Photo by Hemera

Being out in the field, talking to teachers and librarians about the Common Core (CC), I’ve learned as much as I’ve taught. My world is often centered in my study (where I research and write), or in the graduate classes that I teach, or in the K–12 classrooms that I visit. In those spaces, I’ve learned, secondhand, about students being told they can only read an “L” or an “R” book—and how parents have demanded that libraries rearrange their collections from A to Z, according to carefully determined reading levels, so their kids can read totally non-frustrating texts. But it took being at a workshop out on Long Island, NY, for me to really understand the fundamental clash between guided reading and Common Core—something that many of you doubtless experience daily.

At the workshop, librarians spoke of their schools being, in effect, taken over by guided reading crews with their alphabet soup of labels and rigid instructions. That type of approach made absolutely no sense to me, so I did my homework. I learned that guided reading began as a good idea: breaking classrooms into groups by reading levels didn’t work since poor readers didn’t improve when they were clumped together, so teachers needed a new way to match individual readers, reading levels, and texts. So far, so good. Indeed, as one reading expert told me, providing a space, say 20 to 30 minutes daily, where, as part of the reading diet, a learner experiences clear sailing seems at worst harmless and at best a step toward success.

But this relatively benign approach has turned into an expensive program complete with minatory reading coaches who run around mandating to librarians what kids should be allowed to read. The second problem is that the steroidal guided reading monster is directly at odds with the Common Core.

As literacy expert Timothy Shanahan pointed out in “The Common Core Ate My Baby and Other Urban Legends,” a recent article in Educational Leadership, limiting students to below-frustration texts doesn’t necessarily help them (see, especially, “Legend 4: Teachers Must Teach Students at Frustration Levels”) nor does CC require all kids to tackle weighty tomes far beyond their previous reading ranges. In the early grades, where students are working to become fluent readers, CC doesn’t demand that they read more complex texts. And it’s precisely in that preK-to-2 band that learners may need some reading time where they don’t have to struggle. And that brings us to content.

The key clash between guided reading and CC is that those A-to-Z labels have nothing to do with content—they are about the ease of decoding. Starting in earnest in second grade, CC stresses that knowledge is a key part of literacy. This cuts two ways. Every elementary school librarian knows that a student who’s passionate about a subject isn’t daunted by the text’s difficulty—the multi-syllabic names of dinosaurs being a prime example. Curiosity drives readers on from one record, one wacky fact, one sports stat, one set of rules on how to care for pets, to another—and the text’s length or structure isn’t a formidable barrier. In turn, the Common Core standards emphasize that in order to read a student must identify details that add up to evidence and tap into modes of thinking that add up to argument and point of view. You can’t build those muscles without what librarians used to call “stretch,” or challenging, books.

Whether young people are on a sports team or practice an instrument, whether they play Minecraft or chess, they realize that to be good at something you have to work at it; you have to test your limits. Reading works the same way: you build muscles through confronting and overcoming a challenge, and you’re drawn to that challenge because you have a specific goal. We in library land know of many reading goals that appeal to students—books they want to tackle because they find them engaging, interesting, and exciting. Common Core adds the goal of preparing students for a successful life after school. That is the sort of guided reading that makes sense to me.

Photo credit: D. Feingold

In addition to best-selling mysteries and thrillers for adults, James Patterson also writes for young readers, and he’s extremely proud of his “Middle School” series. The latest entry, I Funny, is told from the point of view of a middle schooler who uses humor to help him cope with a physical handicap and the loss of his family. In this case, laughter really is the best medicine for Jamie Grimm, the narrator of I Funny.

Your series for young adults, like “Maximum Ride” and “Daniel X,” have been checked out so many times from my library that they’re falling apart. What makes them so popular with teens?

Well, when my 14-year-old son, Jack, was younger, I told him that I expected him to read every day during his summer break. Jack was never a huge reader, but his mother and I told him that we would make sure he had really cool books to read. Cool books are ones that he wouldn’t put down and when he got done he would ask for another one. When kids are younger, we want them to read, read, read, and they will only do that if they like what they read. Kids in middle school need books with stories that move along, stories that they love, and pages that practically turn themselves so kids won’t pick up a  book and say that they don’t like it and they don’t like reading. I think that books need a lot of meat in them. For example, Maximum Ride is really about a couple of things beyond the story line like dealing with being different. It is really about kids taking responsibility for their own lives. My most popular books are the Middle School books.

Why did you create the website Read Kiddo Read? Has it made a difference in kids’ lives?

Absolutely! Part of my interest in creating the website was watching Jack grow up and watching his attitude toward books.  Even with his friends who are very bright, it has always been a struggle to get them to read at least on their own time. That is a big stimulus for me. As individuals we cannot do much to help the health care crisis, budget situation, or global warming. Unfortunately, we spend a lot of time just talking about these things, which doesn’t help anything, and I am big on doing stuff. As individuals, we can most times get the kids in our houses reading or our grandchildren reading, or we can even help our local school get more books. So doing something to get kids reading is a big deal for me. I have been trying other things too, like working with independent bookstores to hold essay contests, where kids write about a book that most affected them. I have set up over a 100 scholarships at different colleges across the U.S., and they are all for teachers.  We plan to double this number in the coming year. We have even set up a program at Vanderbilt University to bring in kids every Saturday to help improve their reading skills. I am testing an after-school program in four middle schools in Palm Beach County to get kids help with their reading, and we pumped 700 to 1,000 books in all these schools. If we can get a cadre of kids reading, the teachers will notice when their reading improves and more kids will start reading and over time this will improve the neighborhoods. I do all of this because I can. We must help kids build good habits and break down bad ones. Getting kids to read will not happen overnight. We must keep at it and get the right books into the right hands.

Why does the “Middle School” series focus on humor?

Humor is one of the ways to get to kids. Combining the prose and illustrations makes the book more like a movie, and that’s a cool thing. All the Middle School books are good stories. I think that I Funny is my best.

I like I Funny‘s  main character, Jamie Grimm. Could the story have played out the same way if he wasn’t in a wheelchair? Are you worried that some people might be offended because he makes fun of his handicap?

I like the idea of a kid having a terrible break in life, rising above it with comedy, but yes the story would still be valid if Jamie didn’t have a handicap. Nobody should be offended by this book.  I am not big on political and social correctness, because I think it is more important to be a good human being.

Which gets us to the contest for the Funniest Kid in America. What kind of response are you hoping for? How does the contest relate to your literacy work?

Some kids are going to be brave enough to submit videos, but we are going to put a lot of videos up on the website for kids to watch and that should be fun. I recorded a bunch of short pieces with Zach Gordon, who was in the Wimpy Kid movies, to introduce the idea of the contest. We want to get kids attention and hopefully this will help them start building the habit of reading.

Elizabeth Kahn is the librarian at Patrick F. Taylor Science and Technology Academy in Jefferson, LA. She writes reviews for School Library Journal and Library Media Connection as well as a blog to chronicle the happenings in her school library at Tales from a Loud Librarian.

Nationally, there are more than 700,000 teens in custody each night—teens who have been abused and neglected, teens who are entrepreneurs, teens who have experienced many major losses, teens with adult experiences and low reading levels. Due to the fact that minorities are disproportionately confined, too many of these teens are African American and Latino. Being underground, they’re the canaries in a coal mine, exposing what’s poisonous in the environment. There are many opportunities to reach these young adults both in and out of custody. My hope is that this column can bring to light new finds for these “urban” readers.

According to a December 2012 Anna E. Casey Foundation report, nearly 4.3 million young adults (ages 20 to 24) are unemployed and truant. That 4.3 million translates to a national 74 percent teen unemployment rate. With those statistics, it’s an understandable and even somewhat logical choice to turn to an underground economy. Kenny Johnson’s memoir, The Last Hustle, is unique in providing insight into the normality and reasoning that led to his choice of a life that was devoted to crime. The consequences? He spent over 20 years in city, state, county, and federal prisons. Booker T Huffman’s From Prison to Promise tells a more familiar story of a neglected child who turns to the successful role models he sees growing up: gangsters and drug dealers.

Most of my teens were initially victims, with their victimization not adequately addressed. Meg Medina’s fantastic Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass (slight quibble: the title should be Is Going to, not Wants to) deals with bullying and the way that teens facing difficult and challenging circumstances hold their fear and vulnerability underground. Check this out along with these other featured titles.

*The names of kids have been changed.

Takoudes, Greg. When We Wuz Famous. Henry Holt, March 2013. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780805094527.

Gr 8 Up—The jury (my kids as well as myself) is still out on this title. It reminds me of Matt De La Pena’s pacing style—slow to start, yet ultimately an engaging read. In one of the first chapters, Francisco’s girlfriend, Reignbow (yeah, really), is talking openly to the police. From my experience, this is completely unrealistic and I’m not sure my kids will make it past this point. But by page 61, I was rapidly turning the pages as Francisco struggles with attending the white prep school on a basketball scholarship and feels torn by his loyalty to Reignbow and his messed-up foster kid brother who’s on the streets. Takoudes made a movie with teens from Spanish Harlem and the book is based on the film.

