As a teenager, the music I listened to influenced the literature I read independently. The Cure led me to Camus. The Police to Nabokov. U2 to Flannery O'Connor and Joyce (Bono living in a Martello watchtower on the Irish coast was enough to pique my interest). You get the idea. Morrissey's video for "Suedehead" showed him wandering around James Dean's high school in Fairmount, Indiana, where someone had scrawled on a wall "You can't go home again". In the days before the internet, it took some digging for me to connect it with Thomas Wolfe, although years later I found out he'd borrowed the phrase from friend Ella Winter (Godwin, 2011). "You can't go home again." It keeps sneaking up on me, especially now, during the time of COVID-19. In the most literal sense, I can't go home again. I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, and my side of the family still lives in Nueces County, consistently in the top 10 counties out of 254 in Texas of new COVID-19 cases per capita. My mom is in her late seventies. My niece has a newborn. Every one of my relatives' households has reasons to be highly cautious. No stopover on the way to a beach condo is worth it, so FaceTime and Zoom birthdays it is for a while. I'd never forgive myself for unknowingly transmitting COVID-19 to any of them, so I just eliminated the possibility. And just in case anyone didn't catch the implications of that, my going back to work in a school with children literally means that for the foreseeable future, I can't visit ANY of my family members, maybe until the end of the school year. Usually by late July, my back-to-school dreams have started. Sometimes, it's the first day of school, and I've accidentally slept in. Other times, I'm back in high school, and I've forgotten my drill team gauntlets before a football game. I make to do lists, split, and reorganize them. Even after twenty-two years of teaching, the beginning of the school year is not unlike the days leading up to a wedding, full of excitement and insomnia. This year, it's anxiety, caution, and insomnia. Classrooms are second homes for teachers, and the ways they look are just as varied as our homes in which we sleep. During the work week, we spend more waking hours in our classrooms with children we call "our kids", even though they're not legally ours. Sprucing up our classrooms makes us feel more at ease and happy to be there as we build relationships with our new school family for the year. . .although we all know they will forever be "our kids" in our hearts. ![]() Last year was my swansong as a regular, classroom teacher. I'd completed my Master's in Library Science the previous summer, and the last of a strange and winding path of timbering dominoes fell, three years in the making, ending with me accepting the librarian position at the neighborhood school I had spent the three previous years teaching third grade. When I packed up my classroom in the third month of the pandemic, I didn't yet know it would be the last regular classroom I'd ever have. (Lots of "threes" in that paragraph there. It IS a magic number, after all, and who doesn't need a little magic?) Even if I were going back to the classroom in the fall, it wouldn't look like this, with the flexible seating, beanbag and bucket chairs at the ready, curtains, and modular table arrangements. This fall, because of COVID-19, gone would be the high-fives, hugs, and handshakes. I wouldn't need my rocking chair and floor space for minilesson gathering and read alouds, because they wouldn't be allowed due to social distancing. I couldn't go home again, even if I wanted to. During my graduate studies, we were asked to design our dream library, which programming would we include, and how would we prepare our 21st century learners for an uncertain future. (After all, the year I was a third grader, the Internet was first assembled into a cohesive network!) How would I make my students feel welcome? In what ways would I build a collection that is not only a reflection of their lives, but a window to worlds unlike their own? In all my ponderings and plotting, I never envisioned plexiglass, quarantined books, and gloves. Being the new librarian, it saddens me that the kids will be disappointed when we get back. In their minds (who am I kidding? In my mind, too!), the library is browsing for books and huddling over their choices with a friend on the cushioned furniture. We explore coding apps on the iPads, try out research resources in pairs, gather in the Book Nook for read alouds, and make wish lists for the book fair twice a year. We have author visits and kids scope out the newly-checked in books, where most graphic novels get snatched off the book carts before they ever make it to the shelves. The new library home I had wished for won't quite be . . . not just yet. I don't think people realize that "going back to school" at the very beginning of the year only means being inside the school building; "school" as we know it has been put off indefinitely. There are so many things we will ALL have to wait for:
