Tag Archives: teachers

Returning Librarians to my School District

A few years ago my children’s school district faced a catastrophic shortfall in their budget. The cuts that followed were many and painful, among them the loss of every single certified teacher librarian in the largest school district in Oregon. Fortunately our funding crisis is over and we’re in the happy position of deciding how to expand services. After some very eloquent 5th graders testified to the frustration of going to the school library only to find the door locked, I added some observations as a former student, a parent, a 20 year volunteer, and a visiting author.

What I had to say may be applicable to your home school district so if you are fighting this battle in some other place, please feel free to borrow my words. If you are a parent or student in the Beaverton School District, you have one more chance to make your voice heard at a budget meeting at 6:30pm on the 20th of this month at school district headquarters.

Here are my thoughts on why my own school district needs a certified teacher-librarian in every school.

1.Teacher support

As a visiting author I am in hundreds of schools all over the country. I work with grade school, middle, and high school teachers to encourage reading and writing and generate excitement for literature. Everywhere I go I meet English and reading teachers who are genuinely excited to do the higher level reading work that new standards ask of them. They want to delve deeper into texts of all genres. They are excited to bring students the best and most current books. But not every book stands up to higher level reading. The Wimpy Kid franchise, for example, is not up to the task. In order to find the books that will bear greater scrutiny and model the best and most elegant use of language, you’d have to read several hundred books each year. It’s wildly impractical to ask every single English and reading teacher to do this every year.

A certified teacher librarian is the person well qualified to winnow the enormous variety of current books to the 30 or 40 strongest candidates so that each teacher can choose from among the best of the best. They are also the ones with the resources to help teachers find books available in translation, audio, and ebook to accommodate the needs of a diverse population.

2. Loss to private schools

There are dozens of private schools within Beaverton’s boundaries. All of them have full time teacher-librarians, and that is a huge draw. It was not always so. When my parents were choosing between public and parochial schools for me they looked at the options and saw, on the one hand, a parochial school that would see to my spiritual development and had significantly smaller class sizes, and on the other hand, a public school with a well funded library and a full time librarian. They chose public schools. The parochial schools in the area are expanding, and we stand to lose high achieving students and highly involved parents if we don’t provide school libraries. Having been in several Catholic schools over the last five years, I’ve seen relatively small libraries with limited technology. But they have a full time teacher librarian and children have full access to that smaller collection. The Beaverton school district libraries far exceed most private schools in the size and quality of the collection but that vital asset is currently behind a locked door.

3. Supporting growing diversity.

Our school district has recently become a majority non-white district. This coincides with a moment when publishers are highly motivated to publish titles with multicultural characters. Looks like a win-win situation. But if nobody is there to buy the books with non-white characters, publishers will stop making them. There is a huge need for kid’s books with non-white characters. At the moment, 90% of titles have a white protagonist. That’s a ridiculous figure and the only reason it’s true is that those books consistently sell. In order for an authentic body of literature to take root for the young readers we have today is for well funded school libraries to buy the books that reflect their populations, and make sure that kids find the books that mirror their own experience and speak to their own values. We could make a huge difference in providing a legacy of inclusive literature for children.

4. Supporting family literacy

One of the things I’ve seen in talking to immigrant students, not just in Oregon but all over, is that for many of them the school library is their only library. Whether the issue is transportation or fear of library fines or reluctance to register an address publicly, lots of kids only have access to free books through a school library. One of the strongest factors in predicting whether a child will read on grade level is access to books in the home. Our families no matter how poor or disadvantaged want to support their children’s reading. By keeping the school library behind a locked door, we deny them the number one tool in learning to read: books!

A fully funded and staffed school library supports literacy better and more efficiently by enabling the student and parent to do their share of the work. With English language learning families we have a golden opportunity in the years when parents are motivated to read aloud to their children. A teacher-librarian is in the position to put into the hands of these families the books and audio books that will, not only support the child, but lift the literacy of the parent. Then we have both higher performing students and more empowered and engaged parents–a win for the entire community.

