14 Cows for America

Oh, sure, this cover looks innocuous enough, but this book will slowly and gently pull out your heart and make you weep like, well, me after I read it.

This isn't out yet but will be out in August. I saw a copy at the conference I just attended and man did it get to me.

It's the true story of a man from a Masai tribe in Africa returning from being in New York after the events of 11 September 2001. I won't say much more except that it's awesome. It's one of those books like Pink & Say that'll make me cry in front of my students no matter how many times I read it but it makes you proud to be a human being. Which is saying something.

Amazon link.
Carmen Deedy's site.

Glasses For All!

How awesome is this? A physicist has invented glasses that are self-adjustable and has created an organization trying to get these out to anyone who needs them. They have lenses that are adjustable, so there would be no need to fill a bazillion prescriptions for everyone in the world who can't afford a visit to an eye doctor. My poor kids who can't get glasses would have an instant fix! They're ugly-ish right now, but I'm sure it won't be long until they can get it a bit more fashionable. Of course, maybe fashion is catching up with these glasses! I first read about these in my new National Geographic, but here's an article SciAm did back in February. It's an amazing idea that could actually help millions of people. Here's how you can help if you wish.

Yay, science!

Yay, people!

Real Change for Math Education

I couldn't agree more. How do we do this?

The Unquiet Librarian!

You've seen the The Unquiet Librarian blog, right? It, among many other things, is run by Buffy Hamilton, high school librarian/information goddess.

Finally got to meet her in person! She was scheduled to present at that conference I went to this week, but it was an online presentation (that's a photo of her while she was doing it) so we didn't see her, just a screen image of her desktop and her voice coming through the speakers. I felt jipped since that's one of the reasons I went to the conference in the first place!

But then, surprise surprise, our professor invited her to our class today to go over some real-world cataloging issues! So not only did I meet her, but it turns out she and my wife had a class together a few years back. Crazy.

Now if you know anything about Buffy you know that she is Ms. Intertwebs. She has the aforementioned blog. She has more than one wiki and pageflakes, and netvibes, and twitter, and facebook and and and...

So it was kinda cool when we were geeking out after her talk to get to bring up a few online tools she was unfamiliar with. I know that's not that impressive--there's too many online tools for anyone to know everything. Still. It was good talking to her. She couldn't be sweeter or more willing to share every scrap of knowledge she's ever come across.

Check out her stuff.

Oh and those sites? Buzzword, Instructify, and Google Moderator. You can check out those too if you have so much time on your hands. Now get back to work, slacker! Buffy has already created whole new web worlds in the time you've taken to read this!

(photo via flickr)

Harris and Me

This weeks Booking Through Thursday question asks what book evokes the idea of "summer" for you the most and for me it's undoubtedly Gary Paulsen's hysterical and touching romp, Harris and Me. There's a newer cover but I like this Wendell Minor version myself.

An 11-year-old boy, an obvious stand-in for a young Paulsen if you've read any of his vivid and compelling (and horror-filled) autobiography, spends the summer with some rural relatives and in particular the 9-year-old Harris who opens the relationship with the question, "We heard your parents was puke drunks, is that right?" Well, yes, but the rest of the summer is too much fun for anyone to worry much about "real life."

It's an episodic book, in the style of Twain and recounts the narrator's and Harris's encounters with the wildlife (animal and human) in the country. It's funny but definitely for those around twelve and up due to some language. It's unfortunate that Paulsen is only known as a children's book writer, because this should have crossover appeal with adults in the same way Richard Peck's Grandma Dowdel books do (A Long Way to Chicago, A Year Down Yonder, A Season of Gifts). My own daddy grew up on a farm in Tennessee and just about peed his pants reading this, so that's high praise indeed.

Batgirl Was A Librarian

The title of this post comes from the front plate of a car I saw in the parking lot of Macon State College as I attended the GLMA Summer Institute. It wasn't the best conference I've ever been to, but it was a good one for getting the feel of my new career path.

