Oh, yeah, Livejournal
Jun. 20th, 2008 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66I don't know exactly why I haven't updated for shit, recently. It's summer; I've got the time. I'm doing pretty well at not falling into my general summer habit of staying up ridiculously late and then sleeping during the day. Partly, my summer is starting off with classes and trainings that don't really permit that.
Anyway, I thought I would use this entry to kill two birds with one stone: continue writing about some of the YAF authors on my long, long, long-assed list, and make what I write one of the assignments I turn in for the final class I need to take to clear my multiple subject teaching credential. I hope it is the final class. I may need to take CPR again (so annoying) and I have to prove to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing that I DID take the stupid Health Ed requirement. Which I did. I don't know where proof of that lies, sadly, since I took it through Oakland Unified. But I did take it.
So. The class I am taking, the possible LAST class, is through Cal Berkeley Extension, and it's on Mainstreaming Students with Disabilities. I think it is fantastic. SO much better than the version I attempted last Fall, which was online and dreadful. I really, really like this instructor, who is a counselor specializing in adolescents and adults with ADHD as well as a graduate professor of education. She's awesome. And herewith, annotated reviews of several YAF books that focus on or include as major characters young people with disabilities. And possibly one film -- we'll see.
----- ----- ----- -----
As a middle school teacher of Language Arts, I try to have a wide knowledge of contemporary and more classic (or just less current) young adult fiction. I also try to maintain a large library with what I consider are the best examples of these. That doesn't mean I exclude R. L. Stine and K. A. Applegate, both factories churning out series titles -- horror and science-fiction, respectively -- which are very popular and very easy to read. I just don't read them myself, or care whether they get dogeared or are stolen. I admit that I cater to my own tastes, too -- I have a vast collection of historical fiction written for children and teenagers, some excellent, some merely covering a place and time I consider useful. I also choose books that offer students (potential) opportunities to identify with characters like themselves. Working in West Oakland, I made it a priority to find YAF that centered around African-American characters, and was written by African-American authors, or at the very least extremely good non-Black authors -- some of the historical fiction had white authors who managed not to be terrible in that regard. In the district I work in now, I look for novels in Spanish, in translation, but also for books which reflect the Latino/a immigrant experience, Mexicans in the United States, turmoil in Central America and so on. I also have gathered, over the years, a number of books whose main character or major supporting characters live with a disability of some kind. My reasons for having these books -- well, if I'd thought about it, my reasons would have been to -- again -- offer models and opportunities for identification for my students, and to offer vicarious opportunities for students without disabilities to "step into someone else's shoes", or take perspective. In fact, however, I didn't think about it, exactly. The following titles are books which meet those goals, but which I collected more because they are very good fiction -- well-written, interesting, mind-stretching, emotion-evoking fiction. I offer this annotated list as a resource for teachers of students aged 11 through 15 or so.
Blindness/Deafness
Okay, this first one isn't a book. But it's a classic movie which is still amazingly effective even with jaded students who play fast action video games in color every afternoon. I refer to the movie The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke playing Annie Sullivan and the famous Helen Keller. The Miracle Worker not only gives what seems to be a pretty accurate portrayal of the world a deaf-blind child could create for herself in the absence of any more complex means of communication than miming, but makes it very, very clear to any watcher that the facts of a disability mean nothing whatsoever about the quality of the mind in that body. Helen Keller was brilliant, stubborn, brave, and resourceful, and that is clear in the movie as well as in any biographical material about the socialist speaker.
ADHD
This is a more recent focus of attention in schools -- was that a pun? Not sure. Anyway, when I was in school, there was no such diagnosis, and a student with the range of symptoms which might produce that description now would probably have been called "a handful." But we have named it, now, and now students with this label are well aware of it. Some of them, in my experience, are able to use their self-knowledge to get accommodations for themselves. Some of them, not yet. One series of books which I think is wonderful both in giving students a sympathetic mirror to look into, and to offer deep recognition, is about a boy named Joey Pigza, a fifth grader (I think -- maybe he starts out as a fourth grader?) and is by Jack Gantos. In my longer treatment of YAF, these books would also go under a category I want to write about -- novels with working class culture and roots. There are far fewer of these than I would like to see -- most novels for teens are firmly rooted in the middle or upper-middle class, and if their class identification shifts for one or two titles, the attempt is often awkward and unconvincing. An example in this regard is an author I like very much, but who can't really write anything that isn't middle to upper-middle class, or anything that isn't white. That would be Andrew Clements, an otherwise great author of school stories.
