![]() 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.
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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. ![]() 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
https://i0.wp.com/socialjusticebooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TheyCallMeGuero.png?resize=193%2C300&ssl=1 ![]()
Recent events in our world have challenged me to think about what I think I know about race and diversity, as well as examine my own personal biases. I could go on about that here, but what I'd rather focus on is how this will apply to my new position as an elementary teacher librarian. Diversity in books was always important as to me as a classroom teacher, but as a librarian it will be even more important in curating the library collection for over 1,200 students!
Through my undergrad and graduate studies, as well as my library practicum, the work of Rudine Sims Bishop has come up time and time again. You may know of her work, but not know it was she who wrote about the need for "Windows and Mirrors" in children's literature. [To read her original piece, click here, and to learn more about her, click here. Grace Lin has aTED Talk referencing this as well.] During this time of COVID-19, I mentioned Bishop's work on a FB post, and a friend from high school thanked me for mentioning the concept. She was having to make a presentation at work the next day on the importance of finding mentors who were BIPOC for her company's new interns, and the idea of these interns needing "windows and mirrors" as professional role models fit perfectly with what she was hoping to explain to the powers that be. So what starts in libraries really can change the world! ![]()
As I'm slowing wading through the remnants of my former classroom library, deciding what to keep or give away, I zeroed in on Chris Barton's What Do You Do With a Voice Like That? The Story of Extraordinary Congresswoman Barbara Jordan . It's on the new Texas Bluebonnet List for 2020-21 and beautifully illustrated by Ekua Holmes. Growing up in Texas, I knew that Barbara Jordan was one of the giants of Texas politics, and she was still teaching at The University of Texas when I was an undergrad. She was a trailblazer in life and is still admired today as a master orator and influential leader.
This book is the perfect example of the goal of Bishop's writings of promoting books that are mirrors and windows: Barbara Jordan persevered and overcame the obstacles of her time pursuing a career in law, education, and politics, and she is a figure whose life is inspiring to all. In our home, we talk regularly with our children about current events, and after reading this book with together, I found clips of her on YouTube to share with them. While reading this book, I kept wondering what words Jordan would choose today to craft and measure her message, full of wisdom and gravitas, wishing she were still with us, forever an inspiration.
UPDATE: 7/24/2020: I believe this is the Barbara Jordan speech referenced in the comments below. Although we are sadly still working on the issues she highlights, we are fortunate to have her words of wisdom to keep inspiring us today, and we continue to work.
Jordan, B. [Austin History Center YouTube Channel]. (1988. October 6). Barbara Jordan's address at the LBJ Library [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/MYAYOsr5xI4
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