Huffman, Booker T with Andrew William Wright. Booker T: From Prison to Promise. Medallion Press. 2012. Tr $14.99. ISBN 9781605424682.

Gr 8 Up—Booker T was one of eight children. His hardworking father died of a stroke when he was 10 months old, and his equally hardworking mother died of surgical complications when he was 13. Without her, the family fell into chaos, leaving Booker T and his youngest sister to fend for themselves. His mother’s house gradually decays around them as the electricity, water, garbage and other services are cut off, while his older siblings are living their lives to various dysfunctional degrees. Booker T then turns to the successful role models he sees around him: gangsters and drug dealers. In junior high, he becomes a father but doesn’t have the wherewithal to deal with it and blames his girlfriend and abandons his son, just as he was abandoned. Ending up in prison with a job in the laundry, he talks his way onto the weight-lifting team. Upon his release, he recognizes his responsibilities, gets his son out of foster care, and is on his way to becoming the six-time world wrestling champion and public figure he is today. It’s not action-packed, but rather a straight-forward, no-frills commentary.  Reluctant readers will find the trim size appealing and subject matter of interest, and other teens will pick it up for a quick read.

Johnson, Kenny with Shanti Einolander.The Last Hustle. Non-Duality Press. 2011. pap. $16.45. ISBN 9780956643285.

Gr 8 Up—Street lore says that a life of crime leads to only one of three places: death, prison, or going crazy in prison. There’s a fourth option that isn’t talked about much but experienced by some—a deep spiritual awakening leading to complete and total transformation. This isn’t a religious conversion, but an awakening to the true nature of life so that abiding peace is found even in the most challenging of circumstances. The latter was Kenny Johnson’s experience. He writes, “Prison was where I discovered my soul and so much more.” Throughout his life, he desired freedom. Ironically, prison offered him the challenges of confinement and pain as well as the time to read, study, and take classes. Teens who are looking for titles like Jarvis Masters’s Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row (Padma Publishing, 1977) will enjoy this book.

Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. Candlewick. March 2013. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780763658595.

Gr 9 Up—There’s a lot packed into this vibrant small book which will make it a favorite for teens. When the stair to their tenement collapse, Piddy’s mom, an immigrant from Cuba, insists on moving.That means a new school.The trouble begins right away when Yaqui Delgado targets 16-year-old Piddy with threats. Piddy doesn’t even know who Yaqui is, much less what she has done to instigate these threats. Living in fear, her grades suffer, and she finally figures out that to avoid trouble, it’s easier to skip school. Piddy is tough, and knows the rules of the streets, but she doesn’t want to fight. But that doesn’t work—Yaqui tracks her down and inflicts a brutal beating that’s posted on the Internet. Subplots include a boy with an abusive father, Piddy’s desire to work with animals—elephants, to be exact—a wonderful hair salon/aunt/neighbor contingent, and Piddy’s longing for information about her father whom she’s never met. Lots of action with a realistic setting, dialogue, relationships, problems, and solutions make this book a winner. The cover—a blue locker with graffiti for the title—will attract reluctant readers. The content will keep them reading to the end and wanting more, especially to hear Yaqui’s story.

“

Financial Literacy

Grade Level 7 Up

Cost Tiered pricing begins at $595 for an annual subscription for schools and public libraries, and is based on student enrollment or cardholder numbers.

Overview Don’t let the simple homepage layout fool you—there is a ton of information in this database. Rosen has revised and updated material from more than 500 new and backlist titles, readying it for online use—and that effort shows.

Topics are timely, relevant, and made accessible to the intended audience. The homepage displays a list of seven broad financial topics that users can select; these range from “Entrepreneurship and Career Skills” to “Role of Government” to “The Market Economy.” The homepage also offers two featured articles: “Making Sense of It” discusses a current event, while “Take a Closer Look” typically contains a story with video; the one displayed at the time of the review, for example, stars teenage girls discussing how to start and market a small business. Users can also try one of six different financial calculators or get involved by answering the daily quiz or poll. Resources for teachers and librarians include Common Core and state-specific standards correlations, promotional materials, and Web buttons.

Content and Usability To get an idea of the content available here, users will want to browse by simply drilling down into a topic of interest. For example, clicking on the homepage topic “Personal Finance” brings up a list of related issues, which include “Credit and Debt,” “The Economy and the Individual,” and “Income and Careers,” to name a few. Under “Credit and Debt” are four relevant articles including “First Credit Card and Credit Smarts,” which is presented in very manageable sections. “Entrepreneurship and Careers Skills” offers helpful advice on job seeking, including how to write résumés and cover letters and prepare for interviews. Articles are divided into 8 to 12 prominently labeled subdivisions. “Previous” and “Next” navigation buttons allow readers to easily turn to the next screen.

A search box is provided for more specific queries. In addition, topics may be browsed alphabetically or by subject, and doing either reveals the depth of material provided.

Layout This database is not cutesy but rather reflects a more serious approach, a smart choice for the topic and intended age group. The interface is pleasantly consistent and predictable. Every article is presented in the same way, with a menu of sections on the left and the text on the right. At any time the user may click on the large “Financial Literacy” link on the top left to go to the homepage.

Some of the pages could use additional back navigation buttons. For example, after clicking on a calculator there are no buttons within the database that will bring the user back to the calculators’ menu page. Also, the “Browse A-Z” and “Browse Subject” buttons do not work when using Internet Explorer 8, but were fine on the iPad (Rosen recommends the use of Internet Explorer 9), while, using the iPad, moving the mouse over a highlighted word provides a definition that is then hard to remove.

Rosen offers a user-friendly option to print or email either a section or the full article. Six financial calculators help with, for example, auto loan payments, college costs, and budgeting. Each article includes “investigate” topics that encourage related reading on the subject.

Articles can be translated into 50 different languages using a built-in Google Translate option. There are text-to-speech capabilities, although the voice is robotic and thus the pacing and pronunciation are off at times. However, for students who need the audio, it is a valuable feature. Article citations are provided in APA and MLA formats. The material is written in plain language, although unfortunately the authors are sometimes condescending or preachy (“teenagers should turn off the television and learn…non-exportable jobs…”).

The Common Core and state-specific standards correlations can be viewed on screen or exported to an Excel spreadsheet. Social bookmarking allows for sharing of articles, and the material is iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and netbook compatible.

Verdict This accessible database hosts a wealth of information for students and provides teachers with a solid resource to support financial-literacy lessons. Rosen has taken into account the needs of students and teachers in creating this comprehensive tool for the classroom, and the end product is a valuable, dynamic resource.

Stephanie Farnlacher is a librarian at Trace Crossings School, Hoover, AL

Words Are Delicious: Food Writing in the Classroom

I bet this was the only NCTE session in which each attendee was given an Oreo! Presenter April Brannon, from Cal State Fullerton, started off the session with a discussion of poems about food, featuring Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Tomatoes and Donald Hall’s Eating the Pig, and how these poems can be used to boost students’ reading and writing skills.  Both student-teacher and individual student work was showcased, including Eating the Chicken Nuggets, inspired by Hall’s aforementioned poem. With an Oreo in hand, each member of the audience was asked to contribute a simile, metaphor, alliterative phrase, personification, image, or hyperbole which Brannon then used to create an ode to the iconic cookie.  Brannon was followed by Elle Yarborough from Northern Essex (MA) Community College, who focused on developing literacy skills by investigating food. Attendees were asked to watch “The Soup Nazi” episodes from Seinfeld and read Molly O’Neill’s essay “The Soup Man of 55th Street” (from the New York Cookbook [Workman, 1992]), comparing the various ways in which Al Yeganeh, the real-life owner of the famous soup restaurant, was characterized on the popular sit-com. Yarborough also talked about how she uses road-food writers Jane and Michael Stern’s wonderful piece “The Lobster Roll Honor Roll” (from the August 1994 issue of Gourmet magazine) as an example of investigative food writing. The Sterns combine history, culture, and social norms in the retelling of their quest to find Maine’s best lobster roll. You might want to ask your students to select a local culinary favorite, research its origins and variations across the region, and even gather recipes to produce their own food writing. All of these activities can easily be converted to library programming for teens and tweens.

Inspiring Readers with the Newest Young Adult Literature Winners

How many booktalks can be squeezed into about an hour? A lot, as proved by presenters Jennifer Walsh (Forsyth Middle School, Ann Arbor, MI), Daria Plumb (Riverside Academy, Dundee, MI), and Jennifer Buehler (St Louis University, MO). This group, chaired by Teri Lesesne (Sam Houston University, TX), created a grid to keep track of the number of awards that 2011 titles have received during the past year, then they organized the titles according to the number of award lists they have each appeared on. It was no surprise to hear which two titles appeared on the most lists: Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades and Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races each appeared on six awards lists. The presenters were able to race through 20 titles, halfway through the three award lists, before the closing bell rang. Their incredibly useful and informative list of awards and titles can be found on a handout on NCTE’s 2012 website.