Anyway. Jack Gantos' protagonist Joey Pigza, is a handful. His mother is divorced from his father (who seems also to be a handful) and in the first novel, Joey lives with his paternal grandmother, who is eccentric to say the least. Throughout the first novel, called Joey Pigza Swallows the Key (2000), Joey is confused and sometimes tormented by his inability to fit in with the norms of classroom behavior. The depiction of what it feels like to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is very powerful, and very specific. Gantos evokes the physical sensations as well as what seems almost like a manic emotional high. He is on medications, but they do not work well. By the end of the novel, he is transferred from a mainstream environment to what seems to be SDC while a more competent and concerned teacher helps him both with meds and with coping techniques. This novel obviously deals with very controversial ideas -- whether and how to mainstream, for instance, and the place and utility of medication -- but it does not state anything monolithically. In the course of the four books, in fact, Joey's education seems to run the gamut from mainstreaming to segregated Special Education to being withdrawn from public education and home-schooled by a Christian acquaintance of Joey's mother. It is as though the author wants to explore several different avenues of how Joey can deal with his life, his education, and his interactions with others.
There are four books in the series, so far, and it may end there. I haven't read the fourth one yet, but the titles are, in order: Joey Pigza Swallows the Key, Joey Pigza Loses Control, What Would Joey Do?, and I am not Joey Pigza. I really wish I had these books on tape.
Amputation/prosthetic limbs
Cynthia Voigt is an amazing author of young adult fiction. She is prolific and she is especially good at complex characterizations which are often ambivalent. None of her characters are flat. In Izzy, Willy Nilly, she tells the story of a young middle class high school student, moderately popular, moderately pretty, moderately good in school, whose life is disrupted when she allows her older date to drive her home drunk from a party. In the crash, the driver walks away, but Izzy loses a leg, or more accurately, her right leg below the knee joint. The novel is a journey for Izzy through dealing with this change. She denies it, revolts against it, is deeply depressed for much of the story, and slowly comes to terms with it. Her life changes as a result of losing a leg, but in some ways, Voigt seems to argue that she comes away a better person for having to struggle. She is dropped by her own popular clique and slowly becomes friends with a much smarter, more awkward and honest misfit. She sees herself and her old friends through a more thoughtful, if painful, prism. I don't think that the book is didactic or preachy -- Voigt never is -- but she handles emotions and nuance very, very well.
Learning Disabilities
Cynthia Voigt is also the only author of YAF I can think of right this minute who has a major character who would have an IEP (Individualized Education Plan, for students who qualify for Resource Specialist Programs), at any school I've taught in. In her series on the fictional Tillerman family, the younger daughter, Maybeth, is "slow" -- she does not have mental retardation, but is frequently identified as "retarded" by children and teachers alike. She has been held back in school once already, and in the first book is about to be held back again, so that she would be in the second grade for a third time, this time with her younger brother. Throughout the series, Voigt develops Maybeth's abilities and explores her processing issues. She has trouble both with language processing when using the whole language teaching methodology and the memorization of lists of sight words, and with mathematic concepts like fractions. Yet she can learn to read using phonics, and she has perfect pitch and the ability to read music and recall songs and melodies very quickly and accurately. The second novel in the series, Dicey's Song, even has her older brother James, a gifted student, research teaching methods that might help Maybeth once she is allowed to proceed into third grade instead of being retained. The book is useful not only for is portrait of Maybeth as a multidimensional character, with many graces and talents, but for its exploration of how families can look for resources to help members with processing issues, and how they can understand difference.
