One Little Word -- Inspired by Our Classroom Routine

We change desks every two weeks in Room 226. Students' morning work on moving day is to move all their belongings out of their desk (or box) to a stack on their chair (or stool or nearby their spot at a standing table). Then we clean and disinfect (hooray for Clorox and Lysol wipes!) our old abode so the new tenant will have a fresh start. (Embedded life skill: clean the apartment so you get your deposit back!) With all of the students seated in the meeting area, I pull sticks to "assign" seats. First stick pulled chooses a spot at the first table, next stick sits at the stool table, then the clock table, the red chairs table, and the blue chairs table, and back around again until all the sticks are pulled and everyone has a new spot. (Pairs of students volunteer for the two standing tables.) So, every two weeks, students get a new table group and a new view in the classroom. I am not in charge of creating a seating chart and therefore, I am not in charge of behavior--they are. In reality, the spot they are assigned is mostly just a predictable place to put their belongings. Seating is flexible during most every work time--they are also in charge of their learning zone.

We've added a new spin to this bi-weekly routine. I wrote about it a few weeks ago, and it was #12 in last year's 31 Teaching Truths. We choose a new word to BE for the next two weeks. The person who chooses the word gets to determine the style of the lettering and decorate the poster. So far this year, we've been positive, fierce, focused, persevering, love (not be loving, but actually be love), courageous, flexible, and confident.

In 2019, instead of choosing One Little Word for the year, I am going to spend more time with each of the words we choose for our gallery of what we will BE.

A few weeks ago in a conversation about our words (not during the actual choosing ceremony), I tossed out the word WIERD in honor of our ongoing celebration of diversity, but was gently redirected by one of my students. He suggested that UNIQUE would be a more positive expression, one without the negative connotations. (So...maybe our quick little practice of lining up shades of meaning in synonyms is starting to stick?) Let the record stand, though, the words that are chosen are theirs, not mine. And yes, kids are starting to hoard words, hoping to be the next one chosen.

Lo and behold, the word that was chosen for this round was, indeed, UNIQUE. Perfect word, actually. It was the theme of the talk they heard on Monday from author Jason Tharp! So for the next two weeks, we'll celebrate all that makes us one-of-a-kind.

Winter Break #bookaday and a Plan for my 2019 (Guilt-Free) Reading

I am so glad that Donalyn Miller invented Winter Break #bookaday. I always participate in Summer #bookaday and loved thinking about what I might read for Winter Break #bookaday.  I counted the days off during break and set a goal to read 15 books. I ended up reading 12 and feel good about that. I read a pretty good variety--picture books, middle grade, professional, etc. Below are screenshots of my Goodreads page of the books I completed over break. I would never had read this many and felt a bit caught up had it not been for Donalyn's #bookaday.  And I love so many of the new 2018 middle grade books that I read!

I didn't get to all 15 titles because a few days ago--a few days before the last day of break, I took a look at my stack of middle grade novels I had hoped to finish as part of Winter Break #bookaday and I decided I was finished. I realized that no matter how many books I read before awards are announced in January, there are books I will miss. I decided that the reading was starting to feel like work and the pile felt a bit overwhelming. And I realized that even though I had read a ton, I had not read the one adult fiction book I have been hoping to read for weeks.

Around the same time, Pernille Ripp wrote this piece, On Book Quantity and the Damage it Can (Sometimes) Do, on her blog. I had just reflected on my own reading goals (and not meeting them) here on the blog last week. So I have some new reading thoughts going into 2019:

Mary Lee and I started this blog 13 years ago as a way to read and predict the Newbery winner before it was announced. It was fun and I still love that part of my reading. And I love knowing so many books to recommend to my students and to talk to them about. But I have learned that no matter how many books I read, there are books I miss.  I can't read everything and that is a hard reality as someone who loves good books.  Moving to 5th grade a couple years ago, I wanted to catch up on the 5th grade books and to be current so I knew that I'd need to commit a few years to that.  So I've been reading frantically to keep up with books that might be great for my 5th graders.

