We are truly fortunate to have such a supportive community! Through annual fundraising efforts, our campus has been able to provide so many learning resources for our students. We literally couldn't do it without the support of our families and community. One of the things we were able to do is replace our five rows of shelving (used for our fiction chapter books and most of our everybody picture books) with mobile shelving. This was something our administrators had identified as way to better utilize our library space, and it was DEFINITELY a change I am thrilled we were able to do! Now during events such as book fair In addition to adding flexibility to the space, we now have better sight lines in our everybody book section, which is where most of our youngest students find their treasures. It's an added safety bonus that came with the ability to rearrange our shelving at will. I can't thank our administrators, Nancy Varljen, Therese Wafford, and Carlos Molina enough for entrusting me with this project. Again, the generosity of our families and community made this possible.
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"But now that doctors and scientists know better, everyone knows that to protect their skulls and their brains, they should wear a helmet," I say. Most nod and concur. A few rat their parents out, saying they don't always make them.
"Whose skull is it?" I ask them. "Mine," they answer. "Well, maybe you should be the one to be responsible and remember to wear it. Like the book says: 'You only get one skull,' right? Maybe your parents NEED you to start taking on that responsibility to get it yourselves." To watch a child consider this and realize that they are caretakers of their own bodies is a beautiful thing. Kids follow our lead, especially our attitudes, just like when I was 11, and the Texas Legislature passed seat belt laws. Sure, as a preschooler my favorite place to be in the car had been standing up, so I could try to balance and see EVERYTHING. But my parents were adamant about following the seat belt laws moving forward. Helmets. Seat belts. Masks. These are not easy times, but kids are resilient, and they understand. They WANT to feel SAFE, and they want CONTROL, especially these days. I haven't been keeping up with my blog lately.
Not even the "It's Monday What Are You Reading?"s, even though I've been reading. No musings about the profession. I've been bogged down in so many ways, and my To Do List is a mile long, but it's getting shorter, and I'll get better. Education is ALL about having plans, but being FLEXIBLE. If you are ever considering a career an education, but can't be flexible, this isn't the job for you. I'm definitely a Planner, but what I love about working with kids the most are those moments when their curiosity takes you on a "Teachable Moment" or tangent, and their curiosity drives the lesson. I love Logistics. I try to account for contingencies, and I'm the kind of person who volunteers to help with schedules, because to me, it's just one big logic problem. One of my first few years in this district, several teachers were taking issue with the new master schedule, so our principal challenged the staff, "If you can figure out a way for X,Y, and Z to happen, go for it!" So I did. I presented her with three possible master schedules, and she actually chose one! Where I struggle is when I see a problem I either can't wrap my head around or don't have the confidence or authority to fix. Sometimes I'm not good at realizing my logistical brain has scouted possible outcomes up ahead, and realizing that's why others don't see the same pitfalls I foresee. In the spring, I wanted to be in "The Room Where It Happens" [shout-out to Hamilton], like some of the district planning committees, but as the summer went on, and observed everything else going on in the world, I felt myself recoiling from wanting to be a decision-maker in general. I just wanted to be safe and hunker down with my family. I think even more taxing than my Beginning-of-the-Year Work Load has been my Mental Load. When our district reopening plan was announced, I was surprised. Going by our superintendent's letter to TEA and the Governor in mid-July, I was expecting our district to go the full eight weeks of virtual learning that the state was allowing. Then I thought the Board of Trustees was going to vote on it, and two meetings later, it was clear that they were going to allow the plan to proceed without a vote. So I forced myself through the stage of SURPRISE, and realized I had to quickly shift into ACCEPTANCE and back into that Logistical Mode. Part of that shifted into EXCITEMENT for all the things I wanted to do to make the library my own. Nothing overly dramatic, because we've had a very successful library program, but there are things I want to try. Whenever I'm pondering something, my very experienced and knowledgeable assistant Betsy keeps reminding me that yes, I can do it, because yes, I AM THE LIBRARIAN NOW! (Part of me still doesn't believe it. I made a donation the other day, and when I had to type my occupation, for the first time instead of "teacher" or "educator", I put "librarian." So I guess it's real. ) If I'm being honest, the other part is I've had anxiety about reopening. I'm not going to lie. I've been relieved that the local numbers have been trending downwards, and I want it to stay that way. But the fact that going back to work with school children means that I can't visit my mom and other family members indefinitely has been heartbreaking. Even if I'm being safe and am asymptomatic, I don't want to be the carrier who's responsible for infecting them, since each of my relatives' households has various concerns deserving the utmost caution. It's a dilemma every family is facing. I'm SO fortunate I have a job, a husband who's working from home indefinitely, and choices. I'm very blessed, but it's also very isolating, since I haven't seen my side of the family since February and probably won't until maybe the end of the Winter Break. MAYBE. After two days of having students in school, I've come to a few conclusions/realizations:
I was sitting here, trying to think about writing a conclusion, despite this meandering kind of post. The thing is, I can't write a conclusion. This is all open-ended. Yesterday I was listening to an NPR piece about how rabbis have been researching what their predecessors were saying at Rosh Hashanah sermons a century ago, during the 1918 flu pandemic. History repeating itself. Sentiments are the same. Somehow humanity endured enough for us to be here today. John Lennon sang, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." --"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" I've got to keep reminding myself of that, too. ![]() Although the events of the last few months have opened up many opportunities for discussing social justice in my household, the funeral of Congressman John Lewis recently made for yet another. My husband and I, both former history majors at UT, regularly discuss historical and current events with our two children, who are eleven and eight years old. What an inspiring life of service John Lewis had! It's not every day three former Presidents of the United States speak at anyone's funeral (plus Carter's written words). I watched President Obama's eulogy with my kids...if I'm being honest, most of it. They were getting antsy, and me just explaining to them who John Lewis was wasn’t enough. I found a clip with mixed historical footage and interviews. I told my youngest she didn’t have to watch the confrontation, but she watched what led up to it and how they kept trying to march beyond the bridge to Montgomery. I wanted them to see how brave John Lewis was. It’s hard to explain to children why these events take place. Children like mine have a hard time accepting that the answer is simply, “They were racist. They were hateful people. An unarmed man had been killed by officers. They wanted the right to vote without restrictions.” My children are fortunate and, yes, privileged for not understanding that at face value. It is a privilege to not have that experience or be exposed to those types of people. Our level of discomfort discussing these issues could never scratch the surface of what others experience. They are 11 and 8 years old, but it is not too early to start talking about it with them. Which is one of the reasons why I love my job. When I was my children's age, I wasn't aware of any titles that didn't gloss over historical events. Just as we are living in history today, with all of the complexities and all shades of opinions, every important event of the past was complex. Today, there are so many options for youth to deepen their understanding of causes of events, motivations of those involved, and how what we've been taught as fact may be something worth questioning and investigating with a healthy skepticism. When I was in school, I loved my American history classes. Kenny Reagan and Robert Parks could not have been more different, but they were engaging teachers, each in their own way, inspiring me to choose history as one of my majors. I especially loved learning about the movements an landmark events of the 1960s, which is when Mr. Parks attended our same high school, and in class we watched things like the Zapruder film and questioned the Warren Report. Yet for as open and out-of-the-box as my teachers were, they still had to wrestle with the curriculum and contend with the textbooks they were handed to use. I requested the first edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen as a gift, and the person who gave it to me was shocked to learn that it wasn't a parody, but an analysis of the shortcomings of American high school history textbooks. The version I recently acquired was revised for the youth audience. It challenges the notion that heroification of our leaders is best practice; as a matter of fact, it can lead to disillusionment when our present leaders don't seem to measure up to an ideal implanted by our education, with figures who never truly existed to that level of idealized statesmanship and decorum. With my own children, we talk about historical (yet flawed) figures, such as explaining Washington and Jefferson's slave ownership through lyrics from Hamilton. Not always fun. I love 28 Days: Moment in Black History that Changed the World because it doesn't just touch on the historical figures whose names surface most often in state social studies standards, like King, Tubman, and Parks. It names Crispus Attucks, the first person shot and killed by redcoat soldiers at the Boston Massacre, more than a month before the official "shot heard round the world". When my family visited Boston in the summer of 2019, we saw where Attucks was buried at the Granary Burying Ground, near Boston Common. Children--ALL children--need to hear the names of these heroes, such as Robert Smalls, Daniel Hale Williams, and Marian Anderson, amongst those our history books recycle every edition. But it's the books I hadn't touched on my shelf, the ones in a lovely slipcase, that I have been fascinated by the most lately. How could I have ignored the March trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Aidyn and Nate Powell, for so long? I bought the set when I was in graduate school, taking a youth lit course. I had perused the first book of the trilogy, enough to get a sense of the style, but I admit, I didn't think I had the time to devote to it, or so I thought. The truth is, I didn't have time NOT to read it. I don't know why it impressed me so much that John Lewis would take part in a graphic novel memoir. I don't know why I didn't conceive that a man with such a progressive drive in everything he did would choose such a groundbreaking medium. But