Neglecting the blog, again

I've been writing elsewhere, though.

Here's my last column for Literary Mama.

And here's today's installment at the Mama, PhD blog at Inside Higher Ed.

Nick's last day of school is today--and I thought I'd post this picture here, since the tattoos are, yes, Dreamdark tattoos. Very cool. The whole concept was his idea; I was just his stylist. (The hair is a spray-on color that washes right out, unlike Mariah's pink hair...)

Small Rant

I try to support my kids' schools, I really do. I have volunteered at fundraisers, donated money, donated time, and--especially--overseen homework projects even when I have some questions about them. I never once asked why Nick should make a biography "cube" with six facts about his subject on the six sides (silly gimmick?); I sat with him while he researched women mathematicians and scientists well into the night (good idea; not enough direction); and I coached him through the "Christmas shopping" project so he found things on sale and calculated the reduced prices, figured the sales tax, and kept within his budget (great project; he just procrastinated on it). But lately I've been pushed close to my breaking point.

The culprit was the project on identifying clauses. OK, fine, he's learning to identify different kinds of clauses. I'm all in favor of that. But did he really have to write each one out on a separate piece of paper, rather than just marking them in the article? Maybe he did. But did he really have to separate out the adjectival and adverbial ones? OK, fine, it's important to make distinctions, and he really does seem to have figured something out here about how to modify subjects and verbs. But did he really have to make a graph of the ratios of adjectival to adverbial clauses? And independent to dependent? Ah, yes, math across the curriculum. All right, I can live with that, too. And then writing a paper on his process? Well, fine, reflection is good, even if his process was mostly "Mom, I think this one is an adjective clause, right?" (Actually, it did get better than that...) I'm not sure I would want to read a paper on this process, but I'm not the teacher. If she wants to read these, more power to her. The fact that he was doing the project mostly over the snow days, and that there seems to have been some missed communication on the due date, well, these things happen. I guess that's OK, though if you tell a kid in an e-mail that a due date has changed, and then change your mind, well, you can expect some angst, right?

But it's March, and as far as I can tell, he hasn't yet read a book in this class. I'm not sure I can forgive that. If language arts is all labeling parts of speech and making graphs, I think it may have lost its soul.

[edited to add: Nick is 11, in sixth grade. The projects in the first paragraph were in elementary school, except for the "shopping" one, which was just before Christmas.]

Ready, Set...

...things are changing around here. New semester, new courses, and --the biggest change of all-- Mariah heads off to CA for the rest of her gap year, any day now. I blog about that today at the Mama, PhD blog at Inside Higher Ed.

Go!

Pre-reading Favorites

The Guardian Book Blog, one of my favorite reads on my feed reader, poses a fabulous question: What were your favorite books before you could read? I actually mentioned two of mine in my last post: Madeline, and Nomi and the Lovely Animals. I think that my dad began reading The Hobbit to me before I could read, too--I was just a week shy of my fifth birthday. I don't remember any others, but those are still lodged somewhere deep in my memory. When all is else gone, I expect those will still remain.

Favorite Childhood Reading

I mentioned in my last post that we've been discussing favorite childhood reading on the child_lit listserv, so I thought I'd repost here the message that I sent. (I've made some tiny edits.)

Like another reader, some of my favorite books (especially in fourth grade) were biographies. My earliest reading memories, though, are of my father reading me Madeline and, my very favorite, Nomi and the Lovely Animals, a book I haven't thought of in years though I can recite large parts of it by heart (and I had no idea, until just now, that it was by Louis Slobodkin). My father also read me the entire Lord of the Rings series, though I only really remember him reading The Hobbit; later I read them all myself and virtually inhabited that world for a while. The Chronicles of Narnia, the Little House books, the Streatfeild "shoes" books, and anything by Madeline L'Engle were also favorites that I read over and over again. There was also a collected Twain and a collection of similarly-bound Alcott novels in my grandparents' house, where we spent some summers, so I read those over and over as well. And does anyone else remember Thee, Hannah? That was another one from my grandparents' shelves...

There are more, of course, but I'll stop after mentioning the Moomin books, which I also remember reading over and over at around the same age (somewhere under 12).

Some of my old books are at my parents' house and I've enjoyed introducing them to my children as my mother must have enjoyed introducing her old books to me. What a pleasure to remember all of these!

Edited to add: here's a piece from the Times Online with some writers' favorite childhood reads.

When did fairies get cute?

Many years ago my daughter dressed up for Hallowe'en as (her choice, her words) a "princess-fairy-angel-bride."* Friends teased me about "gender girl's" choice. But the part I remember best about it is the wings she insisted on having, that made the get-up a "fairy" or an "angel" rather than just a pretty girl. When did fairies get cute?

