O Brave New World...

I think my family is kind of worrying about me in this whole mess, because a) I've had pneumonia three times, bronchitis twice, pleurisy (how is that even a thing, after about 1890?) once; b) age (I'll be 54 in May); c) underlying conditions, baby, from Type 2 Diabetes to low-level asthma; and d) the last not-as-apocalyptic rodeo, I actually got H1N1 and was out of school for three weeks, miserably sick and actually confined to my bed most of the time, cracked a rib coughing (second time in my life for that) and came back to soon to work, fainted, fell and hit my head! Fun times. Anyway, most phone calls with my sister or my father and stepmother now begin with "How are you feeling? Any symptoms?"

Which is depressing. I haven't seen my nieces and won't until they've been asymptomatic for at least nine days (?). Boo!

In the US, it's all so fucking patchwork -- my school district announced Friday night that it's closing for a week, "though we should stay tuned for further news on that". Most other districts around here are closed for three weeks, whether that includes their Spring Break or not. Our Spring Break is still four weeks away. We were given one day's notice, on Friday, to make distance learning/independent learning lesson plans for all our classes for fifteen days which we could post on Google Classroom or another platform, but which also had to have offline equivalent assignments. Said assignments are required to: be grade-level appropriate, standards-aligned, and rigorous. They are also required to: take about 20 minutes each, not involve any new ideas or concepts, and mostly be skill practice. And they cannot count (much if at all) in students' grades. I understand the equity issues, I do, of course. But it makes it all seem like so much make work, both for our students, and for us.

Lowlights of my lesson plans: straight bookwork from the history textbook they all have a copy of at home, enlivened a tiny bit with some sketch requirements; straight "StudySync" lessons from the online curriculum we were forced to adopt three years ago. Two years ago? Some relatively recent time ago. (During the summer after its adoption, the principal literally came to the seventh grade English/Language Arts and Social Studies teachers' rooms and removed the single class set we'd each kept of the former literature anthology so we could still do a few greatly-beloved lessons). (Most of those lessons have been quietly resuscitated by finding illegal PDFs online of the various texts, like "Seventh Grade" by Gary Soto, or "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"...)

Highlights of my lesson plans (at least in my mind): a couple of art projects for Social Studies -- one involving creating a paper version of a West African symbolic pattern, with instructions and also links to various YouTube iterations. I apologized for the poor voice modified choices made by one of the artists. It was damn crazy. An extra credit project where I ask students to BE Samuel Pepys and keep a daily diary of mundane events as a FUTURE PRIMARY SOURCE for future historians. I made a sample page with the hours from 5 AM to 11 PM along the left side, and, in a fake handwriting style font, entries for one full day, including things like "Needed a break, so I watched three YouTube videos of MrBeast" and "Texted Julio to see if he gets this Math assignment. He doesn't." and "My sister wanted Mac 'n cheese for lunch. I made Mac 'n cheese. I told her she had to do the dishes. She broke a bowl." I really enjoyed making that. Oh, and the final assignment for the three weeks was a link to (and I'll have to make some hard copies of) a) some reputable not too difficult articles on the coronavirus and how it's being dealt with (or, instructions to get a couple of newspapers and read some similar articles) and b) two primary sources on the Spanish flu epidemic, a letter from an Army doctor stationed in Boston, seeing thousands die, and writing about it graphically, and a piece about local experiences including the news that in many places, schools were closed and teachers had lesson plans printed in local newspapers. I ask kids to read those and think about their experience and write a similarities/differences one pager.

My older niece is home from college now (which is a matter of two miles distance for her) and doing coursework online. My younger niece apparently went on a Boccacio-like binge of socializing last night -- sushi with friends and then a weed-fueled (I assume; she didn't actually say so, but I think I take it as read) sleepover with her four besties. She's home now, assuaging her boredom with Buzzfeed quizzes and phonecalls to me.

The saddest thing so far for me -- not only related to coronavirus, of course, and in fact, his response to that was one of the most heartening and inspiring things I've seen so far, as have been most of Bernie Sanders' utterances -- is that this seems to be the death knell of the Sanders campaign... with no rallies and no door-knocking, the main way to try to convince people devolves to ads, ugh. My many donations aren't going to pay for much of that. If you haven't seen it, though, I do recommend that you watch Sanders' press conference on the coronavirus. He gets it so right.