But, I've realized that sometimes my goals get in the way of my bigger life as a reader. I've been following Katherine Sokolowski as she has added romance reading back into her reading life, letting go of the guilt and knowing that she still reads plenty to recommend books to her students.  I love reading middle grade books--they are not work to me--I think they are some of the best books out there in the world. But when I limit myself to reading only the books that I might share with my students, my own reading life feels more like a job than an authentic life as a reader.

I have been wanting to read Barbara Kingsolver's new book Unsheltered since I purchased it the day it was published. I started (but have not gotten very far) Michelle Obama's book Becoming on Audible. I've had YA books The Belles and Children of Bone and Blood on my stack for months. And I keep hearing about There There, another adult book. I want to read. But I have made almost no time for books like this during the last 2 years. I have so many friends and relatives who I used to talk about books with. People who continue to recommend adult fiction to me --I miss talking to those people about books we read.

So I am thinking about just being a reader this year. A reader with a goal of reading 200ish books. A reader who loves to participate in Winter Break, Spring Break and Summer #bookaday. A reader who loves to share books with my students and to have authentic conversations about books we've read. A reader who loves to predict the award winners before they are announced. A reader who recognizes times when reading begins to feel like a chore because of constraints I place on myself. A reader who doesn't feel guilty about the books that I haven't read.  This year my goal is to just be a reader.  To be a reader who reads books and other things that sound good. To read books that stretch me, that friends recommend, and to let go of the guilt I carry about not reading enough, not reading the best books, not knowing the award winners before they are announced. 

I am going to keep in mind this important quote Carol Jago recently shared in her post Why Read on NCTE's blog:

"Love for books drew us to this profession, yet in many cases as soon as we were handed the keys to a classroom, our personal reading was put on hold. With student essays piling up, we feel guilty about picking up a novel. The lure of Twitter doesn’t help, either. But when teachers stop reading, we can easily forget why we went into the classroom in the first place.

Our adult reading lives need nurturing every bit as much as those of our students. To insure that we continue to grow as readers, we need to find ways to be nourished in the company of other adult readers, doing what we love to do best. Don’t think of reading as a guilty pleasure, but rather as professional development."

To kick off the year, in January, I plan to not read any middle grade novels. I am giving myself permission to not rush to read every potential Newbery winner and I am going to give myself permission to nurture my adult reading life again --without considering it a "guilty pleasure".  I'll keep you posted!

Poetry Friday -- The Moon

Photo via Unsplash

Trans-
by Rita Dove


The moon is in doubt
over whether to be
a man or a woman.

There’ve been rumors,
all manner of allegations,
bold claims and public lies:

He’s belligerent. She’s in a funk.

(read the rest at Poets.org)

The moon. Today, January 3, 2019, the Chinese landed a rover on the far side of the moon. (How did I miss that they landed a rover on the near side of the moon in 2013?!?) 

Coincidentally, I just finished listening to Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. It was all kinds of eye-opening -- the lingering effects of Jim Crow, discrimination against women, the evolution of computing from human to machine, and that the cost of space exploration was seen as extravagant when huge segments of the population were economically depressed (suppressed). Similarly, in this New York Times article about the Chinese landing, a citizen was quoted, “The economy is bad,” she said. “Is it really a good thing for the country to spend recklessly?” Echoes of the past.

And my birthday/Christmas present got hung tonight. My sweetheart "lassoed the moon" for me. Five different phases of the moon, to be exact: handmade ceramic representations of waxing crescent, first quarter, full, last quarter, and waning crescent. Just like photos of the real moon taken with a mortal camera, this photo doesn't do the installation justice.

Sylvia at Poetry for Children has our first Poetry Friday Roundup of the year with a sneak peek of poetry books that will be published in 2019!

