The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

One of the blogs I follow religiously is Peter Greene's, Curmudgucation.  Today he posted a great piece called   The Missing Link in the Reading Debate .  After reading it, I thought about some conversations we had yesterday in our staff development.  We were supposed to be looking at "data".  It seems to matter to no one that none of the people on our staff are a. statisticians, b. mathematicians, c. professional researchers, or d. interested in the slightest in becoming experts in one of these fields.  We sat in a staff meeting for a couple of hours last week while various charts and numbers and colorful graphs were thrown up on the screen, apparently all illustrating how greatly our school is failing.  Yesterday we were supposed to be looking more deeply at those numbers and charts and graphs and engaging with them in a productive way to improve our school.  Umm. No. Every one of those charts and graphs and numbers are produced by looking at ONE snapshot, on ONE day,

How do I love Jane Eyre ?  Let me count the ways. Because even in the darkest moments of the novel: at the school when the children were told not to talk to Jane, living with the hateful Reeds, being lost and almost starving on the moors, living in the terrible understanding that Rochester was going to marry Miss Ingram, in trying to please St. John and live up to his completely unreasonable expectations, Jane never loses her utter "Jane-ness".  She never loses sight of herself and who she is, and she never wavers in her faith in herself.    Because the love story between Rochester and Jane is almost purely intellectual.  She never seeks to hide her thoughts and feelings from him behind the wall of femininity, and in doing that, she inspires all women to be truly feminist.  Jane speaks her mind and tells the truth, and Rochester loves her all the more because of it.   Because Jane is more beautiful in my head because she sees herself as plain. Because Jane never l

The prompt for this posting was "A book turned into a movie and completely desecrated."  I'll be honest and say that I'm having a really difficult time thinking of any books turned movies that I really loved or really hated.  They generally don't have that much of an effect on me.  Certainly there have been a great many movies made from books that do not in any way do justice to the plot.  There are many movies I've seen that are great in their own right, even though they really departed from the book ( To Kill a Mockingbird  and The Book Thief  come to mind).  I guess the only truly abysmal book-turned-movie that  I can think of would have to be The Da Vinci Code . So, yes, I am outing myself that I have read and enjoyed Dan Brown novels.  In fact, when my hubby and I visited Italy, we took the Angels and Demons  tour in Rome.  (An entertaining and informative tour, FYI!)  I know that Brown is a bit of a pattern writer, and not to be taken seriously, but I

Les Miserables  is the longest book I've read in entirety, weighing in at a hefty 1,463 pages.  And yes, I read it before the movie came out.  I've actually read it all the way through twice.  The first time I read it, I was a sophomore in college.  My American Lit professor saw me carrying it around and accused me of "just trying to look smarter."  He bet me that I'd never get through it.  Well, I am and have always been a stubborn old poop, so when he told me I couldn't do it he provided me with the incentive I needed to muddle through it. It is also by far the most difficult lengthy book I've read.   It, by Stephen King, Gone With the Wind , by Margaret Mitchell, and the North and South  trilogy by John Jakes are all of comparable length to Les Mis , but definitely much more lightweight on the readability scale.  I reread Les Mis  over the summer last year.  It was even better the second time around.  I can't say that I like the book better

It's very difficult to choose just one secondary character for this post.  It would be my first instinct to choose from classic literature, but I've decided that I want to stick to reading I've done recently to complete this challenge.  I narrowed it down to two finalists: Haymitch, from The Hunger Games , and Thomas, from Being Henry David .  And the winner is... ( drum roll please )... I read Being Henry David, by Cal Armistead, over the summer.  (You can read my review of it  here. )  It was a decent read, but one of the things that really added to my experience was how gifted the author is at characterization.  The characters are some of the most memorable from any novel I have ever read.  Even characters we only meet for a page or two are incredibly well-crafted and interesting.  And Thomas bookwormed his way into my head and into my heart as one of my favorite characters ever. Not to give too much away, but the premise of the novel is that the protagonist wa

You never forget your first time.  Oh, the magic, and the excitement, and the WONDER of it all.  I will never get over the Harry Potter  series.  I have students who have told me in the past few weeks (as they have been selecting their first independent reading books) that they made it through two or three, but they never finished the series, and I. Am. Horrified.  How anyone could stop in the middle is just beyond me!  JK Rowling's story arcs in the series are just so inspiring and creative, taking all of the best bits of the hero's journey and completing them for not just one character, not just two characters, but COUNTLESS characters in varying degrees.   When the series was released, and the hubbub and the furor over the books began in earnest, I was in college. I told myself that clearly this was a gimmick, and I would never read those silly books.  A boy wizard? Why does anyone even care?  However, fate and my Mythology professor had other plans.  As a junior in

Every year around this time, I start to get the "book challenge" itch.  I've done a 30-day book challenge on Facebook for the past two years, with generally positive response.  I've also had this blog for two years, with generally positive response.  However, it gets sadly neglected.  I wish I had more time for writing.  It somehow seems as though the fall of the year is a renewal for me, a time that I want to write and reflect. As I have done the book challenge in the past, I find myself forced to think about myself as a reader, a writer, and a learner, and those are all valuable elements for every teacher to have.  I think that completing these challenges makes me better at being a good role model for my kids.  And, as the responses by adults have generally been positive as well, I thought I would try to incorporate the challenge into being a better blogger. For those of you who have spent any time in the archives, you may find this to be a rather schizophrenic