It is almost 10:30, and I am not ready to go to bed and concede that my weekend is over. I also haven't eaten dinner, and that is stupid for numerous reasons, actual physical hunger being one of them. (In a follow up to my last entry more than a month ago... I have been able, so far, to continue doing pretty well in tracking and being regular with diabetes stuff, despite school starting. I am especially doing well in eating well at school, and drinking tea there, and not wasting money and pancreatic health on the fast food franchises that infest all school neighborhoods in the US... I have a microwave, a plug in kettle, and a small fridge in my classroom, but until this year, I had not made the best, most consistent use of those things. I am also hella grateful for cheap frozen meals from Trader Joe's, and fruit, and cut up veggies from ditto...).

Anyway... as far as the title of this post... yeah, Sunday Night Blues, amplified by two things -- first, our union's tactics in contract negotiations with the district, see how they suck. The president has pretty much hinted (and it was no surprise given this union local's generally supine approach to the district, with whom they USED to be cozy as hell) that if we do go to impasse and then arbitration and then vote for a strike, it will be long and depressing because the district is headed by Scott Walker wannabes aiming to gut any union, and we'll lose. Great! So the only tactic the union leadership is pushing is a) electoral, as far as getting two new members of the local school board elected who might vote against the superintendent, and b) work to rule until that school board election, although not every site is participating. My middle school site is THE VANGUARD, ahead of any other school including the two high schools. Crazy.

So here's the deal. [This is mostly excerpted from a chat with a friend, to whom I was explaining what is going on]

Labor situation: our union, the [redacted] Education Association (so, NEA rather than AFT) has been in negotiations for the past eight or nine months, and we've been without a contract that long. The district is playing Scott Walker hard ball and has utter contempt for us. They offered a 1% raise while districts surrounding us were offering 8% or more. They've inched up to 2.5% or something derisory like that. They have tons of new money that is neither restricted nor one-time only income, but they refuse to spend it on either salaries or smaller class sizes in the lower grades, which was supposedly a California priority.

In reaction, we're "working to rule" at least at my site (I am very curious about at least one of the other middle schools, because they were supposed to vote on this last week) until mid-November, after the (stupid) school board elections. I don't think much of this electoral tactic — why the two board members supported by the union would make THAT much difference, and also, why they would necessarily get elected, despite a big push and precinct walking by the union. This is a pretty conservative community, small, mostly stable working class and lower middle class, with a lot of Christians and a lot of Mormons.

Working to rule means we can only do what is literally in our (expired) contract: we can't work early or late (which ALL of us do); we can't have our rooms open and supervise children during the morning break or over our lunch period (which sucks because I have a group of kids who like to eat there and who are hella nice, from last year and this year); strictly observed, we shouldn't even grade at home or send email to parents or students answering their email at home. I am very nervous about not grading, though generally I am hella up to date on that. Right now I have two weeks' worth of Reading Logs for my three English/Language Arts classes, and one article with "talking to the text" all over it to comment on in depth for those three classes, and one Review & Assess on a short story by Gary Soto, and coming tomorrow, one character trait/character/supporting quote assignment on the same story. The Social Studies grading mostly happens in class, so there's that, at least. There are two more weeks in the first quarter, and we've been told to do our "best guess estimation" on grades.

My friend asked how anyone could "catch me" grading at home, or sending emails at home. I told him that they (the union) cannot. But it undercuts solidarity with my fellow teachers if I grade and post grades for parents to see on Schoolloop when other teachers are not doing it; it divides us. I may decide to grade at home, but not post the grades publically, that is, update Schoolloop (the online grading/email program we use to communicate with students and parents). Literally, grading and planning and emailing students and parents is all unpaid overtime that teachers do at home and after school and before school ALL THE TIME.

But it sucks. It's painful, and it makes my job harder while I'm on the clock.

Here, have a couple of pretty pictures that show how my classroom has progressed since the first bare day.