Mental Illness
The book I selected for this category was surprising to me, because its author is more well-known for her own vast factory-like production of The Babysitters Club series novels. Ann M. Martin has been trying her hand, lately, at more complicated, 1960s-based, class-located first person novels, and two of these are very good indeed. These novels are Here Today, and A Corner of the Universe. It is the latter which tackles the subject of mental illness in the secondary major character. Hattie, a girl living in a small town in 1960, meets her uncle Adam, of whose existence she had been utterly ignorant, when his specialized private boarding school closes down. It is not exactly clear what her uncle's diagnosis is -- some level of autism, it seems, signaled by an encyclopedic knowledge of the I Love Lucy show, and the use of lines from that show to mediate most social situations. But Hattie's relationship to her newfound uncle -- by far the closest forged by anyone in her family -- makes Adam a real person, whose differences stop being frightening and begin to be understandable. The novel is aimed at 9 to 14 year olds, but I agree with the Amazon.com reviewer who felt that age bracket skewed too young: the ending of this novel is tragic, and its darkness would be very hard for most children under 12 or 13.
Cerebral Palsy
Finally (I could probably keep going for quite a while, but I am going to stop, I think) there is the novel Libby on Wednesdays by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The main character of the book has no disability except a social awkwardness caused by being homeschooled by an unworldly poet father. But when she is forced to go to middle school for socialization purposes, the Gifted And Talented Education program places her in an after school writing club which meets on Wednesdays. There, she meets an ungainly assortment of other students whose writing is fascinating and creatively compelling, one way or another. She does not expect to like any of them, but slowly comes to respect and enjoy them all. The first student she gets to know is a boy named Alex, who is called a spaz by other students because he has cerebral palsy and cannot control his limbs well, at all. He writes his stories on computer and composes parodies of almost any genre, lickety split. The depiction of a boy with cerebral palsy, again, underscores the fact that mental ability is not the limiting factor -- if there is a limiting factor -- in a disability.
Anyway, I thought I would use this entry to kill two birds with one stone: continue writing about some of the YAF authors on my long, long, long-assed list, and make what I write one of the assignments I turn in for the final class I need to take to clear my multiple subject teaching credential. I hope it is the final class. I may need to take CPR again (so annoying) and I have to prove to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing that I DID take the stupid Health Ed requirement. Which I did. I don't know where proof of that lies, sadly, since I took it through Oakland Unified. But I did take it.
So. The class I am taking, the possible LAST class, is through Cal Berkeley Extension, and it's on Mainstreaming Students with Disabilities. I think it is fantastic. SO much better than the version I attempted last Fall, which was online and dreadful. I really, really like this instructor, who is a counselor specializing in adolescents and adults with ADHD as well as a graduate professor of education. She's awesome. And herewith, annotated reviews of several YAF books that focus on or include as major characters young people with disabilities. And possibly one film -- we'll see.
----- ----- ----- -----
As a middle school teacher of Language Arts, I try to have a wide knowledge of contemporary and more classic (or just less current) young adult fiction. I also try to maintain a large library with what I consider are the best examples of these. That doesn't mean I exclude R. L. Stine and K. A. Applegate, both factories churning out series titles -- horror and science-fiction, respectively -- which are very popular and very easy to read. I just don't read them myself, or care whether they get dogeared or are stolen. I admit that I cater to my own tastes, too -- I have a vast collection of historical fiction written for children and teenagers, some excellent, some merely covering a place and time I consider useful. I also choose books that offer students (potential) opportunities to identify with characters like themselves. Working in West Oakland, I made it a priority to find YAF that centered around African-American characters, and was written by African-American authors, or at the very least extremely good non-Black authors -- some of the historical fiction had white authors who managed not to be terrible in that regard. In the district I work in now, I look for novels in Spanish, in translation, but also for books which reflect the Latino/a immigrant experience, Mexicans in the United States, turmoil in Central America and so on. I also have gathered, over the years, a number of books whose main character or major supporting characters live with a disability of some kind. My reasons for having these books -- well, if I'd thought about it, my reasons would have been to -- again -- offer models and opportunities for identification for my students, and to offer vicarious opportunities for students without disabilities to "step into someone else's shoes", or take perspective. In fact, however, I didn't think about it, exactly. The following titles are books which meet those goals, but which I collected more because they are very good fiction -- well-written, interesting, mind-stretching, emotion-evoking fiction. I offer this annotated list as a resource for teachers of students aged 11 through 15 or so.
