Literacy Now

A love/hate reading relationship has formed between digital reading on tablets and moi. I dearly wish one side would just finally pummel the crud out of the other so that I could at long last jump on one side of the fence as to how I feel about these things and simply move on with my reading life.

Like William Tell, I cannot tell a lie: tablets are AWESOME! Then again, reading on them comes with a set of issues that are not only not going away, but are, in fact, amplifying with each new generation of device.

p: andyi via photopin cc

Reading on a tablet nowadays is akin to trying to count your profits after a long day at the lemonade stand while your annoying 8 year old little brother goes, “6, 11, 43, 12, 52” as you try to add up all the change. It’s inevitable that you are going to get distracted—that’s his entire goal—and have to double back and pick up the pieces from where your train of thought went off the rails.

Consider hyperlinks. For example, when reading an online article, do you click on the hyperlink that makes reference to something you know you want to read right at the very moment you come across the connection or do you wait until after you’re done with the entire piece to double back and go see where it was that the author was pointing you? Or do you skip it entirely? To do the former breaks the entire narrative flow of the piece you started, and even if the new link turns you on to a great piece of content, it’s also sabotaged your ability to coherently digest the mental meal author #1 wanted you to consume. On the other hand, if you wait until later to click, the narrative flow is still broken because you have to stop and give yourself a mental reminder, “Hey, remember to go back and click that – it looked interesting.”

Either way, as a reader you experience the mental phenomenon of, “Uhm, where was I?”

And if you skip it, you still paused to weigh whether or not you should bother with the hyperlink which—yep, you guessed it —also broke the flow of your reading. Our brains can’t multi-task in this manner. We can breathe and read but we can’t read and make navigatorial decisions about our reading and read.

Yes, I hyperlinked the word “navigatorial” just now. Why? Cause it’s a word I made up but it kinda seems like it should be a word—and there’s a word for words that might one day be words if someone starts to popularize them.

That word is neologism. I mention it because it prevents me (as the author) from having to hyperlink the above and yet still allows you, the reader, to stay within the text without having been transported to Goodness-Knows-Where on the Internet.

Quick question: Which do you prefer?

Of course, over the course of reading one or two pieces, perhaps this is not so bad. But if you do ALL of your reading on a tablet, this becomes something that actually nourishes non-stop stop-n-start, stop-n-start thinking. Sure, it’s challenging for me to maneuver this minefield of link after link after link with some of them of value and some of them just merely me horsing around, but consider for a moment that I am a digital immigrant. That means I’ve already had my brain developed in a physical, printed word world. Yet as we now see all the rage of outfitting students with tablets over printed books, is it just me or do others see that we might actually be nurturing partial attention deficit disorder?

In fact, its cultivation is perhaps even being assigned as homework!

Now add in the idea of emails, instant messaging, tweets, notifications, pins, racy YouTube videos, and so on when it comes to tablet reading and the question must be asked, “What kind of kiddie brain cocktail are we creating?”

And really, who’s immune? Question, did you click on the link where I mentioned “racy YouTube videos”? If not, did you make a mental note to click on it after? Even if the answer was “No and no” did you mentally find yourself saying, “I wonder where that link will take me”?

It took you to a cat video. Why? Because millions of hours of people’s lives have been devoted in the past decade to making and watching YouTube videos on funny things cats do.

Whodda thunk it?

I need to power down now. I want to love my tablet, but I can’t say I am all that fond of loving the potential consequences reading on tablets still has yet to bring.

Alan Lawrence Sitomer was California's Teacher of the Year in 2007. He is also the author of multiple works for young readers, including Nerd Girls, the Hoopster trilogy, THE SECRET STORY OF SONIA RODRIGUEZ, CINDER-SMELLA, and THE ALAN SITOMER BOOKJAM. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. In addition to being an inner-city high school English teacher and former professor in the Graduate School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, Alan is a nationally renowned speaker specializing in engaging reluctant readers who received the 2004 award for Classroom Excellence from the Southern California Teachers of English, the 2003 Teacher of the Year honor from California Literacy, the 2007 Educator of the Year award by Loyola Marymount University and the 2008 Innovative Educator of the Year from The Insight Education Group. A Fun Look at Our Serious Work appears quarterly on the Engage blog.