Bookshelves with classroom library near front door



New bookshelf for my own teacher stuff, and more posters/decor



Past extra credit projects from first quarter's Medieval Europe unit

And things are calm, and kids are in a good mood, despite the fact that I am three class parties down, and three class parties to go. The cleaning-as-we-go thing is working well so far, hallefuckinglujah.

My tree is decorated! It is a giant explosion of Xmas lights -- two big bulb LED strings, and one small LED string. No blinking; I hate that. It's very, very pretty. I will add a photo to this post when I get home, which will be hella, hella, hella early.

There are cut out snowflakes on my classroom windows... yeah, I know I frequently sound like an elementary school teacher.

It's my prep period right now, on our short day. In the classes, all I am having to do is be vigilant that the songs I am allowing them to play on my sound system are clean, and grade their History group projects, a West African Trading Empire board game. Some very, very good ones -- best I've seen in doing this three times -- and some adequate ones -- and some crap, man-you-didn't-exactly-work-hard-on-this-did-you ones. There are three more half-hour classes/parties, and then teachers, too, can leave early, hurrah! We don't have to stay until 3:15, because these are hours we worked at an earlier evening... Report Card Night, most likely.

That was the randomly generated topic (well, it was the topic after ten non-starters, many of them repeated non-starters).

I love to draw. I love to build drawing into my classes, which is one aspect of teaching middle school versus high school that is a plus. Maybe I could work drawing into high school history classes. But probably not as often. Anyway. The Middle Ages in Europe is fun to teach, and right now students are working on skits to dramatize different aspects of lives in late medieval towns (guilds, merchants, home life, medicine, crime and punishment, and leisure activities), which will be interesting to see. But the mini-project right before this was having them create illuminated manuscripts. I bought parchment (-like) paper and copied an outline onto it for their final drafts, and I got some nice ones. I decided they had to write their letters in 1175, and had to pretend to be either Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine or someone related to her (first husband Louis VII of France, daughters Marie and Alix, both already married by then to, respectively, the Comte de Champagne, and the Comte de Blois; second husband Henry II, who had imprisoned her in 1173 for conspiring with her sons to rebel against him; any of her seven living children with Henry II, Young Henry, Young Eleanor, Geoffrey, Richard, Matilda, Joan, or John, or Henry II's illegitimate half-sister, Marie of France, who was at that point the Abbess of St. Edwards Abbey in Shaftesbury, and the author of some of the earliest romantic poetry. They had to pick one person to be and one person to write to -- oh, I added, for the boys who desperately wanted to be knights, Sir William Marshall, who was Eleanor of Aquitaine's Marshal and Household Knight-at-Arms. I gave them a handout with some basic information about these people, and their ages on one side, and a model letter on the other side. At home, I made my own, and here is my two page illuminated manuscript letter.*



And here is the second page. Kids only had to do a one page letter, and most of them wrote approximately three times as big as me, and with wide lines. They are not accustomed to writing long letters, at all.




*full disclosure; I read E. L. Konigsberg's A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver when I was ten or eleven, and its impact has never faded. The Alison Weir factual biography of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine did not teach me much more than that YAF historical novel.

History. That was easy.

I like reading, and I like writing. Nay, I love reading, and I love writing. And I can even be interested in grammar's peculiarities. But I do not at all enjoy trying to cozen adolescents into liking reading and writing, or even just learning to read and write better.

History can be fun. Teaching history can involve art projects (so can English, just not as often), can involve little-known weird and gross facts, is colorful and at the same time organized and slightly regimented. It's true that students are very dubious about WHY they should learn history... but then, they're almost equally dubious about why they should read or write.

Also, a student asked me what I was going to be for Halloween this year. I don't know. Maybe Eleanor of Aquitaine? That seems to be the theme right now.

This time I took the first topic offered. I may have written about this before, but too bad, here I go again.