My Year of Reading (and Other Things)

This year, I did not meet my reading goals.  I read 201 books and the goal I set was to read 250.  I looked back at my Goodreads Challenges in the past and I tend to set a goal of 200 and I tend to read about 200 books a year.  I guess I was feeling energetic and optimistic last year when I set a goal of 250.  

I am actually surprised I read 200 books. It was a very busy year of life. So many good things and not my usual amount of reading--even when I had time, I didn't seem to have the brainspace to read as much or as often as I usually do.  

In May, we moved from our house of 20+ years to a condo.

A week later, our youngest daughter graduated from high school.

In August, our oldest daughter got married.

And I was program chair of the 2018 NCTE Annual Convention in November.

It was a fabulously full year with so many good things. But it didn't leave room for much reading or blogging. I loved the year but have been glad to have some quiet time this week to get back to regular reading and to catch my breath and to try to blog again.

When I look back on my year of reading, even though I didn't get to all the books I had hoped to,  I read soooo many incredible books. I read so many books that pushed my thinking and that changed me in some way. Looking back, there are several books that have stayed with me--books that I am so glad I found time to read in 2018. These are, in my opinion, books not to be missed (so if you missed them, add them to your stack!).

It is easy to beat ourselves up over not meeting goals. It is easy to forget--when I look at my 2018 Goodreads Challenge - that I read 200+ incredible books and had a full year outside of my reading life. I think goals are fabulous IF we use them in a way that moves us forward instead of in a way that makes us feel like we are not enough or we should do better. Goals should help us grow and reflect and celebrate. I've been thinking a lot about this as I think about goal setting with students-I worry that sometimes with student goals, we give kids the message that no matter what they accomplish, they need to set a next goal, to do more. And that is not the message I want my students to get. I want them to celebrate all that they accomplish, whether they meet a goal or not.  I plan to share all of this with my students--I want them to know that I did not meet my reading goal and that it is okay -- that I still have so much to celebrate.

As with any goals or numbers, this year has taught me to be careful with the expectations I have of myself and how I measure them. Because 2018 was a year of great reading, great books and lots of other great stuff, no matter the number or the goals I didn't meet.  

Happy 13th Blog Birthday to Us!

We can't believe that A Year of Reading is 13 years old today! Happy Birthday to Us! We love blogging and we love the community of people we've met because of the blog. When we started the blog, we thought it would be a one-year thing. Who knew?  Looking forward to another great year of talking about our reading and teaching lives!

Poetry Friday -- Whose Beauty is Past Change

Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things— 

 For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

 Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 

  And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

 Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

   With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                    Praise Him.

Seemed like a good day for an old favorite. Read it aloud and savor Hopkins' rich words. 

Next time we gather, it will be 2019, so early best wishes for a new year full of dappled things and the embrace of change. Next time we gather, I'll have the 2018 Poetry Friday Roundups archived at Kidlitosphere Central and the first half of 2019 ready to go. Until then, Donna has today's roundup at Mainely Write.

Poetry Friday -- Poetry Gifts

Photo via Unsplash

I've received three (edited to add one more) thoughtful (thought-full) poetry gifts in the past week.

1. I wrote this haiku for #haikuforhope, and Amy Ludwig VanDerwater wrote a response haiku that helped me get my head on straight for the day. Thank you, Amy!

avocado toast

(practice mindfulness)

four days until winter break

(sipping my hot tea)

new student today

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2018

Honey Nut Cheerios

 (a little scared) 

four days until winter break 

(drinking orange juice) 

will my new teacher be kind?

©Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, 2018

2. Steve Peterson tweeted me this poem, proving for good that proximity of geography is not required for a friend to know the nooks and crannies of your heart. Thank you, Steve!

3. A childhood friend I haven't seen for decades (along with geography, add time to the equation of friendship) tagged me with this article on Facebook: Why Reading Poetry Is Good For Your Brain. Some of the studies are a bit dubious, but none of us are going to argue with the conclusions, right?