Blindness/Deafness
Okay, this first one isn't a book. But it's a classic movie which is still amazingly effective even with jaded students who play fast action video games in color every afternoon. I refer to the movie The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke playing Annie Sullivan and the famous Helen Keller. The Miracle Worker not only gives what seems to be a pretty accurate portrayal of the world a deaf-blind child could create for herself in the absence of any more complex means of communication than miming, but makes it very, very clear to any watcher that the facts of a disability mean nothing whatsoever about the quality of the mind in that body. Helen Keller was brilliant, stubborn, brave, and resourceful, and that is clear in the movie as well as in any biographical material about the socialist speaker.
ADHD
This is a more recent focus of attention in schools -- was that a pun? Not sure. Anyway, when I was in school, there was no such diagnosis, and a student with the range of symptoms which might produce that description now would probably have been called "a handful." But we have named it, now, and now students with this label are well aware of it. Some of them, in my experience, are able to use their self-knowledge to get accommodations for themselves. Some of them, not yet. One series of books which I think is wonderful both in giving students a sympathetic mirror to look into, and to offer deep recognition, is about a boy named Joey Pigza, a fifth grader (I think -- maybe he starts out as a fourth grader?) and is by Jack Gantos. In my longer treatment of YAF, these books would also go under a category I want to write about -- novels with working class culture and roots. There are far fewer of these than I would like to see -- most novels for teens are firmly rooted in the middle or upper-middle class, and if their class identification shifts for one or two titles, the attempt is often awkward and unconvincing. An example in this regard is an author I like very much, but who can't really write anything that isn't middle to upper-middle class, or anything that isn't white. That would be Andrew Clements, an otherwise great author of school stories.
Anyway. Jack Gantos' protagonist Joey Pigza, is a handful. His mother is divorced from his father (who seems also to be a handful) and in the first novel, Joey lives with his paternal grandmother, who is eccentric to say the least. Throughout the first novel, called Joey Pigza Swallows the Key (2000), Joey is confused and sometimes tormented by his inability to fit in with the norms of classroom behavior. The depiction of what it feels like to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is very powerful, and very specific. Gantos evokes the physical sensations as well as what seems almost like a manic emotional high. He is on medications, but they do not work well. By the end of the novel, he is transferred from a mainstream environment to what seems to be SDC while a more competent and concerned teacher helps him both with meds and with coping techniques. This novel obviously deals with very controversial ideas -- whether and how to mainstream, for instance, and the place and utility of medication -- but it does not state anything monolithically. In the course of the four books, in fact, Joey's education seems to run the gamut from mainstreaming to segregated Special Education to being withdrawn from public education and home-schooled by a Christian acquaintance of Joey's mother. It is as though the author wants to explore several different avenues of how Joey can deal with his life, his education, and his interactions with others.
There are four books in the series, so far, and it may end there. I haven't read the fourth one yet, but the titles are, in order: Joey Pigza Swallows the Key, Joey Pigza Loses Control, What Would Joey Do?, and I am not Joey Pigza. I really wish I had these books on tape.
Amputation/prosthetic limbs
Cynthia Voigt is an amazing author of young adult fiction. She is prolific and she is especially good at complex characterizations which are often ambivalent. None of her characters are flat. In Izzy, Willy Nilly, she tells the story of a young middle class high school student, moderately popular, moderately pretty, moderately good in school, whose life is disrupted when she allows her older date to drive her home drunk from a party. In the crash, the driver walks away, but Izzy loses a leg, or more accurately, her right leg below the knee joint. The novel is a journey for Izzy through dealing with this change. She denies it, revolts against it, is deeply depressed for much of the story, and slowly comes to terms with it. Her life changes as a result of losing a leg, but in some ways, Voigt seems to argue that she comes away a better person for having to struggle. She is dropped by her own popular clique and slowly becomes friends with a much smarter, more awkward and honest misfit. She sees herself and her old friends through a more thoughtful, if painful, prism. I don't think that the book is didactic or preachy -- Voigt never is -- but she handles emotions and nuance very, very well.