“To read well is to take great risks, to make vulnerable our identity, our self-possession.” This is a quote by George Steiner. He goes on to say that the task of the literary critic is to help us read as total human beings. I feel the same might hold true for writers. To write well often means to take great risks and make vulnerable our identities. Sometimes we must lose our self-possession in order to write as total human beings. We must, in short, slip out from the comfort of our own skin and inhabit others’.

It is somewhat ironic that in the past few years to write as a total human being I have had to slip out of my own skin and into the feathers or pelts of animals for my fantasy series about owls The Guardians of Ga’Hoole and then The Wolves of The Beyond. Oddly enough, I found this tremendously liberating. To do this, I would first have to learn all about the habits, habitats, and behavior of a particular animal.  You see, even though this is fantasy, if I am to move the reader to a state of willing suspension of disbelief, there must be a compelling veracity about the animal. And yet at the same time I am telling a story in which I want an emotional resonance that is deeply human.

A recent article in the NEW YORK TIMES addressed this question of perspective, pondering how Woody Allen could write such great roles for women. Cate Blanchette, the star of Woody Allen’s recent film BLUE JASMINE, spoke of Allen’s ability to capture the voice of women. “Often you can write more closely about your own perspective and experience of the world through a character of a different gender,” she said.

Well for me it was writing from the perspective of a different species.

THE EXTRA (Candlewick) is a different kind of story entirely. It is not fantasy at all, but historical fiction. THE EXTRA tells a story that fell between the cracks of history during the Nazi Holocaust. It is not about a Jewish girl, but a Roma (Gypsy) one. It is based on a true story about how Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, went to an internment camp where gypsies were held as prisoners and took several of them to use in a movie she was making.

It might seem odd that as a Jew, and one who has lost distant cousins of my generation in the holocaust, I would choose to tell a holocaust story from a non-Jewish perspective. Indeed in a book that has no Jewish characters. Three years ago, in my book ASHES which is set in Berlin in the early 1930s during the rise of Hitler, I made a similar decision. I told the story from a gentile girl’s perspective. I felt that I could write a more powerful story if it came from an unorthodox angle.

I think the best Holocaust novel I ever read was SOPHIE’S CHOICE, which was narrated by a gentile man. So why did I find this gentile voice so moving? It is mysterious like art itself. But I think it is the choice that William Styron made to use the young, naïve Southern male as the narrative channel for this story of ultimate horror that gave it a kind of distance that, in the end, made it so powerful.

I, too, must have subconsciously sought a distance. There are many stories and many voices for telling them, but the voice of Lilo in THE EXTRA and that of Gaby in ASHES were the ones that whispered in my ear with an insistence I could not deny. It was a great risk. I let loose of my own identity, and watched my self-possession dissolve.

Bullying is not a new phenomenon, but today, parents and teachers are talking about bullying behavior and its effects on children much more than in previous generations. This heightened awareness around bullying is a good thing. Unfortunately, however, this awareness has come as a result of the now countless number of cases in which bullying victims have lost their lives, either as a direct result of the actions of their bullies, or indirectly through their taking their own lives in attempts to end their pain and suffering.

p: Jason Walton via photopin cc

Few of us will ever forget the 2009 suicide of 11-year old Carl Walker-Hoover, who hung himself with an electric cord while his mother made him a cheeseburger.  In that same year, 11-year old Jaheem Herrera hung himself in his closet as his mother cooked dinner. The common thread with both children was that they were both victims of bullying at school. In both cases, the boys were bullied because other children believed them to be gay. These boys are just two of many children whose lives have been lost because of bullying. So while the heightened awareness of bullying is undeniably a good thing, how tragic a commentary that it has taken losing so many precious lives for us to begin to treat the issue with the seriousness that it deserves.

Part of adults’—teachers and parents—nonchalance and inaction with bullying has stemmed from the fact that so many of us grew to see it as a normal, even if unpleasant, part of the childhood experience. In many of our school and childhood experiences, children who had characteristics or qualities that put them outside of average were likely candidates for teasing and bullying. If a child was perceived to be too smart, not smart enough, overweight, underweight, poor, wealthy, gay, or sexually promiscuous (for females), he or she could end up the victim of a bully. And both today and in previous generations, the categories of bully and bullied are not necessarily mutually exclusive ones. In other words, bullies have often been victims of bullying, and bullying victims can sometime turn into bullies. In bullying another child, the bully is often mimicking bullying behavior that she or he has seen or been on the receiving end of.