Learning Lessons from YA War Literature

Session chair, author, and Brigham Young University English professor Chris Crowe gave an excellent overview of the types of YA literature that can be used in the classroom to help readers connect with those who have lived through a war. Jen Bryant, an award-winning novelist, poet, and biographer, spoke about war’s effects on society and the people “left behind,” and explained how she writes about those experiences. For example, in her verse novel, The Trial (Knopf, 2004), the growing fear and distrust among Americans of Germany as World War II approached became a major factor in the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann,  who was accused of the murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. In Bryant’s novel The Fortune of Carmen Navarro (Knopf, 2010), a high school dropout and a cadet from Valley Forge Military Academy and a long-standing military family stumble into a romance, as the war in Iraq plays out in background, which puts an additional strain on their relationship.

Author Dean Hughes embeds his readers directly into the battlefield in his war novels. In Hughes’s Soldier Boys (Antheneum, 2001), two young men—a German and an American—come to understand each other’s motives for fighting in World War II as they see their friends and colleagues die around them. Ricky Ward thinks that going to war will solve his problems with his violent father and dismissive girlfriend, but readers of Search and Destroy (Antheneum, 2005) discover that the Vietnam War is scarier and more complicated than anything Ricky has left at home. Visit the NCTE 2012 session site for an excellent bibliography of YA war literature and more from the authors.

Igniting the 21st-Century Spark with Big Ideas and Technology

If you’ve been thinking about using technology and books to connect with classroom teachers and teens, look no further. This NCTE session featured three dynamic presenters who have incorporated technology into their literature lessons to enhance writing and comprehension skills. Catherine Reeves, a University of Wyoming grad student, shared Hyperstudio presentations that she created to teach Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry. Reeves’s student not only had to master the technology, they nad to research images from the 1950s to use in their own presentations. And that’s not all: they also had to write their own confessional poems and create a Hyperstudio presentation to support it. At Montana’s Arlee High School, kids in English teacher Anna Baldwin’s multicultural literature class created a YouTube video entitled “Perma Red: From Our Vision,” which includes students’ photographs, along with selected music, and text excerpts from Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red. Baldwin also created a teacher’s guide for the video project as part of her entry for the PBS Teacher Innovator awards, which recognize innovative preK-12 classroom educators, media specialists, technology coordinators and homeschool educators who use digital media to enhance student learning. . The final presenter, Tiffany Rehbein, an English teacher from East High School in Cheyenne, WY, described the process she uses to help students create book trailers, which are shown on the school’s TV station. The kids’ videos not only showcase students’ works—they also encourage their classmates to read. Rehbein’s book-trailer resource guide and checklist can be found on the NCTE session hand-out site. This session was chaired by Beverly Ann Chin, Director of the English Teaching Program at the University of Montana at Missoula.

Literature Lover’s Lament: Learning to Love Nonfiction: Connecting Real-World Texts to the Common Core Standards

Even though it meant racing directly from the airport to the MGM Grand Conference Center, this session was not to be missed. Featuring the powerhouse trio of UCLA’s Carol Yago, UC-Irvine’s Carol Olson, and Carleton College’s Deborah Applebaum, the audience was treated to a terrific overview of what the Common Core standards really mean to English teachers and their classroom materials. While there was discussion of the use of cognitive toolkits and the Reading Framework for the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which librarians certainly need to be aware of, much of the talk focused on encouraging educators to go beyond the tried-and-true literature they currently use, and to try out some of the excellent nonfiction resources that are now available. For instance, if you’re teaching the classic Grapes of Wrath, why not add some outstanding nonfiction titles to your lessons, such as The Worst Hard Time (Mariner, 2006), The Dust Bowl Through the Lens (Walker, 2009), and the free verse Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1999)? And if you’re looking for articles to spice up a literature unit, check out Lapham’s Quarterly, a magazine of history and ideas that’s overseen by Harper’s editor emeritus, Lewis Lapham. The theme of embracing nonfiction was certainly evident throughout the conference, and publishers in the exhibit hall evidently have heard the call as well.

English Teachers Igniting Literacy for Incarcerated Students: Inspiring Writing in the Inside to Connect to the Outside

This very compelling session, chaired by the University of San Francisco’s Peter Williamson, featured speakers Sean Neil and Constance Walker, who both teach at Woodside Learning Center, Juvenile Hall, in San Francisco, and Carleton’s Applebaum. Since we know that literacy can help end recidivism (which currently hovers at 86 percent for juveniles), reading and writing can be some of the most powerful tools that you can give incarcerated kids. Neil and Walker described the programs they’ve offered to their teens, with the full support of the Juvenile Hall Library, which is run by the San Francisco Public Library. A project that involved writing letters to ancestors on reflective mylar was mounted at the Alcatraz Prison Museum, and a blog created by students, Songs of the Caged Birds: Caged Bodies, Free Minds, provides an ongoing outlet for their writings. Key readings in class, offered so that teens can understand the prison system better, are The Real Costs of Prison (PM Press, 2008), Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media, 2003), and The Politics of Injustice (Sage, 2003).

Applebaum works with adults at the Minnesota Correctional Facility, a high security prison in Stillwater, MN. As a teaching volunteer, she has been able to introduce and nurture creative writing skills in her students, many of whom are serving life sentences. Using liberatory pedagogy, which is a pedagogy of liberation centered around the principles for social change and transformation through education based on consciousness raising and engagement with oppressive forces, Applebaum has seen her students’ intelligence and creativity surface in many ways. From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writing (Creative Space, 2009) is one result of the classes. This anthology features letters, short stories, and poems from incarcerated authors from her facility.

Watch for two articles to appear in the March 2013 issue of English Journal on writing and the incarcerated—“Traveling in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Writing in Prison” (Applebaum), and “Songs of the Caged Birds: Literacy and Learning with Incarcerated Youth” (Williamson, Mercurio, Walker).

Fae-Tal Attraction: The Timeless International Appeal of Faerie Folk in Young Adult Literature

Young adult fantasies about faerie folk are more popular than ever, and as this panel proved, no two faeries are exactly alike! Authors Janni Lee Simner, Aprilynne Pike, Janette Rallison, and R. J. Anderson captivated the audience with their discussion of the origin of their faerie mythos, the rabid fans that attend FaerieCon (“Do not go dressed up as Tinkerbell!” warned Pike), and the ongoing interest in faerie titles for teen readers. All of the panelists cited An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, & Other Supernatural Creatures (Pantheon, 1978) as the go-to reference for all things faerie. A sampling of contemporary faerie novels can be found in the NCTE 2012 program listings.

“I really wanted to make all of our curriculum and resources tailored to teachers, so one of the first things I did was to revamp the lesson plans and curriculum,” says Chris Angotti, director of the Young Writers Program. “I aligned them all to the Common Core, which really makes it easy for teachers to take stuff right out of the box and bring it into their classrooms.”

The Young Writers Program recommends a sliding scale for students’ word-count goals, ranging from 20 to 200 words for kindergartners, to 25,000 to 50,000 for12th graders. The lesson plans provide guidance from prewriting to publishing. Supplements include downloadable workbooks for students and classroom kits with goodies like stickers and buttons.

This is the fourth year that Jackie Keith, a librarian at Riverbend High School in Virginia, has organized an after-school NaNoWriMo program. This year she offered September prep lessons, following the lesson plans to get kids on track—and stay there. “We want to increase the number of kids who actually reach that goal, which is why we implemented the lead-up classes,” she says, adding that the lessons also increased teachers’ enthusiasm for the program.

In past years, Keith had around 25 participants, between five and 10 of whom reached their goal (or “won,” in NaNoWriMo lingo). As of October 27, she already had 55 signed up.

Keith is somewhat of an evangelist for NaNoWriMo among librarians, touting the program’s flexibility for students and those leading them: “That’s part of the selling-point of this for me, that they can do this however it works for them—and for us.” But the program’s main appeal is the sense of accomplishment participants feel. Kids who go through it “definitely see themselves as authors,” says Keith.

In videos made to promote the program, one of Keith’s students’ says she’s participated all three years—and it’s made writing easier for her in general. Another enthusiastically encourages teachers elsewhere to start NaNoWriMo groups of their own.

Keith has tried to write her own novels along her students, but has yet to finish one. “I’m the eternal beginner,” she jokes. She gives high praise to Jacalyn Stanley, a multi-year NaNoWriMo “winner” and Riverbend volunteer who “talked to the kids, encouraged them, and gave them a taste of what the bigger NaNoWriMo community is like.” Keith recommends that librarians who haven’t completed the program seek an experienced community member to help out.

Emily Remer, a librarian at Michael E. Smith Middle School in Massachusetts, decided to bring NaNoWriMo to her school this year after participating herself. During October, her group practiced writing and discussed issues like character development and plot. They also registered on the Young Writers Program website “which they’re totally psyched about,” she says.

Fun is a major motivating factor: “Mostly I want the kids to have had a good time,” says Remer. “I’m hoping they’ll achieve their goals so it’ll be a boost for them. And give them enough enthusiasm that they want to do it again next year.”