Learning Disabilities
Cynthia Voigt is also the only author of YAF I can think of right this minute who has a major character who would have an IEP (Individualized Education Plan, for students who qualify for Resource Specialist Programs), at any school I've taught in. In her series on the fictional Tillerman family, the younger daughter, Maybeth, is "slow" -- she does not have mental retardation, but is frequently identified as "retarded" by children and teachers alike. She has been held back in school once already, and in the first book is about to be held back again, so that she would be in the second grade for a third time, this time with her younger brother. Throughout the series, Voigt develops Maybeth's abilities and explores her processing issues. She has trouble both with language processing when using the whole language teaching methodology and the memorization of lists of sight words, and with mathematic concepts like fractions. Yet she can learn to read using phonics, and she has perfect pitch and the ability to read music and recall songs and melodies very quickly and accurately. The second novel in the series, Dicey's Song, even has her older brother James, a gifted student, research teaching methods that might help Maybeth once she is allowed to proceed into third grade instead of being retained. The book is useful not only for is portrait of Maybeth as a multidimensional character, with many graces and talents, but for its exploration of how families can look for resources to help members with processing issues, and how they can understand difference.
Mental Illness
The book I selected for this category was surprising to me, because its author is more well-known for her own vast factory-like production of The Babysitters Club series novels. Ann M. Martin has been trying her hand, lately, at more complicated, 1960s-based, class-located first person novels, and two of these are very good indeed. These novels are Here Today, and A Corner of the Universe. It is the latter which tackles the subject of mental illness in the secondary major character. Hattie, a girl living in a small town in 1960, meets her uncle Adam, of whose existence she had been utterly ignorant, when his specialized private boarding school closes down. It is not exactly clear what her uncle's diagnosis is -- some level of autism, it seems, signaled by an encyclopedic knowledge of the I Love Lucy show, and the use of lines from that show to mediate most social situations. But Hattie's relationship to her newfound uncle -- by far the closest forged by anyone in her family -- makes Adam a real person, whose differences stop being frightening and begin to be understandable. The novel is aimed at 9 to 14 year olds, but I agree with the Amazon.com reviewer who felt that age bracket skewed too young: the ending of this novel is tragic, and its darkness would be very hard for most children under 12 or 13.
Cerebral Palsy
Finally (I could probably keep going for quite a while, but I am going to stop, I think) there is the novel Libby on Wednesdays by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The main character of the book has no disability except a social awkwardness caused by being homeschooled by an unworldly poet father. But when she is forced to go to middle school for socialization purposes, the Gifted And Talented Education program places her in an after school writing club which meets on Wednesdays. There, she meets an ungainly assortment of other students whose writing is fascinating and creatively compelling, one way or another. She does not expect to like any of them, but slowly comes to respect and enjoy them all. The first student she gets to know is a boy named Alex, who is called a spaz by other students because he has cerebral palsy and cannot control his limbs well, at all. He writes his stories on computer and composes parodies of almost any genre, lickety split. The depiction of a boy with cerebral palsy, again, underscores the fact that mental ability is not the limiting factor -- if there is a limiting factor -- in a disability.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 08:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 10:18 am (UTC)It's one reason I can't stand L'Engle. The unapologetic hierarchies she creates around class and intelligence dwarf anything else she might do well.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 03:00 pm (UTC)Libby On Wednesdays is in that mode of smart socially ostracized girls who love to read! And write! But more interesting. Man, that makes me think of Harriet the Spy, Sport, and the truly fascinating Nobody's Family is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh. Those are awesome -- must add her to my ongoing long-assed list.
Have you read either Deborah Ellis or Suzanne Fisher Staples, by the way? They both focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan and girls. I mean to be reviewing them soon. Common plot device of girl-dresses-as-boy.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-26 05:44 am (UTC)July 31 (Thursday) 7:00 PM (Donation) Nap's 3152 Mission St. at Precita, SF
Closing Party
Please join us to celebrate the last day of the LaborFest with the Angry Tired Teachers Band, AT&T. This band, which is based in Hayward has written about the travails of teachers at working class districts in the Bay Area, and was also featured in a daily video strike bulletin of 2007 show called The Truth which can be seen by going to www.youtube.com and typing in “HUSD strike.”
no subject
Date: 2008-06-28 06:55 am (UTC)