Few of us have managed to completely avoid being involved in relationships where we were either the bully or a victim of bullying; and for those of us that did manage to avoid direct involvement with bullying relationships, nearly all of us have at least seen it in or schools, in our neighborhoods, or in our homes.  I am no exception. So yes, I approach the topic of bullying from the perspectives of a former middle and high school special education teacher, a teacher educator, and an education policy researcher; but also, and just as importantly, I approach the topic of bullying from the perspective of an adult who was once a child involved in unhealthy adolescent bullying relationships.

As adults—teachers—who have been involved in or have witnessed bullying relationships, we must acknowledge how our own experiences, biases, and perceptions around bullying impact the way we understand and respond to bullying in our professional roles. Here are just a few things teachers should keep in mind:

1. We all have biases, prejudices, and past experiences that can impact the way we see the world and the way we go about doing our jobs. Teachers are people just like everyone else, with political preferences, religious beliefs, ideologies, etc. But it is important for teachers to do the work of trying to understand their own beliefs, biases, and experiences and how those might impact their understanding of and intervention in bullying situations.
   
   I have seen more than a few instances where teachers’ religious beliefs about sexual orientation, their personal biases and prejudices about racial/ethnic minorities, and their political beliefs about immigration have resulted in their failure to intervene in bullying situations where they clearly should have intervened. Please do not let that happen to you. Not only is such behavior a violation of professional ethics, but it puts the well-being of children in jeopardy.
2. Bullying today is not the same as bullying in previous generations of children. Social media has changed bullying significantly. Social media platforms have allowed bullies to attack their victims at any time of the day and from any place. It is no longer necessary for the bully and the victim to be in the same place. Also, bullies are now able to launch anonymous attacks against their victims.
   
   At one time, children could escape the school bully by going home, or even escape the neighborhood bully by staying inside. Children today are unable to escape bullying attacks via social media, and the attacks can happen with the whole class, whole school, or whole town as an audience. The day has passed when the bully’s only audience was bystanders. Now, depending on the platform used, the bully’s audience can be enormous.
3. Never assume that a child is tough enough to endure bullying. While some children show their pain outwardly, others hide it very well. In the cases of 11-year old Carl and 11-year old Jaheem, neither of their mothers had any idea that their sons suffered so severely from bullying abuse that they planned to take their own lives.
   
   Yes, these mothers knew that their children had been bullied, and they had even spoken with teachers and administrators about the bullying, but they did not fully understand the amount of pain that their children were experiencing. For teachers, it does not matter if the victim of bullying appears to take the abuse in stride or if it appears to not bother her much, bullying is never acceptable. Teachers must make it their business to intervene whenever bullying is taking place.

Wayne D. Lewis, Jr. is the author of THE POLITICS OF PARENT CHOICE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. He is an assistant professor and Principal Leadership Program Chair in the Department of Educational Leadership Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Students and young readers often ask me if I was bullied as a child. It’s a fair question, since bullying is a major topic in both of my young adult novels (BUTTER and DEAD ENDS), and it deserves an honest answer.

Yes, I tell them, I was bullied. Sometimes, the youngest—and bravest—students will ask how I was bullied. Then we do a little dance in which I sidestep the details of my own seventh grade nightmare and tell them instead about how that nightmare came back to haunt me years later.

I was on a visit home from college, and I met up with some friends at a coffee shop—my coffee shop, the safe haven where I spent most of my happy high school days trying to forget the way kids had treated me in junior high. It was there, in my safe place, where one of the faces I’d hoped to forget suddenly popped up across the crowded coffee house. She wasn’t the meanest mean girl, but she had definitely been cruel.

I hadn’t seen any of my seventh grade tormentors since my parents had moved me two towns and a whole school district away from them, but suddenly I was thirteen years old again. I would have run for the exit if she hadn’t been staring right at me. And she didn’t just make eye contact. To my horror, she actually started pushing through the crowd to get to me.

I probably held my breath, waiting to hear what she had to say. I didn’t have to wait long. She said her name, asked if I remembered her, then she got right to the point.

“I’m sorry for the way we all treated you back then.”