One of the things that I was most involved with during high school was a student political club that I and a friend whose parents were Communists (like, literally -- one was the nicest Stalinist you could ever hope to meet, who had fled with his family from Poland just ahead of the Nazis, and then gone back as an anti-Nazi spy just post-war, as a nineteen year old or something crazy like that; the other, D's mother, was an Italian Eurocommunist with strong opinions and amazing cooking skills). D. and I argued all the time about how hard left our little club was going to be -- he wanted us to have a study group and read Michael Parenti's Democracy for the Few, while I wanted us to create speakers' platforms for people in the Sanctuary movement from El Salvador, and attend nuclear freeze AND Central American solidarity demonstrations. I won, basically, in the first round, and then our adult club sponsors won, on the surface at least, in the second round. They forced us to change our club name from the "Evanston Progressive Students Committee" (which I stole from the student activists at Northwestern University, where I frequently meeting-hopped on weekday evenings) to "Students for International Understanding" -- the first public event of which was an international potluck. Oh, god, I was furious.

Nevertheless, we kept struggling for autonomy and radical actions. We would paint banners and go on demonstrations in solidarity with the guerillas in El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua one weekend, and then -- here comes the origami -- fold a thousand paper cranes and have tables to ask that student volunteers fold another thousand paper cranes, and then stuff them in cardboard boxes and LITERALLY mail them to Leonid Brezhnev, the week after this. Let me check the year, it might have been Andropov. Yeah, I think it was Andropov, unless it was early in the year.

The cranes drove me crazy. I don't think I folded a single one myself. Yes, it was visual and symbolic, but did it educate anyone in anything? No. Plus, I was completely a unilateral disarmament proponent (me and E. P. Thompson and the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and was disgusted that we sent cranes to Russian leaders, and none to Reagan.

On the other hand, we also had alternative political projects around disarmament, which I thought were better political education of those participating in them as activists. We organized a school campaign to declare Evanston Township High School a Nuclear-Free Zone (yes, totally symbolic; no one was suggesting hosting missiles or even nuclear accelerators at ETHS), and held our referendum on the same day as the campus-wide Student Council election. Hundreds more students voted in our referendum than bothered to vote for Student Council electors, and of those who voted in the referendum, about 83% voted in favor of declaring the school a Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone. Oh, we (and often, mostly me) made the principal angry. Those sorts of things were always why I got called to the principal's office. So fucking stupid.

The upshot of this campaign was, however, indicative. All the young liberal students in the club were so proud of our efforts, and so certain that this democratic endeavor would prevail, and I pretty much knew it wouldn't. They called a School Board Meeting -- on the same night as my Medieval Banquet, so I was dressed in a Medieval costume I'd made myself, and had to duck out of one of the songs the Madrigal choir was performing, to go to the meeting, held in Beardsley N-112, the Study Hall room. Several other SIU members were there, and at least three of us spoke before the School Board, which listened impatiently and then quashed the results of the referendum, saying students had no authority to declare any school status. I was not in the least surprised, but for the other students (apart from D., also a red diaper baby) it was a shock and a disillusionment. I felt slightly guilty because I had seen this sort of disillusionment produced intentionally by some left groups, as a way to radicalize activists' consciousness. But I didn't do it on purpose -- we did everything right, everything possible to create democratic change, and the institution could not permit democracy. Still, much more educational than the origami cranes.

Aarghh. I don't know. I had Mrs. Weingartner, for both fourth and fifth grade, and I get a little confused as to what happened which year.

I remember that she was strict and seemed ancient, and had a tiny little knot of iron grey hair in a round ball at the top of her head the first year, and then got a really short hair cut, still iron grey, the second year. I think. She was very sallow, and wrinkled. The general consensus was that she looked like a witch, and one of those years, I caved to peer pressure and drew a picture of her, colored green getting married as a witch, god knows why. She smoked like a fiend, and drank diet Tabs (I guess that's all there was, Tab WAS diet) all day long. I am not joking, she smoked in the classroom as far as I remember, and would send students to the Teachers' Lounge to buy her her Tabs. I WANT to say that she sent a student to buy her a pack of smokes, but that is probably apocryphal.

I remember they taught us Right from Left that year, and that's when I realized I really cannot tell my right from left. I have a 50% chance of getting it right, and I always failed (so, less than fifty percent when under pressure) when called on to identify the little plastic figurines that were strategically placed around the classroom.