Wishing will not make the number of COVID-19 cases subside. Real work, personal discipline, science, and time will. I believe it will. I HAVE to. I WANT to go back. My children want to go back, but they don't want to go through what some of our extended relatives in other cities experienced in March/April with this virus. I don't know what to tell them, except that we want nothing more to protect them, that they are the most precious beings in the world to us. That means for as long as we can manage as a family, our children will be distance learning as my husband works from home, even if I have to return to campus. Our family decisions will be guided by local case numbers, not crossed fingers and hoping for the best. ![]() So as their father and I each sift through the remnants of our former work homes, his because his entire office building is being reconfigured for the new normal of more employees working from home, and mine because I no longer need most of the twenty-two years' worth of teacher stuff I've accumulated, our home has been transformed. Uprooted. Whatever. I imagine Marie Kondo nodding sweetly as we empty each box. We've eaten in the dining room multiple times each and every day, since the kitchen table was chosen as the easiest spot to set up online learning. My school mini-fridge suddenly became a necessity at home--we needed the extra space. My husband's desk upstairs is now his primary workstation, with several monitors and a headset. The day I rushed out to replace our modem/router and the evening when a transformer blew and cut our electricity for a few hours weren't just minor annoyances. There have been times when my husband and I have debated getting a larger house, but now this isn't just our first house we've ever owned, nor just the place where our babies first lived, or our Census 2010 and 2020 house. Our home is now The House Where We Lived during the Pandemic. So far, our household has been spared, and every day we pray that we won't get sick. Someday, hopefully sooner than later, we will be able to go home again, and not just our homes where we've been quarantined, either. Our work homes. School homes. Worship homes. Comfort zone homes. Hometowns. Ancestral homes. And one day all these homes will feel completely safe again. In the meantime, please don't assume I don't want to work, that distance learning is easier, or that anyone deserves a tax rebate while their kids learn from home. And lastly, don't be surprised if your child comes home from school that first week saying they want to stay home, because school just isn't the same. It WON'T be their same learning home for a while. Again, it will be up to real work, personal discipline, science, and time. References
Godwin, G. (2011). "Introduction". You Can't Go Home Again. Simon and Schuster. p. xii. Harvard Global Health Institute. (2020, July 22). Covid risk levels dashboard. Pandemics explained. https://globalepidemics.org/
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![]() When I was growing up, my family was big into playing games, and we had a few house rules: 1. You play by the rules as printed. 2. We don't "let" people win; you win fair and square. 3. Dad always has the black army in Risk! 4 Winner cleans up. A few clarifications of these rules are as follows: #1 made it very easy to settle disputes, but I found that when I played games with people outside the family, things were more fluid, and that didn't sit well with me. If you read Tanya Lee Stone's book Pass Go and Collect $200, even from its beginning, there is a history of people making House Rules for Monopoly. As the book shows, it was this fluidity of rules and versions that led to issues when Parker Brothers decided to mass produce the game. However in my house, my dad didn't like the idea of House Rules--at all! We used to take a vote to make all of the chance money paid to the bank go into a pot for anyone landing on Free Parking, and he couldn't stand being outvoted. You see, rule #1 didn't just apply to board games; it was a life rule. To this day I struggle with respecting people who seem entitled and take lots of shortcuts, because I was always encouraged to play fair and work hard. In retrospect, this probably is related to me not being the biggest risk-taker, so I've had to work on that. Rule #2 applied mostly to me. I was a second-marriage baby. I had older siblings who were 10, 11, and 21 years OLDER than I was. Back then there weren't any modified kid versions of popular games, so I played what they played. Today, Monopoly is one of the most popularly-adapted board games, with versions renaming properties with various landmarks and street names for cities and universities. Whenever I won, I felt a strong sense of accomplishment, knowing I'd truly beaten them, and they hadn't gone easy on me. It also led to our game nights being described as "cutthroat". After reading Stone's book with my children and wanting to play it with them, I realized in our house, we owned a kids' version of Monopoly, a UT-themed Texasopoly, and a Corpus Christi version, but not the classic. That's something I think we need to remedy. ![]() Rule #3 was serious business. Risk! [with an exclamation mark] was the game our family would use to test people out. If it was serious, a new boyfriend or girlfriend would eventually be asked to play, and it was a commitment of time and a test of skill and stamina. Once I had forewarned a college boyfriend that my dad always had the black army, and when he was offered to choose an army first, he chose black. He grinned. I was mortified. He didn't last long. Rule #4 was usually preceded by the winner belting out Queen's "We Are the Champions", although my husband isn't as into that. Making the winner clean up was always a way to take the cockiness out of winning, a way of taking them down a