I think her apology went on a little longer, but my mind got stuck on “I’m sorry.” Her words were meant to heal, but they only opened up old wounds. In an instant, all of my seventh grade shame and anger was fresh again. I believe I responded to her apology with something dead clever, like, “Uh. Okay.” Then I went and hid in the bathroom.

It was a one-in-a-billion moment that I squandered when I failed to forgive her. Years later (because yes, it took years), I realized my mistake and tried to track her down, but despite this age of social media and global connectedness, I’ve never been able to find her to accept her apology. So I forgive her the best way I know how—by writing characters in shades of gray—even the “bad guys,” because those bad guys may just grow up to be good guys.

I tell this story to students because I want them to know when I write about bullying, I don’t just write for the bullied. I write for the bullies, too.

“Bullying” has become such a buzzword in recent years, it’s almost lost its meaning. The media like to make it all very black and white, good kids and bad kids, victims and villains. (I feel safe in my media critique, since, as a TV journalist, I am part of the cycle of oversimplification.) But what I can’t do when writing facts, I try to do when writing fiction—and that is to tell a deeper truth about bullying.

That truth is this:

We are all the victim. We are all the bully. This week’s mean girl is next week’s target, and people who are capable of great cruelty are also capable of great kindness.

I learned that lesson from Judy Blume, actually.

I read BLUBBER at the exact right moment in my life—at a time when it mirrored my own experiences. I didn’t know then that it was a book about “bullying.” I thought it was a book about my life! I recognized all of the mean girls from my own classes, and I identified with how quickly the narrator’s status among her peers changed, as she slid from the top of the social totem pole to the bottom. BLUBBER was relatable, and years later, when I started writing my own books, I knew I wanted to try to do what Judy Blume did—to write what felt real.

If a young reader walks away from one of my books thinking a little harder about how they treat people, or vowing to not just stand by the next time they see someone doing something hurtful, then so much the better, but all I really want is for readers to connect, to see a little piece of their own reality in my stories. For me, bullying is just a part of that reality, and I can’t imagine writing books for teens without it.

And maybe some small part of me hopes if I keep writing about bullying, then someday, somewhere, a girl who used to be cruel but grew up to be compassionate and brave enough to right her wrongs, will pick up one of my books and read between the lines those words I couldn’t say to her all those years ago.

I forgive you.

Erin Jade Lange writes facts by day and fiction by night. As a journalist, she is inspired by current events and real-world issues and uses her writing to explore how those issues impact teenagers. Erin grew up in the cornfields of northern Illinois, along the Mississippi River in one of the few places it flows east to west. She now lives in the sunshine of Arizona and will forever be torn between her love of rivers and her love of the desert.

When I was in eighth grade, I loved things. I loved my friends. I loved Bad English and Poison. I loved reading David Eddings’ fantasy series The Belgariad and The Mallorean. One of these things was not quite as socially acceptable as the others, but I didn’t really know that. Or if I did, I didn’t really get it. I was, and am, a passionate person. I love out loud. And so sometimes my thirteen year old self found herself in the awkward position of loving something that was not cool.

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Imagine, if you will, a typical late ’80s junior high classroom. Desks are in rows. The boys and the cool kids sit in the back. I’d ventured back into their territory one day because I’d discovered that one of the cool boys also read David Eddings. He hadn’t gone quite as far into the series as I, and I had a copy of the book he needed next.

It was such a thrill to be making this symbolic trek; I could barely contain my excitement. Here was someone who read what I read, how much more did we have in common? Certainly we’d become good friends. He was likely to fall madly in love with me and be my boyfriend! Wouldn’t all my friends be, like, so jealous? So, with the anticipated envy of the female population of eighth grade prominently displayed on my sleeve, I handed over KING OF THE MURGOS and stood back, awaiting his effusive thanks and a smoldering glance meant to convey his awakening desire.

It didn’t turn out quite like I’d imagined.

Cool boy was more in tune to the social world than I. He knew that reading wasn’t something to be flaunted. He knew that fantasy, in particular, was associated with awkward girls in unflattering haircuts and giant glasses that didn’t even look good on Kim Bassinger in BATMAN. Reading was associated with boys who didn’t play football. So instead of sweeping me off my feet and manfully striding into the sunset, he looked at the cover art featuring the primary female protagonist, and quipped to the delight of his entourage, “Who’s the chick with the rack?”