I also remember hating double digit multiplication and long division, and being recommended to take summer school because I'd done so poorly at it. Which is weird, because in fifth grade they accelerated me to "Project SEED" which was baby algebra, where you did exponents but did not use exponent notation -- instead, you used a capital E between two numbers so that "3 E 4" meant three to the fourth power, or 81. (I hope that is 3 to the fourth power, 3 x 3 x 3 x 3) ANYWAY, I recall that during fourth grade one day I tried to imagine what COLLEGE MATH could possibly be like, and I thought it would be long division only with ridiculously long numbers as both the divisor and the dividend.

Mrs. Weingartner read to us regularly -- four books she read were Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan (she clearly loved E. B. White, as did I) and Marguerite De Angeli's The Door in the Wall, a story set in the Middle Ages, which I loved, though other kids chafed at it. I could never stand to wait for the next installment, so I would sneak the books out of her desk and read them, with my desk lid propped up. She obviously knew I was doing this, but never busted me. She liked my writing a lot, did Mrs. Weingartner.

Again, completely random memories. This was my last year at Marquette Elementary School, in Madison, because we moved that next summer to Evanston, Illinois.

This was the year that I cut the corner off of the American flag in an act protesting the Vietnam War (how it did that, I do not know... it may also have been a protest against the Pledge of Allegiance... GOD, I hate having to hear that every morning).

I remember really, really liking my teacher, whose first name was Rose. I think her last name was Germanish? Now I can't remember. Schneidman? Something like that. I used to remember. She was the first youngish teacher I'd had, and I didn't have another youngish teacher until seventh grade and Ms. Noznick, with whom I fought a great deal, but to whom I was extremely memorable.

Literally the only other thing I remember from that year of school was that in one Science unit, we took apart and then rebuilt little devices with batteries. That was cool.

Oh, and a new girl came to school, whose family had just moved to the US from Bolivia. I was convinced they were political refugees (and they may have been) but in any case, my enthusiasm for Mercedes led the teacher to make me her mentor/guide, what have you. And we became close friends, often playing together after school. Her older teenage sister, Patricia, was amazing to me because she had a microscope and showed us our hair and blood, and because she was taking French, and told me she would take me to France with her when she went, as an adult. This was actually the first time I encountered the notion of studying French, even before our family vacation three years later to Quebec and St. Pierre.

I think my favorite grade was 12th, Senior Year. It was either 8th grade, Junior Year, or Senior Year. So I'll go with Senior Year this time, though I could make an argument for any of those three years.

In my last year of high school, I took four AP classes -- English, European History, French, and Biology. I'd taken US History AP the year before. Those classes were wonderful; they really pushed me and I liked being pushed. I have to admit it was also good having kids who were also really into learning in the classes, though since Evanston Township High School was definitely tracked, I'd had that in most of my classes. Some of the students were annoying rich kids who looked well down their noses at regular kids. But a lot weren't obnoxious in that way. Suddenly I don't remember whether I was in YAMO Senior Year, or Junior Year... no, it was Senior Year. Junior Year, I was in the chorus in The Mikado, which was great fun.

YAMO was a student written, composed, choreographed, and directed play or series of skits, produced every year by a very talented bunch of drama students. No one really knew what YAMO stood for. Some kids said it originated in the 1950s and was an acronym for "Youth of America Marching Onward". Others argued for something else, but I don't even remember other suggestions. It was just the yearly Senior Show. My Senior Year happened to be the ... now I am not sure.. the centenary of the high school? Some of the building was from the 1920s, though, so maybe it was just the 60th anniversary of the high school's central core building. John Cusack and Steve Pink and Leelai Demos and Scott Markus, I think -- anyway a crew of John Cusack and his friends conceived of the general outline and wrote it, composed the music, choreographed the dances, and directed it. It began with a steal from 2001, A Space Odyssey, with a monolith inscribed ETHS rising from the stage floor, and the chorus, as cavemen, cowering before it. That's what I remember the most. That, and being overexcited during one rehearsal such that Cusack came over and patted my head, telling me to shut up or pipe down, or something.