Please consider testifying in support of fully funded and staffed libraries at the Beaverton School District Administration Center at 6:30 on Monday April 20th. 16550 SW Merlo Road, Beaverton, OR 97003.

If you are not in the Beaverton School District I hope you will consider advocating for school librarians in your home district.

Supporting the Avid Young Writer in your Life

Although I’m still relatively new to being a published author, I’ve already done more than a hundred school visits. They are often long days, but I find them energizing and they really motivate me to finish the next book. Often a teacher catches my eye during a visit and wants to have a word with me about a student. Almost every time it’s an avid writer who produces volumes of stories or poems—finished, unfinished, skillfully written or simple, wildly creative or somewhat familiar. And what they want to know is what to do with all that writing. Teachers are great at teaching children who can’t write or won’t write or need lots of support to write. I am routinely impressed by the dedication of teachers I meet. So they can see that the avid writer needs guidance, too, but they are often at a loss about where to begin. Parents of these kids are often equally in the dark—proud, but unsure of how to best support a budding author. I have four kids myself, some of whom are avid writers so it’s a topic I’ve given a lot of thought. Here are three things you can do to nurture the young writer in your life.

Help them save and safely store their work.

I’m bad at this myself. I love my stories but I don’t take very good care of them. One of the most helpful things a teacher or parent can do is set up a file to keep stories both those finished and those abandoned. Most working writers begin as many as a dozen stories for every story they finish. So it isn’t important for your avid writer to finish every project they begin. Learning when to set aside a story that isn’t working is an important skill, too. But many times a writer will return to an old idea with a fresh insight and make a new story from one that wasn’t working before. Sometimes a character that didn’t work on a first try is exactly what you need in a different story. So having those files accessible is a gold mine. If your students write on a computer, getting them in the habit of a daily back up to a disc or thumb drive helps. Because thumb drives are easily lost, it’s also good to email a file and store it at the email account.

Help them find with a time and place for writing.

When writers get together, one of the most common topics of conversation is the struggle of finding a time and place to write. Some young writers are great at tuning out their surroundings and writing wherever they are—school bus, dinner table, math class. This of course has problems of it’s own. But students who need a little privacy to write may need help finding a quiet corner of the classroom or an undisturbed nook in the house, and a few free afternoons a week.

I know a 4th grader who came to school one day on fire with a great idea for a screenplay. She begged her teacher for time to write it and he agreed, letting her use the class computer through all the lessons, recess and even lunch that day. In five hours this girl wrote the first three and a half acts of a screenplay. In the last half an hour of the day the teacher asked her if she could show at least a part of her work to the class so they could see what a screenplay looks like. She chose a scene she wanted feedback on and got the class to read the roles out loud. As a result a half dozen other kids got the screenwriting bug for a few weeks. A gift of time like that is a rare and precious gift for a young writer and went a long way to helping this child believe she could be a professional writer some day.

Instructional time is precious and extra curricular activities are valuable, too, but for the avid writing child nothing is so enriching as simply the time and place to create something new.

Help them find a writing community.

I don’t know a single author who works alone. Most of us have critique groups or at least a writing partner. They are people who help us work out all the many details of writing well. It means the world to me that if I’m stuck I can call on my neighbors Heather Vogel-Frederick, author of Absolutely Truly, or Susan Blackaby, author of Brownie Groundhog and the February Fox, and go out for coffee and just talk through a writing problem.

For young people community can be hard to find. A teacher who is aware of two or more avid writers might encourage them to join the newspaper staff or school literary magazine. Younger students might find kindred spirits in a Newbery Club or on a Battle of the Books team.

The connection need not be formal and organized. I met two eighth grade cousins on a school visit who have an ice cream date every Sunday after church to work on the YA novel they are writing together. Some kids enjoy fan fiction websites because they create a sense of community and offer a place to share work.

Some communities are wonderful about offering writing opportunities for children and teens. Here are two of the best children’s writing communities here in Portland, Oregon and I hope you will add your local resources in the comments.

League of Exceptional Writers.