They're librarians, so of course there's a wiki of resources, which is certainly worth checking out. I was dismayed to hear that it's a yearly struggle to get the funding for GALILEO (click here if that link doesn't work), Georgia's online research library and databases. It's an amazing resource and especially great that every school in Georgia has access to it. Much better than Google for the kiddies and you could get the equivalent of multiple Ph.Ds using nothing but this without any books in your media center. How much does this treasure set the 9.4 million citizens of our state back for use in our public schools? Less than .02 cents each. A veritable drop in the bucket.

The best presenter by far was a fellow named Tommy Johns. I have no idea if that is his real name. He has many of great tips and the theme of his talk was perfect. To be a great media specialist he says, you need to have:

Now there's a philosophy I can promote!

Iran

Wow.

John Hodgeman On Nerds vs Jocks and Obama

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Bradbury Fights for Libraries

I've mentioned Mr. Bradbury before and linked to those amazing videos he did recently to promote libraries.

Today in the New York Times there's a wonderful article about his continuing fight for public libraries. "I don't believe in colleges and universities," hes says, "I believe in libraries."

Dude is pushing 90 and he's still going strong!

Wait Till Helen Comes

Questions are from my Survey of Children's Lit. assignment:

What did you feel?

I felt like these were the worst parents I've read about in a long time and that Molly was one of the more whiny twelve-year-olds. She's also not one of the brightest girls I've met in fiction either. If she can be so manipulated by her five-year-old step-sister, then it's almost surprising that the book ended as well as it did for her.

The parents are a couple of head-in-clouds artists that should seriously be prosecuted for neglect. I'm all for free-range children but when your obviously traumatized five-year-old clearly hates her step-siblings or you're dumb enough to believe that the older step-siblings are harassing her, then why would you leave them all alone together? It didn't make much sense. First of all, they needed better communication; barring that, they could have at least gotten some therapy.

Molly was so naive it was getting ridiculous. She made it seem like she'd never had a problem in the world with her brother and she fell for every generic "gotcha" sibling trick Heather pulled on her. When it got to the point where Heather snuck out of the house the first time, she could have gotten a lot more mileage from yelling to her parents than following the kid. Maybe then they would have realized Heather needed adult supervision at the very least. She also had the problem of not understanding how whiny and crazy she was sounding to her family. Whether there's really a ghost or not, they clearly didn't believe it so she should have given up trying to convince them of that and just worked on getting them to pay attention to what was going on with the little one.

I know this is a children's book and I'm responding to it as an adult reader, so let me be fair. I can see why this is such a popular and beloved book for kids. My students would eat it up. The fourth and fifth graders are always looking for scary stories beyond the goosebumps level, but are not yet ready for Clive Barker. I recall seeing that silly Titanic movie from the last decade and overhearing some teenage girls go on about how it was the best movie they'd ever seen. They were young, so maybe it was indeed the best movie they'd ever seen. To me this book is full of stereotypical and generic gothic tropes, but to an 8-12 year old who was encountering this kind of tale for the first time it would be good and frightening. Hahn certainly has the pacing down and knows all the ingredients to throw in.

What did you notice?

I guess I noticed all the things a younger reader wouldn't. I noticed what terrible parents the adults were. I noticed how shoddy the police work was. I noted the near impossibility of Helen's parent's skeleton's to still be intact a hundred and fifty some years later. I noticed I started to wonder how no one, not even a half-corporeal spirit, had not found these two skeletons before. I know all this sounds picky, and I'm sure this kind of thing would slip by younger readers, so I don't want to dwell on that stuff.

I also noticed that Hahn knew just where to draw the line, playing on a young person's fears of death and ghosts and such without giving these elements too much power. The ghost of Helen can only do so much and can be defeated easily enough. She can talk loners into drowning like some spiritual cult leader, but she can't force the unwilling or apparently even cross property lines so there are safe limits.