Since librarians often lack regular scheduled time with students, it can be a struggle to provide kids with the support they need for the intense program. Supplementing students’ weekly after-school meetings, Remer has reserved a table in the library where students can work during lunch.

Librarian Kelly Benning is also implementing a NaNoWriMo program for the first time at Chaminade College Prep High School. “The main reason I’m doing NaNoWriMo is that it breaks my heart that students equate writing with pain,” says Benning. “As librarians, we say, ‘The right book for the right person at the right time.’…It’s the same with writing. You have to get the right ideas and the right environment and the right structure so that the student can find it enjoyable.”

Benning condensed key sections from the Young Writers Program materials into brief introductions for her weekly student meetings, honing in on this: “getting rid of your inner editor”–particularly important for students who are used to their writing being constantly graded and criticized.

Benning is also excited to offer “the NaNoWriMo Lounge,” a comfortable—and popular—seating area in her often-packed library. It’s reserved for novel writers, “so they’ll know they’ll always have a place to come and write.

Challenging students to expand how they think about writing, national literacy and educational groups are asking teachers, librarians, writers, children and creators of all kinds to share what they write on Twitter and other social media channels on Friday, October 19.

Under the hashtag, #WhatIWrite, the National Writing Project (NWP), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the New York Times Learning Network, among other groups (School Library Journal is a participant), are exploring the myriad forms that writing can take—from a list to a Facebook post, a podcast to a video piece.

“Our effort is to draw attention to the critical role of writing in our lives,” says Paul Oh, senior program associate with NWP. “I think we’re at this moment in education defining what it means to be literate.”

Encouraging students to find their literary voice and empowering them to craft pieces is more important than ever, particularly with the emphasis on writing in the Common Core, says Oh. As paper and pen yield to pixels and screens, students may need help understanding that the blog piece they craft, or the podcast they record, is adding to their literacy skills—and should be celebrated.

The online gathering is geared toward students, but everyone is encouraged to get involved. The digital event takes place the day before the Fourth Annual National Day of Writing—with the hope that children will tweet about what they’re composing at school and at home. The Twittersphere was already chirping with posts from excited participants, from learning coach Aaron Svoboda (@Mr_Svoboda) suggesting people tweet in haiku to sixth grade teacher Kevin Hodgson (@dogtrax), linking to a multimedia project he’s creating to celebrate the National Day of Writing.

Oh hopes more people will participate through blog pieces and social media posts using the hashtag. He wants to hear from school librarians in particular: he sees them as a core group thinking broadly about media and literacy, and a community linked to students of all ages. “Librarians have helped me see that video and audio composing is part of being literate today,” he says. “They’re often the ones helping us to expand our definition of writing.”

Regina Mason talks to our teens about her great-great-great-grandfather’s
self-published memoir, Life of William Grimes, the Runway Slave.
Photographs by Michael Lucia

Ten teens, ages 16 to 17, dressed in tan pull-on pants and dark blue sweatshirts with “Alameda County Juvenile Hall” stamped across their chests, are in my library, crowding around me and talking all at once.

“He said he was hit with an electrical cord, but in the book he says it was a snakeskin belt,” says one boy, pouncing on a disparity between what an author told us when he recently visited and what he wrote in his memoir.

“Yeah, and he said he was wearing a black cap, but in the book, he’s wearing an A’s cap,” says another. “There’s like a million things he said that aren’t the same in the book.”

“Liar!” explodes one teen. “Poser,” adds another.

The teens are talking about Street Life, a self-published title by Victor Rios that charts his former life as a gang member in East Oakland, CA. I’m listening to what they’re saying with a serious look on my face and a big grin inside. One of the kids practically listed the page numbers of all of the inconsistencies he found.

“I’m impressed,” I tell them. “You guys are amazing readers. You could be editors! Let’s call him up and see what he says.” They’re stunned as I pick up the phone and reach Rios’s voice mail. “Victor, I have some young men here who have a lot to say.” I share the boys’ concerns and promise them that I’ll let them know when I hear back from him.

The next day they’re playing basketball, when I come in with my cell phone and Rios’s enthusiastic response on my voice mail. About five of them immediately come over when they see me. It’s not lost on me that this conversation is more interesting to them than being out of their cells and shooting hoops.

“What did he say?” asks one of the kids. “She here to tell us what Poser say,” says another, and he calls over someone who’s still playing basketball. Rios’s message explains how difficult it is to remember life’s specifics, especially after a significant amount of time has passed, and how sometimes details in a book may differ from those in an unscripted conversation. He also explains that as a self-published author, he didn’t have the benefit of working with agents, publishers, and editors. I’m not sure if my kids completely buy the explanation, but we have a satisfying discussion about memoirs, memory, trauma, and writing.

The right stuff

I’m always looking for books that my reluctant—and picky—readers will want to read. Since the most common requests are for books about gangs, killings, violence, and sex—and since I work in partnership with both California’s Alameda County Probation and Alameda County Office of Education—it’s a challenge. When Rios’s self-published memoir came across my desk, I ordered 30 copies and set a date for the author, who’s now a sociologist and associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to speak to about half of my 250 African-American and Latino teens.

Frankly, I’m thrilled that they listened to his presentation so attentively and read his book so carefully. I’m also grateful that my teens, who on average read at a fourth-grade level, are engaged, reading, thinking critically, and discussing books. After Rios’s visit, they even talked about tackling his latest book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York University Press, 2011), a three-year study of the juvenile justice system.

It’s no secret that street lit is hot, especially books by K’wan, JaQuaris, and Woods. But the vast majority of it is geared toward adults, and it’s too explicit. The teens in Juvenile Hall are state wards, and those of us who work here serve in loco parentis, so I can’t justify or defend those types of books in my library. There are a growing number of street-lit titles for teens, including series such as “Babygirl Daniels” and “Wahida Clark Presents YA,” that I carry and that my teens devour. Because kids can sometimes be in and out of the system for much of their teenage years (due to the system’s massive failures), they eventually start to read while they’re here. And when they do, they read a lot! And then they complain that they’ve read everything in the library. While that’s not exactly true, they have read everything in their narrow, picky zone of what they like to read, as well as what I’ve been able to get them to “give a chance” or “read for me because I want your opinion.”

I feel it’s my responsibility to find more for them.

What kids want

There’s a huge market for autobiographies and biographies of African-American and Latino people who have experienced the streets and the criminal (in)justice system. My teens read biographies by Jimmy Santiago, Luis Rodriguez, Chef Jeff Henderson, Cupcake Brown, and Ishmael Beah, all of whom they’ve also met, and other adult authors. There’s also definitely a demand for self-published memoirs among reluctant readers—teens as well as adults, incarcerated or not. (For some great suggestions, see “Recommended reading,” on the opposite page.) People are reluctant to read for many reasons: some because they’ve never seen themselves reflected in a book and, therefore, don’t connect with the characters; others because they only want to read a certain type of book, such as a “true story.” The genre or type of book is more important to them than skillful editing, perfect pacing, positive reviews, correct spelling, and the rest.

More than 300,000 titles were self-published in 2011, according to R. R. Bowker, so finding self-published memoirs that work isn’t a straightforward process, at least for me. It’s a combination of researching leaders and speakers in the field, finding out if they have a book, searching on Amazon, asking someone who knows someone, authors sending me their books, getting a tip from someone who’s sitting next to me on the bus or at a local bookstore—there are seemingly infinite ways.

My first priority is to find books for my marginalized and, frankly, ostracized community that they can relate to, that inspire them, that reflect their experience in our society. Most important is that the story gets told and heard. I do have standards that, in general, relate to the story and the ability of the author to have some form of reflection. I don’t care as much about how a story is told, or—shocking to many—about grammar, spelling, or lack of editing. Those are details that are extremely important in our white, middle-class publishing community, which places a high value on the written word. Other cultures and communities have an oral tradition and care more about story and communication than precision.

One of the most heated debates on the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Quick Picks Committee in 2009 was over the book Teenage Bluez III (Life Changing Books, 2009). While it contains fantastic stories not found elsewhere and was definitely a “Quick Pick” for my teens and other young people across the country, it didn’t make the list. The primary reason? Misspellings and grammatical problems.

Having worked for many years with teens and adults who haven’t learned the “proper” way to communicate, I’ve had to combat massive amounts of trauma from those who’ve given up and are afraid to write even a sentence for fear of having their poor grammar and spelling judged. Editing has its place after the story is told, I always tell my teens, in hopes that they won’t censor themselves because of a lack of confidence in spelling. It’s the same for books. The basic point of a book—and, indeed, of the written word—is to communicate. Yes, I personally loved reading Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Gotham, 2006), but in this case, the comma really doesn’t matter because even without it almost all of my students would read the title as if the comma were there: that’s their experience. People read books to garner meaning, not to have a grammatical experience. (OK, most people, you word phreaks!)

While the amount of time spent browsing and the payoff of coming across a perfect or even good book isn’t high, you never know when you might find a gem. I came across Jerry McGill’s Dear Marcus: Speaking to the Man Who Shot Me (iUniverse, 2009) and was intrigued before Lorrie Moore wrote about it in May 2011 in the New York Times Book Review, before Spiegel & Grau picked it up, and before I gave it a starred review in SLJ (http://ow.ly/dOlHd).