4. How could I not celebrate YOU?!? This community of poet-teacher-writer-allaroundgreathumans feeds my soul. Special wink and nod to the #haikuforhope crew. It's been a wonder-full month. As always, I won't want to stop. Daily writing in a form brief enough to keep me writing daily...yeah, I'll probably keep going.

Happy Friday! (That one's especially for the active duty teachers in our crew who might be reading this on Saturday or next week! We've got this! One more day of joy and craziness with our classrooms full of beloveds!) 

Happy Poetry Friday! Buffy Silverman has the Full Moon/Solstice edition this week.

Poetry Friday -- A Visit From Poets!

My class was lucky enough today to visit with Irene Latham and Charles Waters via Zoom! What a generous gift of time for Irene and Charles to answer the students' questions.

Here are two found #haikuforhope from their talk:

nothing will change if

we shut our mouths and refuse

to talk about race

(Irene's words)

writing

is telling

the truth

(Charles' words)

Last Friday, I reviewed Can I Touch Your Hair in an initial post about the conversations we've had around race in my classroom so far this year.

This week, I added more thinking about our conversations.

Laura Shovan has the Poetry Friday roundup this week.

Conversations About Race and Gender

(This post is the back history I promised in my Poetry Friday post about Irene Latham's and Charles Waters' book, Can I Touch Your Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship.)

My Journey
Last summer, I received a review copy of Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham, so I checked out all of her books from the library. Her writing taught me so much about how to have honest conversations with children about tough topics.

Who knew how calm and straightforward I would manage to be when I overheard a student defending transgender people. I joined the conversation and affirmed that there was nothing "weird" about transgender people. When asked, "What is transgender anyway?" I was ready, thanks to Higginbotham, to talk about the genders we are assigned at birth -- the genders that others can see -- and the true gender we feel within us, and how transgender people experience themselves as a gender they weren't assigned at birth. Transgender people may or may not choose to change their appearance to match the gender they experience. The student who asked for more information said, "Oh. That's all it is? That's not weird." Success.


I listened to So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.

Oluo taught me more about my whiteness and my place in our white supremacist society than anything I've previously read. 

She showed me how wrong I was a couple of years ago when I was so outraged that a parent thought I was racist. If that parent thought I was racist, I was. I cannot deny her lived experience with my behavior. If I could go back, I would approach that parent with honesty and humility to learn what I had done so I could change my behavior.  

The Journey in My Classroom

Our first read aloud, The Cardboard Kingdom, gave us characters who were gender fluid in their imaginary play, bullies with back stories, a diverse mix of races and cultures and families. I projected this graphic novel via Kindle on the Smartboard. Our conversations about each of the short stories and about the characters were rich.

Our next read aloud was 24 Hours in Nowhere by Dusti Bowling. This book opens with a racist bully pushing Gus' face into a cholla cactus. Rossi, a Tohono O’odham Nation girl, rescues him by giving her beloved dirt bike to the bully. From the Amazon blurb, "Conversations among the young teens reveal Gus’s burgeoning awareness of his white privilege as he listens to the experiences of his Latinx and Native American friends." We had amazing conversations about the stereotypes that were revealed and deconstructed over the course of this story. The only thing about this story that was perhaps lost on my urban/suburban students was the level of poverty of the characters. I don't think my students have ever seen, let alone been in, a trailer home!

When October 8 rolled around, we were in the perfect place in our study of the indigenous cultures of Latin America (and in our conversations with 24 Hours in Nowhere) to talk about why that day is simultaneously Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day. We could talk about perspective and about who gets to tell the dominant story of history. I hope my students began to learn that they need to seek out alternative perspectives on historical events and to always consider which voices are dominating the popular narrative and which voices are being left out or silenced. 