Every Second Saturday from 2 to 3 at the Powells Bookstore on Cedar Hills Blvd. in Beaverton from October to May.

Come meet your fellow writers, learn the craft of writing from amazingly talented and friendly authors, bring your own work to share and get feedback. Anyone ages 8-18 is welcome.

We have two sessions left this school year. April 11th Anne Osterlund will talk about developing strong characters. On May 9th Fiona Kenshole will talk about the role of literary agents in the book world.

Young Willamette Writers

First Tuesdays of the month from 7 to 8, the young Willamette Writers meet in their own space during the meeting of the adult Willamette Writers. They practice the craft of writing in the company of great writers from all over the region. The meeting is held in the Old Church on SW 11th and Clay in Portland.

If you’ve got a great kids writing group in your town, please share in the comments!

To #%& or not to &^%$#: Swearing in Middle Grade Fiction

The expectations for the use profanity in children’s fiction are pretty clear. It’s commonplace in YA novels and completely absent in picture books and easy readers. But middle grade fiction takes the middle ground. Is swearing okay in a middle grade book? Well, it’s complicated. The issue is balancing authenticity with respect for your audience. Everybody encounters profanity; it is a language intensifier and can be useful in conveying the weight and reality of your characters situation. And yet it is the nature of profanity to offend, so any use will have consequences in how the book as a whole is received. As a practical matter MG books with profanity tend to be shelved with YA no matter how young the character is. This is not necessarily a problem, To Kill a Mockingbird and it’s 9 year old protagonist Scout have been doing just fine in the YA section of the library for the last five decades. Even so any use of profanity should be carefully considered. When I’m confronted with an opportunity to use a swear word in my novels, here are five choices I consider.

Omit

Every time I use profanity I rewrite the scene with out it, let it sit for a day or two and read the result out loud. I have been surprised by how often the scene was stronger without the swear word. Sometimes profanity is just a habit of the author and not integral to the character’s worldview or the movement of the plot.

Reduce

My editor once told me that swearing is loud on the page in a way that it is not in real life. I think of it as the equivalent of yelling or texting in all caps. As the mom of many I can tell you yelling is most effective when used sparingly—usually when lives are at stake. I think the last time I actually yelled at home was when someone’s sleeve caught on fire while roasting a marshmallow. Because swearing functions as an intensifier, it’s power is diluted by overuse. If I am working with a character who would naturally swear a lot, I’ll run a word search and see if I can limit the swearing to places where it will have the most impact.

Evade

Sometimes you can duck the issue when the swearing is done by a non-viewpoint character. When I was working on Second Fiddle I knew that the moment that the girls discovered that they were all alone in Paris with no money, no passports and no return train tickets, any normal eighth grader would swear. But my main character wasn’t really the swearing type. Instead, I had her report that her friend said every swear she knew in English and then moved on to exhaust her supply of swear words in French and German. This preserved the authenticity of the scene without getting into a specific swear word.

Substitute

Here is one of the more entertaining devices of MG fiction. Most kids get in trouble for swearing, and yet they have the same need for the occasional language intensifier as everyone else. So kids are great at making up substitutes. It’s the “drat, darn, and golly” solution, and it has great comic potential. The advantage to a curse word substitution is that it can also serve to convey information about the character and setting and lighten the mood of an otherwise tense situation. We had a fascinating conversation at a bookstore event recently with some women who wrote adult mysteries. There is an expectation in adult cozy mysteries that swearing is omitted so this author had her spice shop owner detective say things like, “Well that just frosts my chili peppers!” I had no idea such rules extended to the world of adult books.