Today my students read and discussed several "stolen child" poems from the nineteenth century, including "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" (Browning), "The Fairies" (Allingham), and "The Stolen Child" (Yeats). It's not clear what, exactly, the Piper is, but he has fairy-like qualities: he dresses funny, he has magical powers, and he steals kids. In the other two it's even clearer: fairies are weird and dangerous, though not (perhaps) actually malevolent. They live in relationship to the human world, but they do not love it. And they can do things that hurt us, though their intentions are not entirely clear.

In some recent novels that I loved (Blackbringer, How to Ditch Your Fairy), it's really clear that fairies aren't particularly cute or even helpful; they do what they do, and there are consequences for us but that's not their primary concern. Tinkerbell (the original, in Peter and Wendy) is actively hostile to Wendy, if not to the other children. So are the cute fairies derived from fairy godmothers? (Though, as I recall, the one in Disney's Cinderella is dumpy, not cute at all.) Are they derived from the Disney Peter Pan? Or am I missing something here? Because, really, the cute fairy is as bad as the rainbow-colored unicorn--a perversion of the mythology. I know the YA authors may come after me for defending the unicorn* (a glorious and scary creature, really, much better than a zombie). But what about fairies?

*She hates for me to tell this story, but it's totally true.
**(Diane Peterfreund does that much better anyway)

Getting out

Can this be? I just added the first movie to my viewing list since we came back from France in July. There have been movies I wanted to see, certainly--and I have gotten out of the house every now and then--but the movies somehow just aren't happening.

Oh, I lied. Or, more likely, repressed. We did take a bunch of kids to see Star Wars: the Clone Wars for Nick's birthday, which I somehow forgot to list. (And, well, I slept through the middle of it, so maybe it doesn't count?) OK, so one movie since the third week of July. What have I been doing instead?

The reading list isn't much better. I did get a bunch of ARCs and read some of them at the end of the summer, but since school started in August it's been all re-reading, all the time. This weekend it's the Twilight series, since I have an idea for a talk--and an abstract due on Tuesday. But otherwise I'm re-reading for classes. And that's all fine--I don't teach things I don't like--but it still cuts into the time available for new books.

So, to recap: I don't get out much, and from August to May I don't take in much that's new, either. But it was fun to go out last night and laugh at the silliness of Get Smart.

Nick reviews Rapunzel's Revenge

I got an ARC of Rapunzel's Revenge along with HTDYF, and I think that's a pretty good pairing. Both are irreverent takes on fantasy; both are smart and funny; both feature kick-ass heroines. Because Nick is a graphic novel fan, I handed Rapunzel's Revenge over to him as soon as I finished it, and he sat almost motionless on the couch until he was done with it. (He did take a break for lunch and for his afternoon day camp, but I had to nudge him a bit.)

When I asked him what he liked about it, here's what he said.

Well, it helps that I like graphic novels. And I like when they take something everyone knows, and it's all boring, and they say, no, that's wrong, it really happened in this awesome way.

He also suggests a sequel in which Rapunzel and Jack team up again and she dispatches the giant for him. What do you think, Hales? Are you up for it?

Details: Rapunzel's Revenge is by Shannon Hale (author of The Goose Girl, Book of a Thousand Days, Princess Academy, Austenland, etc.), Dean Hale (her husband), and Nathan Hale, the illustrator, who is no relation to either other Hale. I received an ARC from the publisher; the book is due out in August.

Also: now available--The Explosionist, by Jenny Davidson. Get it while it's hot!

Fathers in Children's Lit

I know Father's Day was almost a week ago, but I think I still have a few hours to make it in under the wire for the Carnival of Children's Literature, and I still have a few things to say about fathers in children's lit. So there. I don't, however, have a nice unified post in mind, so I'm going to bullet-point a bunch of stuff and hope some of it sticks.

• I wrote about writer dads last year for Father's Day, and I still like the two books I wrote about, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle and Noel Streatfeild's The Painted Garden (Movie Shoes, for US readers). These are two very flawed dads, for sure, but they are writers and they inspire their children in interesting ways.
  
• My own father is a writer dad, and was while I was growing up--though he also had a more-than-full-time day job. He's the person who read me the entire Lord of the Rings series (starting with the Hobbit, when I was almost five); he also used to tell me fairy tales at bed time but leave off the ends for me to "dream." I never could actually direct my dreaming, but I did like coming up with endings to tell him the next night. I blame--and am equally grateful to--him for at least some of my current preoccupations. (Mom introduced me to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, and mystery novels, but that's a subject for another post. Or two.)
  