If you remember from my previous post about conversations around race, I have a unique place in my classroom. Along with myself, four of my twenty-six students are white. The rest of the class is Middle Eastern, Latinx, African, African American, or Chinese. When I speak to my class about race, I must always be aware that I'm speaking from behind white skin to mostly people of color. My skin represents the dominance and power in our society. There was an incident in class that might shed light on this dynamic, if I'm reading it correctly. I was pushing a heavy table and someone commented that I was Hulk. A child said I couldn't be Hulk because I wasn't green. Another child said I was the White Hulk, and this was met with, "Oooohhh!" That child had clearly stepped out of bounds by identifying me as white. I was puzzled. I said, "What's the big deal? I AM white!" I reminded them that one particular student was never afraid to identify himself as black and talk about his beautiful dark skin. Another talked about his African father. Why was it a big deal to talk about my whiteness? They got more and more uncomfortable, with several asking, "Can we please talk about something else?" This was an eye-opener. But instead of keeping me quiet on race, I was more determined than ever to have these conversations.

I read and re-read Not My Idea in preparation for reading it (and Can I Touch Your Hair) aloud to my students. Even though we had had what I thought were conversations about race, that surprising response to the direct naming of my whiteness made me nervous to read this book aloud. I focused on the ending, where Higginbotham reminds whites that we have a choice about the kind of white person we will be. Whites can sign on to historic whiteness that uses race to keep people of color down or whites can move forward with justice in our hearts and be the kind of white that works for equality and truth.

Hopefully, Not My Idea will help my white students start to understand and grapple with white privilege, while helping my students of color to realize that there are all different kinds of white people. And although the current narrative in our society presents white supremacy as the norm, we can ALL tell a new story about race, a story that begins in our classrooms with honest conversations, a willingness to make mistakes but then own them, and the desire to move forward to a truly inclusive society. 

Poetry Friday -- Talking About Race With My Students

We finished reading aloud Can I Touch Your Hair? yesterday. It was not the first book I've read aloud this year that gave us the opportunity to talk about race. Our conversations started with The Cardboard Kingdom, and continued with 24 Hours in Nowhere and Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness (a book which made NPR's list of Best Books of 2018!). I'll write about the whole journey in a separate post. Just remember, we had had growing and ongoing conversations about race before we got to this book. Also, a note about the demographics of my classroom. Along with myself, four of my twenty-six students are white. The rest of the class is Middle Eastern, Latinx, African, African American, or Chinese. This is just to say that your conversations would certainly be very different than those in our classroom. When I write that other post about our journey in talking about race, I'll dig into the dynamics of teacher/student race.

Can I Touch Your Hair: Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship. The power of this book lies within each word of the title.

Poems. There will be small packages of text that will allow the reader to stop, ponder, and discuss.

Race. Get ready, because you are going to explore some hard topics here.

Mistakes. If you're going to talk about race, you're bound to make mistakes. But making honest mistakes is a far better path than averting our eyes and not talking about it at all. (If you haven't read So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, I highly recommend it.) When you know better, you can do better the next time.

Friendship. The book's characters, Irene and Charles, begin by only seeing each other skin deep. As they get to know each other, they find they have so many more important things in common that race (and even gender) becomes insignificant. What a powerful message for children (adults, too!!) to hear over and over again. It's the danger of a single story. If we're going to move forward as a human race, we've got to stop seeing each other as just this or that. We have to get to know each other as complicated, diverse, interesting individuals!

As I said, the pairs of poems are the perfect amount of text to read, then pause for conversation. As we read along, we talked about the topics that came up -- shoes, hair, church. But when one of the students prefaced his comment with, "In movies they make the black people the athletes," I had the perfect way to move the conversation to a safer place by talking about the stereotypes that are perpetuated by the media. It's not that black people ARE the athletes, it's that "they make" the black people the athletes. Everyone had LOTS to say about stereotypes around race, gender, and age! We ended that rich conversation by sharing times when we "broke" a stereotype.

I highly recommend reading this book with children. I highly recommend making this book one part of an ongoing conversation about race.



Thank you to all who signed up to be Poetry Friday roundup hosts in January-June 2019. We filled the schedule in under one week!

Liz has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Elizabeth Steinglass.