Twenty four years later I’m still embarrassed when I think about it.

Silly Mary. Don’t you get it? Reading isn’t cool. You have to hide such ridiculous passions. Some things are okay, and some are not. And never the two shall meet. You can’t be on the basketball team and audition for the school play. You can’t go around singing show tunes and expect to get a date for the prom. It was some time around eighth or ninth grade that I started paying attention to what was cool and what wasn’t, and I believed a lot of what I saw and heard. It took twenty years for me to stop believing it.

So why are you reading transcripts from my therapy sessions? What does this have to do with teaching reading? Everything. This has everything to do with teaching reading.

I have decided to take the coolness hierarchy that everyone implicitly agrees to, and I’m going to banish it from my classroom.

This summer I went to craft stores and bought scrapbooking paper. Each page represented something I think my students might love, and the pages became the backing for my bulletin boards. Football, hockey, dolphins, moustaches, cupcakes: those were easy. I forced myself to stretch. I made myself buy paper with math symbols and NASCAR on it. I swallowed my discomfort and bought paper with scriptures that proclaimed “God is love.” After all, these bulletin boards aren’t about endorsing any one ideal; they’re about acknowledging that we ALL have passions, and they are ALL worthwhile. And, more importantly, they are equal.

This year, when I introduced myself to my students, I called myself a “literary dork.” I pointed out the action figures of Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, and Austen prominently displayed in my room. I let my guard down and gushed about my love of words and how the meaning of a story or a passage or a poem could hinge on one tiny little article. I recited my favorite lines from literature: HAMLET, JANE EYRE, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. William Carlos Williams, “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow…” I felt my volume rise, my face warm. “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.” I felt tears come to my eyes and I let them come. It was hard, it wasn’t comfortable, and it was a risk, but I stopped worrying about being pretty and composed and authoritative and cool, and I was just me.

In a good classroom, there are moments. I’m sure you’ve had them. The room is silent and all eyes are on you and you know that the kids are just soaking up everything and really feeling it. This was one of those moments.

Because although they may not have discovered exactly what it is they love, they know they want to love. They want to feel deeply and passionately about something important. Even at the young age of 14 they can recognize the bravery it takes to love out loud, and they admire it. They want to emulate it.

And that’s when I pulled out Wesley.

p: WilWheaton via photopin cc

Wil Wheaton is known for his portrayal of Wesley Crusher on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. This summer a video surfaced of a touching answer he gave to a woman’s request at ComicCon. She asked Wil to explain to her new baby girl why it’s awesome to be a nerd. His response, which you can watch in its entirety here, is probably best summed up around 1:40 when he says, “It’s not about what you love, it’s about HOW you love it.”

That is the atmosphere I want to create in my room. I want my students to love deeply, passionately, wildly for whatever it is that speaks to them. A handful will react to literature the way I do, and that’s great. But I don’t need all of my students to be mini-Marys. I want them to be artists and actors and jocks and musicians and skaters if that’s what they want to be. I want to open my classroom to all the potential they bring. But I can’t do it alone. In order for my room to be a judgment free place, I need the explicit help of everyone in there with me.

Instead of implicitly going along with the judgmental standard quo, I ask my students to actively choose to be accepting of others’ differences. Students have acknowledged, in writing, that their peers will like things they do not. They’ve also agreed not to give others a hard time. Students agreed not to act as if they are better than anyone else. If they do, they’ve acknowledged that they may be asked to apologize verbally and in writing. Because I can tell my students all day long that my room is a safe place, but if my students don’t back me up, my words mean nothing.

In the coming months, my students will engage in self-directed inquiry projects. They’ll be expected to choose a topic to research, required to develop an inquiry plan, and present a final project that will demonstrate learning in the four content areas. It’s a new idea my team is trying out, and I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed at how open ended and daunting it seems. But then I look at my bulletin boards, clad in sheet music and manuscripts and baseball bats, and I recommit to helping students explore and express what they love.

Mary Cotillo is an 8th grade ELA teacher at Horace Mann Middle School in Franklin, MA. Mother to two children, she enjoys engaging in light saber battles and hanging out on soccer fields. She earned her National Board Certification in 2009.