What were you reminded of?

I was reminded of the scary stuff I went for when I was younger. I skipped over this kind of book and went straight for Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Lovecraft and Poe. Now those were some scary stories! Well, maybe not the Lovecraft. Those were kind of funny, actually. But I remember having nightmares from Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven." That was creepy.

I've heard that Hahn's new book, Closed for the Season, is a non-supernatural thriller invloving a creepy closed down theme park (a la Bradbury). I may check that out to see if I enjoy her work more without the supernatural elements.

I like what Roger Sutton, editor of The Horn Book, had to say in praise of the actual scariness of this ghost and the children who read about her: "The fact that Helen wins children's choice awards across the country give me hope for the future: kids who can handle it are exactly the kind I want around to take care of things when the lights go out" (Sutton, 2009).

Sutton, Roger. "Read Roger: Futures trading for writers." The Horn Book, Inc. / Publications about books for children and young adults. 9 Feb. 1924. 17 June 2009 .

Great Minds Discuss Ideas

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
--Eleanor Roosevelt

In honor of Sharon Lee's declaration that June 23rd be known as Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's Day, Booking Through Thursday's question this week asks is you read fantasy and/or science fiction and why or why not.

Hell yeah I do. It's funny, because I haven't actually been reading that much of this kind of thing recently, but just last night got around to Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, considered a classic of the genre. It was tough, brutal and even funny. More of a tougher look at the absurdist worlds of Pynchon, Vonnegut and Heller. It's the polar opposite of Heinlein's goofy Starship Troopers, showing off war as the pointless exercise it usually is. I think it's the first big SF satire of the Vietnam War which is practically a sub-genre in the field.

Theodore Sturgeon once said that ninety percent of everything was crap. When it comes to genre fiction, I think the number hovers closer to ninety-nine percent. But that 1% gold can be some life-changing stuff, full of the wonder and terror of our place in the cosmos.

I'm enjoying going back and reading a lot of children's books for my current studies because I skipped over them myself as a kid. I read a few, but after fifth grade or so, I went straight to SF. I may have stuck around fiction written for my age group longer if there had been much in the way of harder science fiction, but it was either realistic fiction or light fantasy in those days. We didn't have Haddix and duPrau or even K. A. Applegate.

So I went for Asimov, and Clarke, a bit of Heinlein, and on to Bear, Brin, Gibson, Bradbury, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Ellison, Dan Simons, Ted Sturgeon, a pinch of Scott Card, Lovecraft, King, Barker, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, Leiber, Octavia Butler, Gaiman, Finney, Orwell, Susanna Clarke, Huxley, Stokey, Shelley, Straub, Tolkien, Mathesen, Ballard, Herbert, Atwood, and even just Chrichton.

It's funny that I started off ignoring the more fantasy-driven stuff in favor of harder SF, but now read a little of both. Science fiction and fantasy, at their best, are about the same things any great literature is about: what Faulkner nailed as "the human heart in conflict with itself."

Free Harry Potter Books

Ms. Yingling has the scoop.

Should be fun, kids!

Bumpy Library

Holy crap! I just about had to whip out my ninja skills on a library patron!

Here I am in one of our lovely and award-winning local public libraries and it being first thing in the morning, it's nice and quiet. I see about eight or ten people on computers. There's an elderly gentleman reading a paper in a comfy chair. At two tables nearby women are tutoring young children. All you can hear are keyboards and soft voices.

This was shattered a few minutes ago by a man who seemed to be quietly working at a table directly behind one being used by a tutor. Apparently his concentration was broken and he angrily stuffed his briefcase and began loudly remarking for all to hear that "this is a library, not a damn tutoring place" and as he walked toward the back of the library, apparently to find a quieter spot, he continued to rant.

I am quite fond of libraries and have a problem keeping my mouth shut.

After his third or so iteration of this not being a tutoring place, I perked up with, "I think it can be used for whatever we all decide to use it for."