One of the main downsides to self-published books is that professional journals tend not to review them. Publishers Weekly has a column that reviews 25 such books each quarter (it began in August 2010), but charges a $149 fee for reviews. Other sources that review these books include Kirkus Indie, which charges $400 to $550 to review, and Blue Ink Review, which charges $395 to $495. None of them guarantees a positive review. David Streitfeld just wrote a terrific article about paid reviews in the New York Times: “The Best Books Money Can Buy”. Don’t miss the comments section.

Clearly, traditional publishers do sometimes pick up self-published titles. Dear Marcus is the most lovely example. And in what might be one of the first self-published memoirs, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, picked up by Oxford University Press and edited by William Andrews and Regina Mason, Mason’s ancestor wrote about his experience as a fugitive slave in 1825—before Frederick Douglass.

Librarians are in a unique position, and it’s up to us to encourage our administrators to purchase books through nontraditional distribution channels. Take a chance on an author whom your patrons might love to meet and who they feel inspired by. Librarians are the ultimate in terms of our capacity for unbiased professional reviews. I do believe it’s up to us to research and provide books for the public—and not just the middle-class, mainstream public.

Amy Cheney is a librarian at the Alameda County Juvenile Hall in San Leandro, CA.

Illustration by Janet Hamlin

Over the past five years, I’ve returned to the New York neighborhood in which I met the children whom I first described in Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other books I published in the 1990s. The neighborhood is called Mott Haven. It’s the poorest section in all of the South Bronx, which is the poorest Congressional district in America.

I wanted to answer the questions many readers ask: What happened to these children? How many were unable to prevail against the obstacles they faced? How many have survived? And, among the ones who did survive, what were the ingredients of character—and what were the opportunities provided by their schools—that made it possible for them to win some glorious and unexpected victories?

Not surprisingly, easy access to good books—and, more to the point, a plentitude of books to satisfy the curiosities and stir the latent interests of the very wide variety of children that I met—turned out to be decisive. And this, of course, is where libraries come in.

In my new book, Fire in the Ashes, I catch up with all those kids, many of whom I came to know when they were only six or eight years old. They talked to me about the struggles they went through, which were often hardest in their adolescent years. Most are in their twenties now. As they look back on their formative years, they speak repeatedly of books that first awakened their appetite for reading—by which I mean real books, books that children read for pleasure, as opposed to the mind-dulling textbooks and those dreadful pit-pat phonics books, “aligned,” as the experts compulsively remind us, with state examinations. Most of the kids found those books immaculately boring.

No matter their level of education, the most successful of these children had, I think, much better taste than those adults who set the rigid standards that have been imposed upon our public schools (and with the most severity, upon our inner-city schools)—standards that require emotionless and robotic modes of learning but don’t open children’s minds to our culture’s treasures.

These kids instinctively rebelled against the narrow test-prep regimen that, even before No Child Left Behind, had started crowding out a love of learning for its own sake. Few of them did well on state-imposed exams, but many read voraciously, and became proficient writers as a consequence; the books they loved, however, weren’t the ones mandated by the number crunchers who were caught up in the labyrinth of the testing mania.

In their early years, many tell me, they were drawn into a love of reading by the soft and tender writings and lovely drawings, so much like pastel tapestries, of one of the greatest and most subtle children’s authors of our time, Eric Carle. (They weren’t attracted to Dr. Seuss. Their preference was for beauty over cleverness.) Before long, those kids who were the most exploratory started reading charmingly enticing books like Kevin Henkes’s Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse and, a few years after that, Lois Lowry’s beautifully transcendent works, including Gathering Blue, which remains a favorite among many of those children to this day.

One of the kids who captured my attention from the start, to whom I’ve given the pseudonym of Jeremy in my latest book, told me he was writing his “first novel” at 13, and that he was “circling” Charles Dickens, but wasn’t certain he was “ready for him yet.” I thought he was. So he made a deal with me. He would read A Tale of Two Cities if I would read Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. We both kept our promises. He conceded later that he got the best part of that bargain.

His favorite author at that age was Edgar Allan Poe. He loved the narrative poem “The Raven” and quoted from it whimsically and playfully. When a large bird flew above our heads one day, he pretended to be frightened. “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore,’” he solemnly intoned. He also liked Poe’s stories. He told me the plot of “The Tell-tale Heart” and was astonished to hear I’d never read it.

Where did Jeremy find these books? I wish I could say he found them in his middle school’s library, but this, alas, was not the case. His middle school, underfunded as many inner-city schools are, had nothing that a good suburban school would consider a real library. (This governmental parsimony at the cost of libraries is even more the case today, in the wake of two recessions, when one of the first steps taken by our cash-strapped inner-city schools is to lay off school librarians.)

Jeremy found the books he loved, not in a school library, but—he was blessed in this respect—in the private library of a neighborhood poet, who recognized his special gifts and let him dig into the books that filled his living-room shelves, from floor to ceiling. The poet tempted Jeremy, moreover, to go beyond what his school, on the basis of his test results alone, regarded as his “modest reading level” by introducing him to snippets of the poet’s favorite writers, which included British authors as imposing as John Milton.

Most of the other kids weren’t so lucky. A few of them attended schools that had decent libraries and full-time librarians. Others were fortunate enough, after slogging through the literary wastelands of their mediocre middle schools, to win scholarships to good New England boarding schools in their later secondary years. These were schools where rich and ample libraries were viewed as indispensable and were also pleasant and inviting places with soft lighting, comfortable chairs, and little nooks and crannies where a student might curl up at one end of a sofa and delve into a book he liked for hours.

Jeremy was one of those who got into this kind of school in his 10th-grade year. The first close friend he made there, a talented woman with a gift for reaching out to adolescents, was the school librarian. Before long, he was working part time as one of her assistants.

By this point, he was reading works by John Keats and William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and the 17th-century metaphysical poets. In the following years, he read the plays of Strindberg, Ibsen, and O’Neill, after having read O’Neill’s great predecessors in the Greek tragedians. In his senior year, he galloped through Shakespeare’s plays, and he questioned me a lot and teased me when he came upon a character I’d forgotten.

“You wrote your college thesis about Shakespeare, and you don’t remember Bolingbroke?”—or Falstaff, or whomever it might be.

He went on to a first-rate college, not the kind that has now replaced the arts and letters with “practical” job training, which is too often deemed to be appropriate for youngsters who have grown up in the ghetto. He immersed himself, not in the utilitarian, but in what he loved the most. Literature and the modern theater was his field of concentration.

This was a boy who hated tests in public school and managed to fail most of them. A neighborhood poet and a school librarian and, later, the Barnes & Noble in New York’s Union Square, which he liked to frequent, were Jeremy’s salvation.

What does this story and the others in my new book tell us about libraries and, in particular, those within our public schools?

First of all, no matter what the economic ups and downs may be at any given moment, public school libraries in destitute communities need not just sufficient but extravagant funding. If there’s a single thing our state and federal governments could do to stir up a love of learning in our poorest children, it would be to take a good big chunk of the massive sum of money that’s now being wasted on the testing industry and use it, instead, to flood our students’ lives with the joys and mysteries of authentic culture—and not only Western culture but, in the case of, for instance, Hispanic children, their culture, too.

I don’t mean to suggest that history or science should be shortchanged, or books of practicality, or writings that are simply fun for kids to read even if they have no literary value. But if we care about the children of the poor as much as our own children, we ought to emphasize the highest possible aesthetics. Kids who live in grim and dreary neighborhoods have an even greater need for all that can endow their minds with grandeur than children who are privileged enough to live in grand and lovely places. Exalt their minds. Don’t cheat them with banalities that simply “keep them reading.” I can hear a lot of little girls in fifth grade screaming at me when I say this, but I still feel a pang of sadness about kids who grew up on “The Baby-Sitters Club” series but to whom no one ever introduced The Secret Garden.

This brings me to librarians again. If I had the power, I’d redirect another big chunk of the money that’s now enriching testing corporations and make certain that every inner-city school has its own full-time librarian, and one whose passion about books is contagiously exciting to young people. Jeremy shouldn’t have had to go to an affluent school to find a sensitive librarian who was paid enough and given the resources to spend hours of her time leading him to books, and tempting him with others, that didn’t simply give him data for his assignments, but expanded his horizons by nourishing his literary yearnings. School librarians like that woman would be celebrated in a wise society, and no myopic politician with a fiscal knife in hand would dare say they’re extraneous to learning.

Finally, I think school libraries ought to be delightful and congenial places. I wish that we could get rid of those plastic chairs and overhead fluorescent lights that make too many of these rooms in low-funded schools about as intimate as Walmart. School libraries for wealthy children frequently resemble living rooms. When I walk into the libraries of inner-city schools and see a group of children filing in beside me, I often get the sense of something “dutiful” about it all instead of something joyful and exalting. I wish the kids could sit at maple tables with reading lamps that have lampshades made from handsome fabrics. I wish the space were beautiful. If we think of libraries as places where we give our kids a feast of learning, the place we serve that feast should be worthy of our offerings.

