clung to every last drop of pink dusky light. Around the time of the summer solstice, sunset wasn't until nearly ten o'clock.

Or maybe it was because, outside of caring for my big white rabbit, Whiskey, and weeding the garden, there was nothing I had to do and nowhere I had to be each day. For the most part, my time was my own. I spent a lot of it playing kickball in the street with my friends, swimming in the pool and reading through the stack of books I brought home from the library every few weeks. Growing up in war ravaged England, my parents had only attended school until they were 14. Still, they recognized the power of books and established the habit of reading in us at an early age. As I got older and began working, the summers seemed to shrink. Those lazy days spent reading, swimming and playing kickball had gone forever.

While I haven't played kickball since I was fifteen and rarely swim much anymore, I still go to the library. During the course of the school year, I go to the library every day. I am a librarian, after all. And no matter how busy I get, I usually find time to curl up with a book each night before turning out the light. Some habits we just never grow out of.

A Book Quiz

I found this little book quiz on somebody else's blog. I'm not sure how any of these questions correspond to the book titles but, hey, it's kind of fun. Anyhow, all you book lovers might enjoy it. Check it out. I was, The Giver, by Lois Lowry -- one of my favorite YA books by one of my favorite authors. Not so bad I guess.