notch and keeping the winner humble. After playing Risk! my kids take this to another whole level by hollering, "Ransack!" and dump everything into the middle of the board. ![]() While not all families are as into playing games together as mine, I wanted to delve into my family's relationship with game-playing as a way of connecting with Tanya Lee Stone's book, Pass Go and Collect $200: The Real Story of How Monopoly Was Invented...although I wrote far more than I had intended! The story of Lizzie Magie's original incarnation of the game that would become the Monopoly we know today reminded me of so many other stories of inventors who never received their proper due--by recognition, financially, or both***. Parker Brothers, who had already entered into business with Charles Darrow for his version of Monopoly, gave Magie only $500 in 1935 for the rights to her patent for The Landlord Game, which is, as Stone puts it, "the heart of the game." Being the middle of the Great Depression, Magie might not have expected the popularity Darrow's version would generate, and it wasn't until the 80th Anniversary Edition of the game that Lizzie Magie's name was more widely known in connection to the creation of the game. Whether your family is into playing board games or not, Pass Go and Collect $200 is part game origin story, part cautionary tale, and part economics lesson. Those familiar with the game might be surprised and even delighted at some of the tidbits the book shares I won't spoil here. To read more about Lizzie Magie, check out this New York Times article from 2015. Happy Reading! ***One success story from the same time period is told in another Texas Bluebonnet List alum, Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully, in which Mattie successfully proved in court that her design for a flat-bottom paper bag machine had been stolen. Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully appeared on the Texas Bluebonnet List in 2008-09. ![]() I taught third grade for sixteen of my twenty-two years as a classroom teacher. For several years I read aloud Margaret Peterson Haddix's Among the Hidden to coincide with our social studies curriculum on citizenship and government, which was typically in the fall, around election time. I always juxtaposed the dystopian setting of the book with our American form of government and our Constitutional rights. At the time, it was a comfort, knowing that in our reality, we have the right to protest peacefully, that free speech is protected, and that no one is considered illegal. It's amazing how time and world events can change one's perspective of a piece of literature, and how a book's relevance can evolve. This year book 1 of her Greystone Secrets is on the Texas Bluebonnet List. The cover alone evokes the Upside Down from the popular Netflix series Stranger Things. Margaret Peterson Haddix's books are aimed for younger readers, but her craft and suspenseful pacing do not read as a juvenile piece of literature; her stories can captivate any reader. As I've been progressing through the book with my children, whenever we try to take a break, it's so hard to find a stopping point. One or both of my children are always begging to read "just one more chapter". . . and I feel that way, too! It will definitely not disappoint! To find out more about Margaret Peterson Haddix's books, visit her author website at https://haddixbooks.com/ ! ![]() I remember the first time I saw a Shel Silverstein book. My friend, Sara Williams, had a copy of A Light in the Attic of her very own, and I was a tad bit jealous. Her mom was our 2nd grade teacher--our little, Catholic school only had one class per grade level. We read it, huddled together, and giggled with glee. The next poetry book that spurred that reaction was Alan Katz's Take Me Out of the Bathtub. By this time, I had started teaching, and sometimes the figurative language in poetry isn't as engaging for elementary-aged students as the more fun-loving ditties are. Aside from Silverstein, my students didn't exactly rush to the poetry books, until Katz's books came along. As we read Rhett Miller's No More Poems, my daughter and I took turns reading the stanzas of every poem. Just like when I was a 2nd grader, we sat, snuggled in my big chair together, giggling at the poems. She especially appreciated "Brotherly Love," since she has her own big brother/nemesis/BFF to contend with on a daily basis; afterwards, she rattled off her own version of an evil laugh. "Purple Pox" reads like a hat-tip to Silverstein's classic "Sick." "How to Play Baseball" starts out as cringe-worthy, but finishes with a comeuppance that could only have been more perfect if the kid's curveball had actually beaned the gruff coach in the head. The poems are twisted and subversive just enough to grab and delight kids searching for more poems in the Silverstein and Katz vein. Interestingly, author Rhett Miller has a musical background, not unlike Shel Silverstein who famously penned Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue". He has spent his adult life playing in the band The Old 97's. He has also published other writings, including a diary he kept during the post-9/11 period, during which he and his future wife were living a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. To read more about this, visit the Here & Now radio show site for the story behind the diary. |
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