I’ve said this before to school librarians, and recently to a convocation of school architects: aesthetics count. Beautiful surroundings refine the tastes of children. Flat and mechanistic settings bleach out their mentalities.

“Well, of course,” the bureaucrats will say (they’ve said this of me many times before), “Jonathan’s a dreamer. He thinks that poor kids ought to get what the sons of presidents and daughters of important business leaders get when they go to private schools like Andover and Exeter. He thinks that inner-city kids deserve that kind of money. He thinks that they’ll be grateful for those maple tables. He thinks they’ll dig into those books and be excited by the opportunity to read them.”

It’s true. That’s exactly what I feel. I don’t think this nation plans to give that kind of opportunity to more than a handful of the children of poor people at any time in the near future. It would take a sweeping change of attitude about potential, and too easily unobserved precocity, among the children who are viewed today as outcasts of American society. It’s just a dream, and I frankly doubt that I will see it realized in my lifetime. Still, I like to fantasize that someday we will turn that dream into reality.

Jonathan Kozol’s new book , Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, will be published by Crown on August 28 .

Seven Title I media centers throughout the district continue to keep their doors open two hours each week, and local kids are welcome to read, check out books, or attend read-alouds. Although it’s not a new concept, it’s the first time Salem-Keizer has kept summer hours—and so far, kids seem to be enjoying it, says Stephen Cox, the district’s library media program specialist.

“This program is for students who are unable to get to the public library to participate in their summer reading program,” says Cox, explaining that the open school libraries are located in buildings that offer the Summer Meal program, where any qualified child age 18 and under can eat lunch, and sometimes breakfast, for free five days a week. “After and before lunch, students are encouraged to go to the school library to check out a book.”

Between 10 and 50 children visit the five elementary and two middle school libraries each week, thanks to $3,500 provided by the district’s Salem-Keizer Education Foundation to keep them open. And, as part of the program—which was widely promoted on the district’s website and at individual schools—students can earn a ticket for each book they read, which can then be entered in weekly drawings for prizes. A grand prize drawing is planned for August.

Although the libraries are run by assistants and parent volunteers rather than certified media specialists, it’s still a step in the right direction for the state’s second largest school district. Back in April 2011, the district lost 90 percent of its librarians when Superintendent Sandy Husk proposed cutting 48 elementary and middle school media specialists in an effort to save $3 million, says Cox. Oregon doesn’t mandate certified school librarians for any grade.

While it’s still too soon to know what impact summer school library hours will have on reading scores, experts know that the “summer slide,” which describes what happens when young minds sit idle for three months, is real. Studies show that kids who read during the summer gain reading skills, while those who don’t often slide backward.

“A conservative estimate of lost instructional time is approximately two months or roughly 22 percent of the school year,” says a report from the National Summer Learning Association. “It’s common for teachers to spend at least a month re-teaching material that students have forgotten over the summer. That month of re-teaching eliminates a month that could have been spent on teaching new information and skills.”

The report notes that family income plays a significant role in determining the extent of the summer slide, with students from low-income families experiencing the cumulative effects of greater learning loss each summer throughout their elementary school years.

Cox says circulation stats at the end of the summer will show just how popular the program was with students-and there are plans to conduct “action research” to find out whether the reading scores of participants went up, down, or stayed the same.

See also:

SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog: Keeping Middle Schoolers Engaged

The award-winning author explains that’s one of the main reasons he accepted the role as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in January—to publicize the problem.

During his many visits to juvenile detention centers over the years, Myers met kids who were functionally illiterate. “Not kids who were uninterested, but kids who could not read.”

The keynote speaker at SLJ‘s 2012 Day of Dialog spoke to a rapt room of attendees about his own personal experience growing up poor in New York City’s Harlem. By 13, his life began to unravel with his uncle’s murder . Myers’s dad sunk into a deep depression and his mother began drinking again to cope. The young Myers once had to lift his drunk mother off the sidewalk and carry her home.

“I was devastated,” he says. “But it’s not something you can tell your teacher about.” Around the same time, Myers became a knife-wielding gang member, who guarded an older teen. But there’s one thing he credits for helping him choose a different path.

“I found literature,” says the 74year-old award-winning author, who as a child would visit the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library on 125th Street in Harlem to read Robin Hood and other adventure stories. By reading, he explains, “I came out of that. I had a different worldview than just my misery.”

The statistics are dismal, Myers says. Out of the four Anglophile nations-the US, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia-the largest reading gap exists here, followed by the UK. The author says he sees the problem first-hand in the tons of fan mail he receives. While he used to be able to separate letters written by elementary and high school students, he can no longer do so because the “writing has gotten so bad.”

“A huge amount of these kids are from the lowest economic status and are minorities,” Myers explains. “That’s one reason people are hesitant to talk about it-they don’t want to blame minorities or poor people.

The issue isn’t going away because “one major problem is our silence about it,” continues Myers, whose father worked as a janitor and mother cleaned apartments. “But I don’t mind speaking about this. I know it’s a problem. Kids need to read, especially poor kids and kids in urban areas.”

Since accepting his ambassadorship in January, Myers has done his best to spread the word about this issue, but says, “Our society doesn’t want to see the problem” of our growing illiteracy and incarceration rate, citing one in four black men in New York City has been in jail. “And this will have repercussions for years to come.”

His main concern? “I’m wondering where the next generation of readers is going to come from,” Myers asks. “What’s going on in schools is a reflection of what’s going on in society. There’s a gap. There are huge pockets of language poverty.”

Myers says his goal is to attract readers, “finding that special book for that child,” which isn’t easy considering that most disadvantaged kids look around and accept the bleakness that surrounds them. “[They] see people like them, with the same skin color, and say ‘this is my future,’” Myers says.

“When I talk to young people about literature, that reading will bring them $20,000 more a year [in salary], that education is going to make a difference in their lives, they know it’s the correct answer. But they don’t believe me.”

Myers stresses the importance of introducing books, especially to babies and toddlers from three months to five years old. “All research says that kids at school are at such diverse levels,” he says.” “And if they don’t catch up by fifth grade they will never be lifelong readers.”

Another important suggestion? To give more books to teens. “Change the educational system to deal with unequal scholars,” he says, explaining that in New York City the dropout rate is 47 percent.

“I want to reach kids,” Myers explains. “I want to reach out to them and invite them in.”

See below for more coverage of SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog:

• Video: Keynote by Walter Dean Myers
  

• Keeping Middle Schoolers Engaged
  

• Pushing the Picture Book Envelope

• #SLJDOD Twitter Feed
  

• Pictures from SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog

• Even more pictures from SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog

The seamless alignment of the Common Core with inquiry standards, skills, and indicators allows us to make the case at the center of our work as librarians. Namely: true learning is about internalizing a process for learning that transfers across all content areas, and inquiry is the process at the center of all true and meaningful learning.

Translation required

The only trick is that the language of the Common Core is still largely foreign and threatens to remain so. Comprehension of a foreign language is never improved by hearing it spoken more loudly, nor is it increased by others’ facility with it. When content area teachers bring their language to the table as well, the scene is ripe for the exchange of loud babble.

Our opportunity lies in figuring out how to translate both languages simultaneously for the various constituents we serve. To do this, we must become masters of the language of the Common Core. If we stop at accepting the crosswalks (connections between past and new standards) and then claim we are doing the Common Core, we will miss out on the opportunity to incorporate our understanding of inquiry for others. The commonality that will help us begin the task of translation lies in a deep understanding of the inquiry process, its overlap with Common Core, and how they both apply across a variety of content.

Building a cabinet requires one to learn the process for doing so—namely, the steps and discrete skills involved. Without wood, nails, glue, and stain, however, the cabinet cannot be built. Think of the actual building of the cabinet as the process and the materials used to build it as the content. One needs both the process and the materials. Librarians know this about learning. This is why we balk at assignments that require students to gather material without requiring them to do anything significant with it. “Copy and paste” assignments ask students to simply move the content from one place (in a resource) to another (a “report”). This does not a cabinet make.

On the other hand, when we are afforded the luxury to do so, librarians teach the transferable process of inquiry using whatever content/materials our colleagues ask us to use. It is only in this meaningful wedding of content and process that our students internalize the transferability of learning as a process. That is to say, if we teach the process for building a cabinet with oak, our students can transfer that process to building cabinets with any number of materials.

At the center of learning

To date, the only Common Core Standards that have been released are reading and writing standards steeped in process, and we are all about process. Content, we are being told, will come in time. In the interim, this can serve us well, but only up to a point. It is one thing for us to see our work all over the Common Core, but it is another to get others to see it, and yet another to position ourselves as instructional leaders in the implementation of the standards.

It will not be sufficient for us to guide colleagues in seeing the connections between inquiry and the Common Core. We will have to provide concrete ways to teach the skills embedded in the inquiry process, because at the end of the day, the conversation will have to revolve around how actual lessons will be taught.