Commit

There are circumstances in which the first four choices are wrong for the voice of the character or the gravity of the situation. And in those cases swearing maybe appropriate. Freedom of Speech means nothing if we never use it, and if you have used profane speech appropriately in your book you will find both people who passionately attack any use of profanity and those who just as passionately defend your right to tell the story as you must, free of censure. I opted to use swearing to a very limited extent in Heart of a Shepherd, having considered and discarded the above considerations, and it has done no harm whatsoever to the book. It was warmly received, sold well, and was carried by Scholastic Book Clubs. A few libraries don’t shelve it in k-4 schools. I really have no argument with that. Most teachers who read it aloud chose to skip or modify the swear word in the classroom. No argument there either. On the other hand, many teachers and parents have told me that because they weren’t expecting profanity in a middle grade book, it gave them a good opportunity to discuss where profanity is socially acceptable and not, and what it was about that particular scene that made a character swear when he ordinarily wouldn’t. In my opinion that’s a conversation worth having.

I’d love to hear what other people consider when making decisions about profanity, both in terms of writing and in terms of sharing books with middle grade kids as a parent or teacher or librarian.

What can one person do?

I have been mulling over the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri this past August and the thing that has really struck a chord with me is this all to common response: what can one person do? It’s a frustrating response in so many ways. It’s a coward’s choice, and must be a very painful thing to hear for people in the throes of ongoing unjust treatment. Unfortunately many people would rather do nothing than risk doing a wrong or offensive thing, and many simply don’t see the small steps that could be taken to advance the cause of justice. I don’t think I have any answers but I do have a story.

The one person who has mentored me more than anyone in my professional life is my cousin Kathleen Delaney. She has spent her entire teaching career in some of the lowest income schools in the Chicago area. She has told me stories about her students my entire life–stories about the ones that have inspired her, worried her, made her laugh, made her cry, and sharpened her understanding of the injustices so many face every single day. This August as she was preparing for the school year she stepped across the hall to introduce herself to a new teacher in her building. She was met with a shout of joy and a warm embrace from this new teacher.

The woman had been an 8th grader in my cousin’s school decades ago. Kathy taught 6th grade and after school she coached the girl for the district speech competition. They chose the address of Chief Seattle from 1854 and worked on it together after school for several weeks. Before the competition my cousin gave her the picture book version of Seattle’s speech written by Susan Jeffers. What she didn’t realize at the time was that the girl’s family had come to this country illegally. The mother was struggling to raise five of kids on minimum wage. That book was the first one the girl had ever owned. The first book anyone in her family had owned. They read it until it fell apart. This girl decided to become a teacher, in part because of my cousin’s example. Her younger brothers and sisters who had Miss Delaney in 6th grade reported that she was the “hardest” teacher in the school, the one who assigned the most homework. She was the one who believed that they could do all that work, even though they were new speakers of English.

This former student took her college classes one at a time over many years because her immigration status made her ineligible for financial aid. But she stuck to her goal year after year and now after all this time, she and my cousin will be teaching side by side. I’ve done author visits for my cousin in recent years and her students are quick to tell me that she is still the hardest teacher in their school. They feign agony in reporting all the writing assignments she’s given but it’s easy enough to see their pride underneath all that complaint. Some of them come voluntarily to school an hour early every day to work in her room before school starts.

I mention all this at the start of the school year because my cousin cheerfully points out that there is nothing unusual about her. Most teachers mentor students before and after school. Many have very high expectations for even their most impoverished students, and almost all of them give away hundreds of books over a teaching career. So this is my thank you to all of you for all you do to change lives, to raise up one literate generation after another, and encourage those who enter school powerless to leave it with something to contribute to the world. It’s easy to get discouraged and in the minutia of daily work and lose sight of your power.

You make history every day. When a child learns to read, you change that entire family’s economic fortunes forever. Our economy cannot function without you. I’m grateful–to my own teachers, my children’s teachers and all of you everywhere who work with students wisely and generously every day. Thank you!

Promotion and the Big Publishing House

The hook I see self-publishing presses use more often than any other is to claim that the major publishing houses no longer promote the books they publish. They suggest that authors are all on their own even at the big houses to arrange their own publicity, so you might as well go with a self-published press and get a bigger share of the pie. It’s a tempting line of thinking but one which can sometimes prompt a decision a writer later regrets.