Mistake.

He spun around and came right at me. No longer projecting the demeanor of a well-dressed library patron, he suddenly became a wide-eyed and out-of-control street thug. "You got anything else to say to me?" he shouted. "You wanna take it outside?" he threatened. "You wanna bump?!?"

By now he was in my face.

I remained calm and simply said, "No sir." I could see three staff members coming over. The closest one engaged him and he was no longer in danger of being slain by a ninja, but I ask you: Have you ever seen anything like this? It was new to me.

He didn't leave right away. I got a few more "You wanna bump" threats and he even told me to shut up and shoved one of my books at me. Lucky for him that he was asked to leave and complied. The poor kids were scared to death.

I guess he forgot that our libraries have quiet rooms set aside.

(image cc flickr)

Still Here!

It's just that I'm taking three graduate classes this summer. They're basically the same amount of work as a regular semester-long graduate class, except without the semester-long part. Ouch. I was feeling all jaunty about it being off for the summer and all, but no. It's pretty much all grad work all the time for me now.

At least in one of the classes, Survey of Children's Literature, I get to read many kid's books. Of course the problem with that one is that the professor wants us to read books we've never read before and they have to be off of her list of books to choose from. So I'm ending up with a severely limited range of choices since I've read more than a few children's books.

Oh, hey! I'll be at the Georgia Library Media Association (GLMA) Summer Institute conference next week if there are any other peach state media specialists out there.

And finally, I blogged about the library without a media center for their blog as well and in the comments heard about another new school that isn't planning on a library for their students. Am I the only one disturbed by this trend?

(image cc flickr)

Read Think Teach for 5 June

Not too much this week. I just got back from Disney on Monday, opened up the old feed reader and clicked "Mark all as read" and got to work on my summer classes. Here's a few interesting tidbits to tide you over.

Google Wave looks mahvelous. (via Kristin)

Now that Kari from Mythbusters is pregnant, she's helping bust those crazy pregnancy myths.

Phil is dancing because Newsweek Slams Oprah. Yea, Newsweek!

Two cool Mars posts: First, one from Kids Lit. Next, it's that time of year again and Phil must tell everyone to ignore those forwarded emails and that no, Mars is not going to be as big as the moon and all that happy crappy.

In other news, Josh over at Teacher Magazine called me up and asked me about my opinions regarding a little something called Twitter. I'll be referred to as an "unnamed educational blogger." Maybe I should rethink this whole anonymous thing? Anyway, I'll let you know when it's up.

Rememberance

More pictures from then and now, at The Big Picture.

Authors That Stick

From Booking Through Thursday: “This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.”

How about authors instead?

1. Shakespeare, especially Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, and, well, ok all of them.

2. Dan Simmons, especially the science fiction.

3. Harlan Ellison, loved the stories, cracked up at the essays.

4. Garcia Marquez, like Poe, slipped right into my subconscious.

5. Carl Sagan, has always been a light in the darkness for me.

6. Kurt Vonnegut. I still haven't gotten over missing him when he came to my town due to a prior commitment. Sigh.

7. Lewis Carroll, obviously.

8. Mark Twain, and I find my self going back to his essays now.

9. E. B. White. I'll read anything he writes. It doesn't matter. It's all good.

10. Stephen King. Not all of it, but much of it is better than you remember. The opposite of Poe, brought everything into the real world.

11. Ray Bradbury. Sometimes his purplish prose stifled, but generally I loved him--especially October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes. And 451, of course.

12. Some of John Irving, especially Cider House Rules.

13. Paul Fleishman, another amazing children's novelist.

14. Most of Richard Dawkins. So smart and so well written.

15. Toni Morrison. Beloved was one of the few books I turned right back to page one and started again. Sula is probably my favorite, though. Song of Solomon was my first and I immediately connected her to Garcia Marquez and Faulkner.

I could go on, but 15 is a good place to quit. Can't wait to hear yours.