With this change will come a wonderful reshaping of our work. If inquiry is everywhere in learning, then our work is everywhere and the work we do is no longer considered the indefinitely postponable “library skills curriculum.”

Nonetheless, it looks like this “opportunity” is all about colossal amounts of work. Joy will come with deeper understanding, greater fluency with the Common Core language, and in knowing that our work is perceived as urgent and critical, and that school libraries and librarians are indispensable.

Also see: Rebecca T. Miller’s Editorial, “‘I Can Help You With That’: Providing solutions puts librarians at the center of Common Core”

While enhanced ebooks engage young children with their interactive elements, print or basic ebooks may be more effective for encouraging literacy, according to a new study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.

The findings, released May 29, are from a “QuickReport” on the experience of 32 pairs of parents reading a print book and ebook on an iPad together with their children, ages 3 to 6. Small sampling notwithstanding, the results do support earlier studies that establish distinct differences in the print and digital experience, particularly with enhanced ebooks. And further investigation is indicated, according to the report.

Noted in the QuickStudy:

• Children who read enhanced ebooks recalled significantly fewer details than subjects who read the same story in print. The features of the enhanced ebook may divert the attention of both parents and children from the narrative, which may have affected the kids’ ability to recall the story, concluded researchers.
• Reading a print or basic ebook with their parents prompted similar content-related actions by children—including labeling, pointing, and verbal elaboration of the story—which can support language development. On the other hand, the enhanced ebook drew activity—e.g. “device-focused talk”—unrelated to the book’s content.

So what’s a parent or teacher to do? Opt for print or basic ebooks to build literacy, recommends the QuickStudy researchers. But it’s hard to beat the sheer appeal of enhanced works, notes the report, which can go far in encouraging the very young, especially those reluctant to engage books at all.

Photograph by sean dreilinger

“The ultimate purpose of the merger was to create an organization that promotes information literacy and reading motivation for all Oregonians, from birth through adulthood,” says Abigail Elder, president of the Oregon Library Association (OLA).

A sponsor of the annual Oregon Battle of the Books and the Beverly Cleary Children’s Choice Awards, the Oregon Association of School Libraries (OASL) aims to ensure that students and educators are “effective users of ideas and information” and encourages the pursuit of “excellence in school library media programs.” With the two associations under one umbrella, all library staff will “work collaboratively to effectively serve the needs of all,” explains Elder. OASL officially becomes a division of OLA July 12.

OLA and OASL members already work closely on library summer reading programs, the Oregon Readers Choice Award, and the Oregon Battle of the Books program, which engages more than 120,000 young readers from across the state. OLA’s Association of College and Research Libraries division also collaborates closely with school librarians on Common Core State Standards, information literacy skills, and preparing students for higher education and workforce transition, Elder says.

With help from the Oregon State Library, OLA and OASL also support the Oregon School Library Information System (OSLIS), which provides low-cost access to high-quality information resources and an information literacy curriculum for students, teachers, librarians, and other educators.

When it comes to legislative issues, the two organizations will continue to work together on the national and state level, especially as school budget cuts continue to diminish the role of media specialists.

“All OLA members are closely monitoring the situation in school districts across the state,” Elder says. “We are advocating for school librarians and strong school libraries, while also finding ways to support students, teachers and families in locations where school library services have been slashed.”

For the 2009-2010 school year, Oregon had 319 certified librarians serving 1,300 school. “However, we are in flux with school libraries—they are declining quickly,” Elder says. “By the end of this school year, we will have lost at least 50 school librarians.”

Oregon mandates school librarians but the current law has no teeth. “Many districts are cutting teacher-librarians for budgetary reasons and there have been no consequences from the state,” Elder says.

This article originally appeared in the newsletter Extra Helping. Go here to subscribe.

When she reads on the second page, “Owl Mother was GONE,” all eyes turn toward the book. The owls’ faces may not show much in the way of feelings, but a baby bird’s plea of “I want my mommy!” conveys an emotion that toddlers can easily relate to. “Oh, my. I wonder where Owl Mother went,” says Janie. “Why did she fly away? Do you think she’ll come back?”

Like you, we use many techniques to help children understand a story. One of the most powerful methods is thinking out loud while reading. Thinking out loud—in this case, talking about the owls’ emotions, actions, and motives—encourages children to think about the story.

“Reading is thinking” is a central principle for Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis, the authors of Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement (Stenhouse, 2007), who work mainly with primary and middle school readers and teachers. They’ve created a toolkit to help educators construct active learning environments that are aimed at boosting children’s reading comprehension.

To learn how libraries can help children think about a story, interact with its text, and, thus, build comprehension skills during storytime, we talked to Barbara Steinberg, a reading specialist here in Oregon. Steinberg believes that when we think out loud in storytime, we are encouraging children to model the same strategies that good readers use, such as predicting events and summarizing. She explained that good readers connect what they know from their own life experiences with what they’re reading. Good readers also constantly ask themselves questions while they read, such as “Why did he say that?” or “Is this important to the story?”

In storytime we ask children the same types of questions that efficient readers might ask themselves. Most of us use these strategies without even being aware of it, but when we think out loud, we are teaching children how to do it, too.

While thinking out loud is a technique frequently used to help students in the elementary grades, reading researchers Lea McGee and Judith Schickendanz have adapted this method for much younger children. Their approach is called repeated interactive read-alouds. How does it work? A storybook is read three times in slightly different ways in order to increase children’s engagement with the text. In the first reading, children are introduced to the story. In the second, they’re encouraged to get to know the characters and their challenges more deeply. And in the final reading, young listeners are invited to pinpoint the characters’ problems and to respond to analytical questions such as, “Who remembers what will happen next?” (To learn more, see “Repeated Interactive Read-Alouds in Preschool and Kindergarten” in the May 2007 issue of The Reading Teacher.) The main idea is to create an active learning environment that promotes interaction with the text and thinking for children of all ages.

When Janie finishes the story, she asks, “When their mother came back, why did the owls bounce on the branch?” One thoughtful toddler says, “I would jump on the branch, too.” Janie gently probes, “Why would you jump up and down?” and the toddler replies, “Because I would be happy, too!”

Successful readers need to do two things well. They need to learn the code and, most importantly, they need to understand its meaning. Librarians like Janie help children clear those hurdles with room to spare.

Think about the number of times in a day that you make your way to Google (or another search engine) or how frequently you check your cell phone (whether or not it’s smart); we depend on information and communication that’s just a click or swipe away. Now, consider the technology available in classrooms with one or two outdated desktops. It’s unlikely that students are using Web 2.0 tools to enhance the learning experience, or that they’re engaged in real-world collaboration. Recent publications by two innovators in education, Will Richardson and Marc Prensky, offer lively commentary on the changes in attitude, access, and implementation that they believe need to take hold if today’s kids are going to be prepared for a different tomorrow. For Prensky and Richardson, it’s less about getting all students on the same page at the same time and more about using digital tools creatively to improve learning and instruction.

In From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom: Hopeful Essays for 21st Century Learning (Corwin, 2012), Marc Prensky, whose 2001 essay “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” (reprinted in this volume) looked at the “intergenerational confusion around the then-emerging digital technology,” presents a compilation of his writings and musings, most of which have been published previously. Divided into two parts, the first, “Rethinking Education,” begins with Prensky’s argument that current “educational improvement efforts” will ultimately be ineffective because they “are aimed at bringing back the education that America offered students in the 20th century…although it no longer works for most of our students.” He pens a convincing case against “curriculum overload” and the need to decide “what skills can be deleted from the curricula,” with suggestions that are bound to engender some serious debate (and headshaking resistance).

“On Learning,” explores what learning is and how it happens, and “Turning On the Lights,” underscores the importance of including students in the conversation and tapping into high-interest subjects such as robotics and computer programming, topics often relegated to afterschool clubs. Part two moves to “21st Century Learning, and Technology in the Classroom,” with selections such as, “The Longer View: Why YouTube Matters,” “What Can You Learn From a Cell Phone? Almost Anything!” and “The True 21st Century Literacy is Programming.” (A recent New York Times article, “Computer Science for the Rest of Us” also speaks to adding “computational thinking” or programming to the curriculum.) The last entry, “Epilogue: From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom,” considers the emerging “Homo sapiens digital” and posits that while there is no going back to the world of teaching and learning as it was, there is greater wisdom to be gained with the prudent use of digital technology. At the end of each part, Prensky includes “Questions for Reflection” which are sure to spark a conversation with any group interested in the role of technology in education.

Will Richardson, the co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice, which offers collaborative online professional development for educators, has been blogging “about the intersection of social online learning networks and education for the past 10 years.” In Learning on the Blog: Collected Posts for Educators and Parents (Corwin, 2011), Richardson has organized his “most discussed, most debated, most fun” blog posts into six groups, “Teachers as Master Learners,” “Learning is Anytime, Anywhere, Anyone,” “The Learner as Network,” “Learning and Leadership,” “Parent as Partner,” and “The Bigger Shifts…Deal With It.” Since these pieces originally appeared as online posts, Richardson directly addresses readers and stirs personal anecdotes about his experience as a father of two school-age kids into the mix.