truly, it was the most authentic way to do so. The graphic medium demands attention. It's unapologetic, stark, and at times jarring. Flashing back from his life as a Congressman in the present, life back in the Civil Rights Era was a constant fight. I hadn't known so many of the details of the marches in Selma. Maybe I hadn't paid enough attention in class. Maybe my teachers hadn't known so much. Maybe it just took the first person narrative voice of one of our greatest leaders to finally find the best way to make his story "sing". There can never be enough books about Social Justice in children's hands. I know some adults think that children need to be shielded, protected from the ugliness in this world. But the truth of the matter is, children are keen observers. They learn so much from watching and listening, especially to the things adults tell them not to worry about or pay attention to--they KNOW those are the most interesting things of all. I'd much rather find gateways to explain things to my own children, so they can process what they observe in the news, neighborhood, and lives, than to pretend that I'm protecting them by ignoring it. These books and so many others are those gateways. References:
Lewis, J., Aydin, A., & Powell, N. (2016). March (Trilogy Slipcase Set). Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions. Smith, C. R., Evans, S., Graham, D., & Jackson, W. (2019). 28 days: Moments in Black history that changed the world. Solon, OH: Findaway World, LLC. Stefoff, R., & Loewen, J. W. (2019). Lies my teacher told me for young readers: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: The New Press. 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/ ![]() 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. ![]() With COVID-19 cases increasing in our area, day by day, the uncertainty of what the fall semester will look like is looming, too. As I was reading Chris Van Dusen's If I Built a School with my daughter, we kept comparing each page to what we'd each want. Usually her opinions were even more fanciful than the main character's imagination of having a zoo in the school; mine were more logistical and practical, wondering if classes would have to rotate animal-keeping duty. Maybe that's because I'm knee-deep in COVID-mode, and am way too preoccupied with how things are going to be--especially in the library. The preliminary ideas from last month may or may not apply by August, so we'll just have to wait and see. And....maybe that's why I loved jumping into this book so much, especially now. Chris Van Dusen has written three "If I Built a...." books. I first became familiar with his work through his collaborations with one of my all-time favorite authors, Kate DiCamillo, on her Mercy Watson series. His illustrations, especially in this book, have a very Jetsons-like, retro whimsy, and they just make you want to smile! This book made me yearn for field trips and hands-on learning experiences...things we may have to curb in the near future, but hopefully not for long, since those are the types of things students love and remember the most. To check out more of his work, visit his website at: http://www.chrisvandusen.com/ . ![]() When I was growing up in South Texas, we'd always get stopped at the Sarita Border Patrol Checkpoint on our way back from Mexico. They'd shine a flashlight into the car and start asking questions. My mom had black hair and an olive complexion, and we knew it was really she who was expected to talk, to prove she belonged on this side of the border, but sometimes they'd talk to the three of us kids sitting in the back seat of our 1978 banana cream pie-yellow Buick. As a shy little girl, I was always left with mixed feelings and unanswered questions...and David Bowles's poem "Checkpoint" from They Call Me Güero flooded all those memories and feelings back to me. Growing up, we were ignorant of our Mexican heritage. I know that sounds incredible, and it's a twisting, convoluted story of its own, but I know this is why I found this book so poignant and personal. There are so many moments in this book that are familiar to me from an experiential/cultural sense, because I was raised in South Texas, but at the time it was through the lens of a friend or girlfriend, not within my own family. But truly, that doesn't matter--for myself or any other reader of this beautifully-crafted book. Themes transcend culture, and the poems in this book are universal: how family is the cornerstone, friendship, triumphing over adversity, and individualism are all threads running through these poems. As this book unfolds, we see Güero interact with his family members, friends, first girlfriend, bullies, teachers who believe in him, and how he navigates the challenges of middle school and hones his gifts as a reader and poet. Readers can identify with it all, even if the setting and Spanish words peppered throughout aren't familiar...and that's what the glossary is for! In these poems, Spanish and English are mixed seamlessly, just as languages are blended in so many families living anywhere cultures intersect. Another thing I love about this book: They Call Me Güero, much like the 2018-19 Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee Garvey's Choice by Nikki Grimes, is a book of poetry written from the first person point of view of a male adolescent. I was teaching 3rd grade when Garvey's Choice was on the list, and I saw how the subject matter really opened up a few of my male students to poetry. Before reading that book to them, it had been eyerolls and groans, because their experiences with poetry hadn't made it relevant enough to their own lives. So I'm thrilled to have another opportunity to promote a book that will appeal to and hopefully widen the reading lives of my students. I can't wait! Image retrieved from Social Justice Books
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