• A while ago a student of mine pointed out that two of my favorite fantasy books, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (not to mention the second book in the series, The Subtle Knife) are plotted around the search for the missing father. Even more interestingly, finding the father doesn't really solve anything, though in all three cases the child hopes it will. Are there other fantasy books with this structure? In the Harry Potter series, Harry does eventually get to meet his (dead) father, sort of, but much more of the series revolves around 1) learning who his father was and 2) learning it again. The first time he learns only the good stuff; the second time around he learns James Potter had feet of clay. It seems to me this is a common theme in coming-of-age novels--learning to differentiate from the parent--but these three series handle it differently.
  
• Neil Gaiman has an interesting dad in Coraline, one who makes "recipes" (which annoy his daughter), works from home, and seems both loving and a bit distant--or maybe just preoccupied--at the same time. Gaiman's own blog has been focusing on his daughters lately, which is fun to see.
• Finally, I'm pretty sure I linked to this before*, but if you love His Dark Materials but for some reason haven't read the piece in The Independent about Philip Pullman's father, you should.

*If I did, I can't find it now...so maybe I didn't, after all!

Placeholder

In case you've forgotten I blog here, I thought it was time for a quick post. And all I have to say is, I found Enchanted enchanting. I didn't really want to, and I'm sure there are things to say about how it both undermines the Disney magic and completely buys into it, but I still loved it. No tears, just pure pleasure at formula done right.

Nick enjoyed it just as much as Mariah, if not more.

(Oh, and by the way? Susan Sarandon should play a wicked stepmother more often. She looked like she was having so much fun!)

"Kid-Friendly"? Take One

I asked Nick to tell me why he liked Michael Chabon's Summerland recently. I'd read it when it came out, and while there were aspects of it that I liked, I remember thinking that it was not kid-friendly--that I didn't know any kids who would like it. I can't remember now if it was the nostalgia for baseball or the wordplay or what that made me think that. (Not the wordplay, though, what could I have been thinking?) Anyway, I asked him why he liked it. And then I mentioned that I was thinking about what made books "kid-friendly." And he said he didn't think Summerland was kid-friendly, even though he'd liked it, because (I think this is right) there were occasional "bad words" in it.

So we need to back up a bit. To one kid, at least, the very term "kid-friendly" is clearly an adultist term, one that has to do with what adults want kids to read rather than what kids really read. (I think he's influenced by the use of the term "family-friendly" all over the place, which usually does mean "devoid of any controversial content.") Now, I know that's not how the Cybils folks mean it--far from it, as is clear from this terrific post.

Unfortunately our conversation got side-tracked and he didn't tell me why he liked Summerland, so I don't know yet why I was wrong about it or how to define "kid-friendly" in a way that works for both him and me. More on that another time!

Happy Father's Day

I spent a surprising amount of my childhood hoping to be my dad when I grew up. Oh, I didn't want to be a boy or anything -- having two brothers pretty much dispelled any mystique of masculine superiority -- but I did want my dad's job. It looked like a pretty sweet deal to me: a little telling people what to do, a little dressing up, a little singing, and a lot of reading, writing, and being at home when other people's dads weren't. Yes, he did have to work on Sundays, but then again he was home at least one day during the week to make up for it.

Read the rest here...

Kindergarten readiness?

(I'm cross-posting this at the other blog; I couldn't decide if it was more about family life or about reading/kids, so I'll put it both places.)

Lots of posts out in the world today about yesterday's NYT article on kindergarten readiness. The take-home lesson I got from it was that if you can afford to think about "red-shirting" your child (keeping him--and it's most often him--home for a year when he's technically eligible for kindergarten), then whether you do or not, he'll probably be fine. That is, school "success" is primarily a socio-economic, not an age, issue. If you need the free day-care, and your kid isn't really ready for school, you'll send him/her anyway and s/he may not "succeed" as well as one might hope. If, on the other hand, you don't need the free day-care, you can probably provide what your kid needs.

Yes, this is reductive. But note that all the "red-shirt" success stories are from people who didn't need free day-care.

Anecdotes:

I was a young starter: with a February birthday I should have started kindergarten at five, but since I knew how to read, I started at four. (I was briefly "held back" when we moved, but then started first grade--in another school--at five.) At my recent college reunion I kept reminding people I was a year further away from fifty than they were. Nice. (Hmm, maybe those social skills still need work?)