Primarily optimistic, the author pushes teachers to think more about “the potentials rather than the problems” presented by runaway advances in technology. For Richardson, it’s not about learning how to use laptops or iPads to support the status quo; it’s about the possibility of “social web technologies” and online resources to move teachers and students to personalized and self-directed learning. And, like Prensky, he worries that present school reform “misses the point. We don’t need better any longer, we need different. Really different.” With a nod to the post “Get. Off. Paper.” in which Richardson writes about a workshop participant printing and distributing a link-filled document and the author’s observation in the introduction that “there’s a certain amount of irony in publishing a book of collected blog posts that can be freely found online,” it warrants noting that Learning on the Blog is chock-full of web-related links. (Those ready to make the electronic leap can avoid a certain level of frustration by considering the Kindle version.)

Whether or not readers accept each author’s view on the present (and future) educational landscape, there’s no denying the need for administrators, teachers, and reformers to consider the continually changing face of technology and its influence on teaching and learning. Both writers would probably agree that getting stakeholders to think about the issues confronting today’s schools with an eye toward incorporating new ideas and solutions is essential.

This article originally appeared in School Library Journal’s enewsletter Curriculum Connections. Subscribe here.

The excited voices of young students echo through the tiled hallways of my school as I make my daily classroom rounds. “Who won?!” “Who won?!” they anxiously ask me, their librarian at New York City’s Bank Street College of Education lab school.

What’s the eager anticipation all about? My students represent some of the nearly 10,000 first through fourth graders from around the globe who take part in the annual ritual of choosing the winners of the Irma S. and James H. Black Award for top picture book author and illustrator—and finding out which of the four finalists has won is always a fun-filled event.

Why do I read hundreds of picture books each year (some 400 titles are eligible), argue (or shall I say respectfully discuss) the pros and cons of each one with my colleagues, and beg for money to buy more books? It’s not because my job calls for teaching critical thinking skills or that my principal hounds me to prove that my curriculum supports the Common Core standards. It’s because I get to witness elementary school students passionately advocate for their favorite picture books. And because I see firsthand how they learn to use the illustrations and text to form opinions about why they’re more drawn to certain books than others. Most of all, I’m overjoyed to see the sense of ownership it gives them as they choose the winners themselves.

Sponsored by the Bank Street College of Education, the Irma S. Black Award is just one of dozens of readers’ choice awards in which kids—not adults—vote for their favorite books. It also happens to be a perfect way to motivate children to read. I know that’s true, because I’ve done it for the past 15 years—and I can honestly say there’s no better way for a school or public library program to offer kids an exciting curriculum that includes Common Core State Standards that focus on critical thinking and other vital skills. Turning the award process into a lesson provides a way for me to collaborate with classroom teachers, as we plan and create the curriculum together.

This year, my students and I focused on the four finalists: Peter Brown’s You Will Be My Friend (Little, Brown), Dan Yaccarino’s All the Way to America: The Story of a Big Italian Family and a Little Shovel (Knopf), J. Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back (Candlewick), and Fiona Robinson’s What Animals Really Like (Abrams). What did kids learn? Using Brown’s book, they gained knowledge about the challenge of trying to make a new friend by relating the story to their own lives. They also learned to make intertextual connections about the art in various books, including another title by Brown called Children Make Terrible Pets (Little, Brown).

My students’ eyes lit up when they realized Yaccarino’s All the Way to America, about four generations of an Italian-American family, is based on the author’s life. We exchanged stories about our own families and how they came to America, and I asked the kids to communicate these tales to each other both verbally and in writing.

Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back, about a bear whose hat goes missing, offers a great way to analyze and synthesize a story by using clues from its text and illustrations. How do we know what happened to the hat? On what page does Bear eat the rabbit? (Hint: there’s no rabbit in the story.) Why do you think Bear was lying? All of these questions elicited some very insightful responses.

With its hilarious text and lively illustrations, Robinson’s What Animals Really Like—which ended up as this year’s winner—proved an excellent way for kids to learn about the dangers of stereotyping. As we read and reread the four titles, the children learned to express their preferences by using the text and pictures to support their ideas.

Our participation in the Irma Black Award process goes beyond selecting and voting for a favorite picture book. We discuss the key elements that go into making an illustrated book, such as cover art, endpapers, font choices, and page layout. Students analyze the words and images, and can, for example, recognize a book by Brown based on its writing style and illustrations. My first and second graders can also evaluate the words and stories in each of the four book-award finalists, and are able to discern whether the artwork is realistic or cartoonish, and whether the medium is watercolor or collage.

The project also offers a crucial professional development tool for teachers, since each year they’re given exceptional new picture books to share with their students. This encourages educators to expand their lessons beyond such old favorites as Stone Soup and Caps for Sale.

The feedback thus far is amazing. “Our Irma Black picture book study has been the cornerstone of our literacy curriculum,” says Bank Street teacher Gregory David, explaining that the curriculum is adaptable for different learning styles. “I’ve never seen a more engaged group of listeners.” David uses the texts from the finalists to model reading and writing strategies, and asks questions such as, “Who can tell me what will happen next? Do the characters look really sad? And did you notice the repetition?”

State awards

With so many readers’ choice awards out there, you can pick and choose the one that best suits your needs. Many state associations sponsor children’s choice awards through their regional teachers’, reading, and library associations. Indiana has the Young Hoosiers Book Award, Alabama offers the Camellia Award, Florida is known for its Sunshine Readers, and Hawaii has the Nene Award. All of them provide outstanding children’s titles on a “master list” for kids to read, enjoy, analyze, and discuss. Author Cynthia Leitich Smith provides a list of links to state awards for children’s and young adult readers’ choice programs on her website.

Children’s book publishers appreciate these state awards because they boost book sales while helping to foster a culture of reading. Victoria Stapleton, the director of school and library marketing for Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, says, “Titles that may not get a lot of attention from the well-known awards find a spot on these master lists and have an opportunity to reach readers. A good example is All of the Above by Shelly Pearsall.” The book, based on real life, tells the story of four inner-city students and their quest to build the world’s largest tetrahedron.

One of the most well-known readers’ choice awards is the Texas Bluebonnet, which lets students in grades three to six vote for their favorite titles. “There’s a lot of talk these days about what kids should and shouldn’t read, and it’s terrific for them to have a say in those recommendations,” says Caity Barillas, the Texas Library Association’s membership coordinator. All school and public libraries in Texas, as well as homeschool associations, are urged to participate in the Texas Bluebonnet Award. Teachers and parents also are encouraged to read some of the books aloud to their students and children.

Mock Caldecott and mock Newbery

Many school and public librarians hold mock Caldecott Awards with their students to determine their own winner of the award for the most distinguished picture book for children. Mock Caldecotts are a terrific way to examine picture book art and media, but they can sometimes confuse kids about what makes a “best picture book” because first and second graders may not understand that the Caldecott is strictly given for the best illustrations—and not for an entire book. Tali Balas, a teacher-librarian at New York’s Ethical Culture Fieldston School, says that each year when she hosts a mock Caldecott with her students, “I need to emphasize that the Caldecott criterion is solely for the illustrations not for the words.” We are looking at the “excellence of execution of artistic technique, appropriateness of the style to the story, setting, and mood, and the delineation of the plot, characters, and setting through the pictures. The committee is to make its decision primarily on the illustration.”

Every year, teachers and librarians email me asking for a shortlist of contenders for the Newbery and Caldecott awards. The American Library Association (ALA) doesn’t provide one, but it’s easy to create your own with titles culled from positive reviews in School Library Journal, The Horn Book, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, or Kirkus Reviews. Complete award criteria can be found at http://ow.ly/aojVT.

ALA also offers a toolkit for those who want to hold their own mock Caldecott or Newbery elections. The benefit of participating in the Irma Black Award or established state readers’ choice awards is that they provide an existing short list of titles selected by trusted judges who choose based on the quality of certain titles and whether they’re age appropriate.

CBC/IRA

Children’s Choices, a popular national award produced by the International Reading Association and the Children’s Book Council, is designed for teachers, librarians, administrators, and booksellers—as well as for parents, grandparents, caregivers, and anyone who wants to encourage young people to read for pleasure. Although educators and booksellers are the final arbitrators of their short lists, the titles are derived from best-seller lists and retail sales figures (http://ow.ly/aokyz).

Discussion and voting

When discussing the finalists with your students and getting them ready to vote, try including math and graphing skills as they tally the class votes. This year, our teachers integrated Yaccarino’s All the Way to America into a larger social studies curriculum. Teachers can also discuss privacy issues when students collect the ballots, as well as concerns such as respecting others’ opinions and the impact of peer pressure.

Now what

Imagine your students getting just as excited about books as people do about the Oscars. You can make it happen by using the world of children’s and young adult literature. A lesson based on a children’s choice award will get children and teens just as thrilled about reading as librarians are. Now is the time to start planning a curriculum at your school. There’s no better gift than knowing that their opinions count. And they do.