Harold Underdown has an excellent post on the things a traditional publisher does for your book here. This is my take on the issue. I have a novel out this year. It’s one that I’ve worked on for more than 15 years and is very dear to me. My publisher, Random House, is not sending me on a book tour or buying product placement for me in the chain bookstores or featuring me at the big book conferences–BEA and ALA. And am I upset? Not in the least! Here’s why.

Nobody expects this book to be a blockbuster, not my publishers, not my reviewers, and not me. We all know that what we’ve got here is a solidly written book that will be of interest to fans of historical fiction and useful to teachers and librarians. It’s exactly the kind of book which never gets attention in the self-publishing market which is a great place to discover a highly commercial book like Fifty Shades of Gray but a dismal venue for a literary children’s novel. But with a traditional publishing house we don’t need Written in Stone to be a blockbuster. We just need it to reach it’s intended audience. And to that end my publisher has done a number of extraordinarily intelligent (but not highly visible) things in the marketing of this book.

1. Editorial Process

First and foremost I have the expertise of an editor with lots of experience and a heart for what makes a book work for a kid reader. He also knows what the school and library market is looking for so he made sure I got all the room I needed for a detailed authors note. And did I have to pay him? Nope. Part of the package.

2. Cover design

I love this cover! It does everything a cover needs to do and is a work of art besides. Did I have to find the nationally known artist Richard Tuschman and convince him to do this work? Nope. All that coordination and design work was done by the talented cover team at Random House. They took the few reference photos I sent and their own love of story and made magic happen.

3. Reviews

One of the hardest things to do as a self-published author is to get review attention for a book, even a really good book. I don’t even have to think about it. Part of the package.

4. Teacher’s guide

Pat Scales made a gorgeous teachers guide and my publicist has been great about sending copies of it out to bookstores doing fall teacher previews. Even better, you can download it for free. Because I’m a teacher I could have made this on my own, but it would have taken weeks of research through the common core to do it properly and then there is the design and layout–an entirely different skill set which I do not possess.

5. Sales Reps

Because my book is of regional interest the local sales reps at Random House featured the book in their meetings with the largest library systems in the northwest. It not only encourages book purchase but highlights the title to the group of people who sit on award committees and choose state-wide reading lists. It’s a very smart move and not something I could ever set up on my own for just one book.

6.Book Tour

Here is the best part: they didn’t send me on a book tour! A tour is expensive and puts a lot of pressure on the author to recoup the expense in book sales. Instead they’ve let me set up my own book events in venues where I know I can generate interest, with book sellers who have supported me in the past, and at schools who are invested in bringing me to speak to their students. I get to pick a schedule that works with my family’s commitments. I can take advantage of family or sports events travel and couple it with speaking engagements. I can pull together something at last minute to do a favor for a friend who is suddenly without a speaker at their conference. I can plan a whole year in advance for a week long author-in-residence. Yes, this is a lot of work, but the payoff in terms of relationships built in the business will benefit me for years to come so it’s time well worth investing.

7. Support

Even though they aren’t flying me all over the country, they are supporting me in my travels with timely responses to my communications, and on time shipments to the bookstores where I speak. They’ve never missed a shipment–not once. They keep my back list in good supply. I never have to worry if the books will be there. This reputation is one of the reasons bookstores are willing to have me in. They make it look easy to have a seamless supply and delivery of books, but I bet it isn’t.

8. Prompt conversion to paperback

About half the schools I contact for visits want to wait until my title is in paperback so that they can afford a full classroom set and the students can afford to buy their own book. No problem! The paperback comes out in a year. We can go ahead and schedule into next school year knowing an affordable book is on the way. And just like all the rest, it’s part of the initial contract I don’t have to make it happen all on my own.

None of this is intended to disparage self-published work. There is outstanding craft in self-published books. I’m very excited to see a new book award from SCBWI for self-published work. But I’m also sad for people who have been swan-songed into going it alone on a book that would be better served in a traditionally published venue. So before you decide to go it alone, think about what you are turning down with a traditional publisher. It might be worth the wait and the careful rewriting and polishing of your story to get your foot in the door.