I probably should have taken a gap year between high school and college. My parents wanted me to, but I was academically ambitious and up for the challenge. Emotionally/psychologically, maybe not so much, but I got by ok and I don't feel scarred by the experience. As a nerdy kid, I was used to being a bit on the outskirts of things socially anyway--I'm not sure age had a whole lot to do with it. I did take three years between college and graduate school, and that was an absolute necessity, in my case. I think grad school would have chewed me up and spat me out at 21, but at 24 I had supported myself for three years, moved across the country, and figured out that I was both employable and at least marginally date-worthy. I no longer thought my only successes would be academic, and that made grad school's pressures much easier to bear.

Mariah, with her December birthday, is one of the older kids in her grade. One of her best friends, three months older, just graduated from high school; Mariah's got another year. She's academically at the top of her class and seems to be holding her own socially/emotionally. She could have skipped at one point, but we opted for a multi-age grouping (in a Montessori middle school) instead. She doesn't seem to have any regrets, and is considering taking a gap year between HS and college even though this would have her turning 20 as a first-year college student. (I wish all my students would take a gap year...)

Nick, with his early August birthday, is one of the youngest kids in his grade. He's not markedly smaller than other boys--this is the year some are shooting up and some aren't, and he's still right in the middle--nor is he particularly delayed socially as far as I can tell. (He does sometimes cry more easily than other kids, but is that his age or just his temperament? Hard to say...though it's true that his mother was a big cry-baby in elementary school.) Academically, he's doing more than fine. According to "conventional wisdom"--which is that boys mature more slowly, so should redshirt if anyone should--he should have been held back and Mariah sent ahead, but we actually did benefit from the free day-care (public preschool at age four) and never really thought seriously about holding him back. Will he struggle in college? If he's like his sister, maybe we'll suggest a gap year at that point. Right now, though, he's fine.

One more anecdote: when my younger brother was tested for kindergarten, he was asked to draw a man, but drew something else--maybe a table?--instead. He was a bit young (November birthday) but pretty bright. The teacher or principal or someone called my mother and said he wasn't ready, he couldn't draw a man. My mother, though, talked to my brother who said he just didn't feel like drawing a man--and convinced the school administration to take him anyway. Years later he admitted that he really couldn't draw a man--but he did know how to game the system!

So there are my anecdotes. I find myself wishing more and more for flexibility in schooling, for some kind of readiness-testing that looked at the whole child rather than just the age or just a test or two. Obviously that's what home-schooling gives people, and that's absolutely what's most appealing about it. But for those who can't or won't take that option, for whatever reason--what to do?

Good night, mush

According to the Writer's Almanac, today is Margaret Wise Brown's birthday. Brown began her career as a children's book editor, and she seems to be best known both for her insistence on making books that kids actually could--and would--use: investing in high quality paper and bindings, using bright colors, etc.

Everyone remembers Goodnight Moon--or they should--but my favorite of her books may actually be Wait Till the Moon is Full, illustrated by Garth Williams. "Once upon a time in the dark of the moon there was a little raccoon," it begins, and it goes on to tell the story of a little raccoon who wants to go out at night but must wait...well, you can figure out why. It's a lovely quiet story, not quite as sleepy as Goodnight, Moon, but fun to read (and sing!) to little sleepy ones as well.

Sad Books

SuperBowl Sunday. We're sitting on the couch, nine-year-old Nick between Mark and me. I'm knitting, Nick is reading; only Mark is giving his full attention to the game. At some point, I look over Nick's shoulder and see the arresting illustration from Bridge to Terabithia: a silhouette of Jess's father holding his shattered son, who has just learned of his best friend's death. I put my arm around Nick.

"It's sad there, isn't it?"

read the rest over at LiteraryMama.com

because that's what I do

We are watching the end of Ella Enchanted, Mariah and I. Nick has given up when it looks as if Ella might actually have to kill the prince. (When does an awareness of narrative conventons kick in? We know she won't have to kill the prince...) It is the final scene.

Mariah: Oh, Edgar (villain) isn't dead. He's just gone crazy.

Me: (disgusted) Right, because it's a G movie. No one can die. Except, of course, the mom. Not the evil uncle.

Mariah: Go write an article, Mommy.

Cheaper by the Dozen

...was one of my favorite books as a kid. I read it over and over again, especially during summer vacations at my grandparents' house. I think that book, along with its sequel Belles on their Toes, a collected Louisa May Alcott, and a collected Mark Twain, made up the "appropriate for kids" library in the old farmhouse we used to move into for the month of August. So I was saddened to learn today that Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, co-author of the books and daughter of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, had died last week.

Don't watch the movie(s). Read the book.

(first seen over at Fuse 8)