Senior Year -- this part is not so great -- was also when I got first bronchitis, then what the doctors called pleurisy (which when I read about it seemed like something left over from the 19th century, and I felt lucky not to have "consumption", e.g. tuberculosis), cracked a rib coughing, and then got viral pneumonia to top it all off. Altogether I was out of school for about three months of my Senior Year, and no one thought I'd be able to make up the work and graduate, or pass my AP tests. I had to take gym three times a day -- at 6 AM, then during the school day at my regular period, and then again after school at 3:30 -- but I fucking made it through, and got 5s on all four AP tests.

The "progressive" political club I'd founded my Sophomore Year was still going strong, and we had plenty of good actions and went to many demonstrations.

I enjoyed the friends I was hanging out with a lot, much parental liquor was consumed (at one friend's house, often repaired to because her parents were gone a lot of the time, we had seemingly inexhaustible supplies of a) vodka (which I now loathe), b) frozen orange juice, and c) velveeta cheese and wonder bread, which became grilled cheese sandwiches... her house was also decorated primarily in orange, from the shag carpeting to the ceramic lamps, to the modernistish murky oil paintings in gilded frames), some weed was smoked, though I was never very good at that, and enjoyable debates and arguments were had.

And then, at the end of the year, I was selected with a few other kids from my French AP class, as I had been selected each year, to take the Alliance Française Concours National de Français. Each year previously I'd done well, and the prize was a French dictionary, or a copy of a French novel. I thought it was the same this year, but no. For Seniors, the prize was an all-expenses paid scholarship to Paris to study at the Alliance Française on Boulevard Raspail. I did not know that, but I was informed, on my birthday, that I had won, from my school. Two girls from New Trier were the other winners. We had to pass an interview, at which I remember raving about how much I loved Voltaire, which I did. And then the current scions of the McCormack family gave me round trip air tickets to Paris, prepaid hostel lodgings on the Ile St. Louis at the Foyer la Vigie, run by severe nuns, and $1,000 spending money. Holy shit. I had never even been on a plane. The whole thing was insane, and wonderful.

Bah, I didn't manage yesterday. So I'll do two today. I keep promising 200 words only, and failing to keep that promise.

I'm done with historical YA fiction, I think. But now I think I need to look back at the earliest parts of this, well, series, I guess, to see which favored authors I covered and which I didn't. I haven't been doing them in order, exactly, and the original list itself (which has been augmented while I've been writing these, as names occurred to me) was pretty random.

Sydney Taylor

J. D. Fitzgerald

Ruth Sawyer

This is a group that is... sort of related to historical fiction and sort of related to 19th c. classics -- essentially because these authors wrote pretty much about the times they themselves lived through, which are now very clearly 'history'. I think all of them were children in the 1880s or 1890s... well, Taylor might be later. She may have written in the early fifties. But it was also about her own childhood in the 'teens. I'll do her first.

Sydney Taylor wrote a series of books -- the All of a Kind Family books -- telling stories about her own family growing up -- Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in the 1910s. I loved these books, growing up. The family is a stair-step family of girls, until the final child, the long-awaited son, is born. There is Ella, the oldest, then Henny (Henrietta), the tomboy with the incongruous blond curls, then Sarah, the bookworm, and finally Charlotte and Gertie. Their father is a rag and bottle and trash collector -- basically a recycler. The stories are full of details of Jewish home life in the first generation after immigration: Sabbath on Friday night, gefilte fish made from fresh carp kept in the bathtub until just before it's made, Passover Seders and Sukkoths, Yom Kippur and Charlie, the baby's boy's bris.

There are also the kinds of details that make an era come alive: New York's subway, pickle barrels and cracker barrels where you get a scoop for a penny. Penny candy. Public libraries and their importance to children. Settlement Houses. Pinafores and organdy dresses. When Henny 'borrows' Ella's only fancy white dress to wear to a party, and it gets stained, the mother at the party saves the day by dyeing the dress with tea. When the mother wants to encourage the girls to do their chores well, she hides buttons -- and once in a while an actual penny, which was almost untold wealth, to them -- in the weird, out of the way places they might forget to dust. I loved it all. I grew up in a town that had a healthy Jewish population, and these books made me feel less ignorant. Maybe even slightly envious and impressed and interested. I bet my niece will love them. I think I have them, or most of them, in paperback... I have to find out, when -- this week -- I sort out my classroom library for getting rid of. Or for transporting the books I don't want to own personally to school. One of those two options. Only the ones I am most passionate about are going to remain in my closets, that's all I can say. And the Taylor books would definitely fit.