Booklisters Read Everything

Niiice.

Deja Vu

Man, Doug Johnson really has written about everything first. Here's his take on the Disney experience which weirdly mirrors my own but is more thoughtful and better written (as usual).

Vacation Reading

Listened to these on audio while driving to and from Disney (and some brief snatches while there). I've done some audiobook listening but will probably do much more after finding this wonderful resource. It made audiobook listening on the iPod exponentially better.

Mr. Obama read his own book and he's so smooth that even when I wasn't completely gripped by the story, I was listening intently. No matter what kind of president he ends up being, he's certainly a thoughtful person and this is a surprisingly personal book from a politician. Here's hoping he doesn't stop writing.

The Hitchhiker's Guide was one of those books I'd always meant to read because it's referenced so much in my world of geek friends but I'd skipped over it back in my middle/high years of more intensive science fiction reading. I wish I'd read it then because I'd probably found it much funnier. Now it's like watching one of those Monty Python greatest hits compilations. It's still funny, but you've heard all the jokes before. I've heard there's an audio version that Mr. Adams reads himself. I couldn't find it at my library but was satisfied with the delightful work of Stephen Fry's reading.

One False Note is the second in the 39 Clues series. Korman was a perfect choice for this kind of work and he does a great job taking over from Riordan, but there was nothing new here. It's just as much fun, but if the children continue to be surprised by the tactics of their competitors much longer, then count me out. Yes, they might kill you (but it's doubtful) and yes, they will intercept messages and hack into your computer and be generally nefarious--get used to it! I'll check out number three sometime and see how that one goes before I give up on it. I can tell you, though, that I would have loved this stuff when I was in 4th/5th grade. No question.

Back from Disney

I must congratulate the authors/compilers of this magnificent tome. I mentioned earlier that I was using it for our week-long Disney trip and it was indeed all that! Every time we stuck to their touring plans, we were delighted. Every time we tried to wing it or went against their advice, we were grumpy. Mostly, we were quite happy. We met princesses and other characters, did three of the major parks, saw shows, parades, had her made up like a princess, rode boats and buses and trains, and enjoyed the hotel pool. A full week indeed!

I am not a fan of long lines, large crowds, or mind-numbing heat so this kind of vacation is not at the top of my list. But I have a six year old daughter who I would do just about anything for (proof), so way back when she first discovered the existence of a Disney park, I started considering options and browsing travel books. I told my wife I'd like to wait until she was either 40 inches tall or 7 years old and I would encourage anyone going to take this advice to heart. It's an expensive trip and everyone I saw that didn't fit either of these two requirements were usually having a temper tantrum or sleeping in strollers.

I saw many grown ups having temper tantrums as well. More than half the fathers I witnessed seemed to think of themselves as generals of an army and the only words they spoke to their children were barked orders, sometimes accompanied by fingers to the chest cavities of the little ones. Some slaps as well. Why were they even there?

I know I'm biased, but I think our daughter was the best behaved of all the children, and this is not something we focus on. I honestly think it's because we simply talk to her about everything. We would talk to her about the schedule and warn her when lines might be long. We discussed choices and how if we rode something again we might not be able to do something else. We even (gasp!) involved her in the decisions.

We're not the kind of people who think this is the "most magical place on Earth" and don't want to do this every year or anything. So we were ready to blow our wad for the week and make it as memorable as possible (another reason for waiting--three year-olds might have fun but won't remember a thing). The Unofficial Guide and Small World Vacations did us up right.

One funny story. While we were watching a performance in front of the castle one afternoon featuring Mickey, Donald, Goofy, princesses, pirates, and dancers all about your dreams coming true, Micky asked the crowd to shout out their dreams. Among many "I want to be a princess/pirate" responses, Harper looked at us and shouted, "This! This is my dream come true!" She was so incredibly happy. Then she laughed when I shouted that my dream was to be a...librarian.