I am teaching two sections of Materials for Young Adults at Rutgers this semester, one one campus, one online. After we do our introductions, the first real class is always spent exploring “what is YA?” — we look at age range, emotional and physical development, voice, style, subject, coming of age as defined in different places and times, whether or not to include books not defined as YA, etc. My students always do a good job of recognizing that these many shifting categories do not neatly overlap, and so defining YA literature is necessarily an ongoing process. But this year… Read More
This week we celebrate Edith Wharton’s 150th anniversary – and last week Apple launched its new enhanced book authoring tool. What do these two have in common? An opportunity and a warning.
When Edith began writing, literary print publishing in America still used a model familiar to everyone who has read Dickens – serialization in magazines, followed by publication in a bound book. An author, then, had two editors – the magazine gatekeeper who got her into print and out to the public, and the maestro of the book. Edith was talented, rich, distracted, eager to be a big… Read More
It was a rough weekend here in our house — at the crossing point of many binary decisions. Sasha is preparing for his first middle grade midterms; Marina has been reading very carefully through the scope and sequence of our ELA program for those same Middle Years; the NFC and AFC playoffs filled a good part of Sunday, and ALA has been meeting in Dallas. By much too late Sunday night when the Giants defeated the 49ers, Sasha collapsed in sobs (the two teams which lost Sunday — San Francisco and Baltimore — are coached by brothers, he had been… Read More
In case you didn’t follow Apple’s Education day as it happened, here is a summary: http://tinyurl.com/85fxh6y Basically Apple is providing tools that make it easy to create enhanced ebooks — but these can only be bought and sold through the iStore — and is getting into the e-textbook business, working with several major textbook publishers. On the one hand, you and I — individual authors, illustrators, editors, but also teachers, and librarians — can easily create materials that make use of text, sound, art, animation, video, etc. This has the potential to be terrific. On the one hand, it now… Read More
NYC recently held an engineering contest for kids 9-14. The kicker of the article is the very last line, from an 8th grader whose robot came in second: “The robot we built, we worked together and created something,” he said. “That teaches you a lot.” Here’s the article: http://tinyurl.com/7htcyhy I bring it to your attention because I am a big fan of student-created-knowledge in content areas — Social Studies, Science, Math — and, also, of the gaming/competition model in those ages. My older son recently graduated from playing Civilization to Age of Empire, and I see how is awareness of… Read More
Last week I posted a link to the long-term study which seemed to show the “value-added” of better teachers, as expressed in lifetime income, and various other factors such as girls who got through teenage without becoming pregnant. Monica quickly expressed her distaste for the whole “value-added” approach to teacher evaluation. Today, Michael Winerip has a wonderful piece in the Times in which he tracks down and reveals a key problem with the study: http://tinyurl.com/6nwskxn He found the flaw through close reading and follow up interviews, but any of us could have picked it up by simple math: the study… Read More
One of the main reasons to have a physical convention, not a virtual meeting, is the side conversations that come up naturally but randomly in and around the sessions. As people cluster around the open bar a discussion between two people draws in a third, adds a fourth, and brings in new knowledge that no one could have planned for, but turns out to be really important. That is very much what EBMA aims to offer, and does in fact achieve. So the other day I was talking with a publishing pal who is a good impromptu host, and drew… Read More
Tonight was the first get-together at the conference, a meet and greet, followed by a dinner in which Sharon Draper was honored. She spoke with wite, style, eloquence about the power of words — having words — in the lives of young people. You could easily see why she was such a wonderful teacher. As I listened to her — immitating the voices of kids, reading from her works — I thought that we do not really honor black women the same way we do the famous black male public figures. In Sharon you saw that strong, stern, teacher, librarian… Read More
One of the highlights of being at the National Book Awards was getting to meet Stephen Greenblatt — one of the leading advocates of New Historicism as a form of literary criticism. Both Marina and I had read and been deeply influenced by his work — Marina by his writing on Shakespeare and me by a piece on Ralegh. I had not, though, read his latest book, The Swerve, until my men’s NF group selected it (and I was not the selector). I am reading it now and it is terrific — you all should read it as an adult… Read More