The next author, J. D. Fitzgerald writes so engagingly and in such a believable kid's voice that it is somehow hard to believe that he is describing his own (suitably exaggerated and embellished) childhood, with his conniving older brother Tom D. Fitzgerald, known as The Great Brain, because he is so good at scheming and moneymaking and, basically, swindling other children and sometimes even adults. His series is set in Utah in the 1890s, possibly just as it is shifting from territory to state, but while some remnants of Old West still remain. A major theme in the book (aside from all of Tom's shenanigans) is the tension and balance of social power between the majority Mormons and the very small minority of 'Gentiles', meaning non LDS Christians, I guess. Adenville, Utah is a small town, and the Fitzgerald boys (there's also a sort of boring older brother named Sweyn) live with their parents -- their father, who is the editor of the town newspaper, and their mother, a housewife, and 'Aunt Bertha', an unrelated spinster who lives with them -- as the only Catholics in the town. Tom is incredibly intelligent and sly and sneaky and charismatic and arrogant. And J.D., his little brother, looks up to him and occasionally is incredibly angry with him. The books are fantastic, every one of them, although I will talk about my two favorites. There are eight books in the series, though one was posthumously assembled from notes. Unsurprisingly, it is the weakest.

The Great Brain, More Adventures of the Great Brain, Me and My Little Brain, The Great Brain at the Academy, The Great Brain Reforms, The Great Brain Does it Again, and The Great Brain is Back.

For me, the best two are Me and My Little Brain and the one which follows it, The Great Brain at the Academy. In the first of these, J. D. is the hero, and he is indeed a hero. Also, it introduces an excellent character, the orphaned Frankie Pennyworth, described by J. D. at one point as "Frankenstein Dollarworth" because he is a monster and a dollar's worth of trouble. And the second one is both a boarding school story -- always something I liked as a kid -- and a story of fomenting rebellion against authority, in this case Catholic priests who teach at this Jesuit school. The plotline about Tom smuggling in candy to sell is ... well, great. Like his brain.

Finally, Ruth Sawyer was a children's author who grew up on the East Coast and wrote about New York in the 1890s, and also the coast of Maine, same era. She -- and her fictional protagonist for those two books, Lucinda Wyman -- was from a wealthy New York society family whose fortunes crashed around the Panic of 1893. They retrenched by selling everything in NYC and moving to their summer home in Maine. Lucinda's rebellion against the strictures and confining beliefs about girls, and especially upper class girls is the plot of Roller Skates, in which book the girl's parents go to Italy and leave her boarding with two of her teachers, who do not exercise anything like the traditional control over her. She has roller skates and uses them to roam the entire city, making friends with people she encounters from an Italian barrow boy to a journalist she calls Mr. Nightowl, to a poor violinist and his family in a tenement, to an abused Middle Eastern wife of some rich Bluebeard living in a hotel. There is sadness in the book, but it's also funny and lovely. The sequel, The Year of the Jubilo takes Lucinda and her returned mother and brothers to Maine. She's older and less able to inhabit a half-fantasy world in the second book, but it is still wonderful. Sawyer's Roller Skates won the 1937 Newbery Medal. And -- I love this bit of trivia -- speaking of Maine, her daughter, Peggy, who became a Children's Librarian (makes me think of our wonderful librarian-that-was, at my school, in my district, which has abolished librarians below the high school level... BRILLIANT) married Robert McCloskey of Make Way for Ducklings, One Morning in Maine, and Blueberries for Sal fame. Those are his East Coast books. His Midwestern books (equally wonderful) are Homer Price, Centerburg Tales, and Lentil. God, I love those books. What a great pedigree children of McCloskey's had... I can just see them, total little beatniks in the 1950s.