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Hunting Great Books: Desperately Seeking Substance

I’ve been on a treasure hunt, a quest, a  mission, an operation, and a charge to seek out books that will help us all answer our burning questions in life. To boldly use my insomnia (inability to sleep peacefully) to explore the websites’ nooks, crannies, bogs, blogs, under logs, and kissing a few frogs to seek beautiful, bold books for myself, and my students, to read.

To say that there are a plethora of young adult book blogsis an understatement. And, one trend I’ve noticed is many of them promote what I would consider a tendancy toward chick-books: Gothic, romantic, swooning, with plenty of lip gloss and angst. Not that there’s a darn thing wrong with any of those things. However, I’m still on a quest for more choices, better organizations of genre, and targeted searches. I may just have to take control of my own destiny and make this blog work a little harder.

 There are so many ways to choose a good book to read. The question isn’t whether or not you should be reading, of course you should. You must. You read to expand your brain so the world doesn’t take advantage of you, but you can control your world. You read to develop better life skills, a personality, you read to get a life, for goodness sake! Let me know how you find good books to read.

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Burning Question #2,679: Who Owns Your Truth?

While researching some links and more information for a book that a student loaned me (thanks, A.N.!), So Far from the Bamboo Grove, by Yoko Kiwashima Watkins, I came across a site that made comments which indicated that what the author wrote wasn’t true. The author wrote the book many years after the events (about forty years later) and it’s her memoir of when she was a young Japanese girl living in Korea during WWII.

What do you think? Who owns your truth? If you remember it slightly wrong, does it matter?

http://www.alisonshomework.com/aalit/watkins/index.html

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Wrapping Up a Year…My Gift to You

As I begin to write out the last two weeks’ worth of lesson plans and agendas, it strikes me that I really don’t want this to be quite over. Yes, I can hear you all now, that you can’t WAIT to get out for summer vacation, not have to worry about a darn thing, and mentally and emotionally prepare yourselves for high school. Well, I’m looking forward to summer break, too. But it shouldn’t feel like this permanent boundary, that once crossed, you can never return. I haven’t taught 8th grade students before, and while I was teaching 7th grade, I had a pretty good idea that I would see most of you again. Now that you’re off to high school, this is when you will really need a friend, a mentor–I just wanted to let you all know I’m still here for you, so please email me, let me know how you are, and ask questions.

Some of the things we’ll be finishing up are:

  • Writer’s Portfolio: In my overly ambitious attempt, I don’t think it will be possible to bind and laminate your writer’s resource guides, but you will have your Writer’s Portfolios, and those are still heavily graded.
  • Make sure all missing assignments (blue sentence packet, set 1 and set 2 of the grammar vocabulary words, your burning questions summer reading list) are all completed by June 12. Grading begins then, and I must have my grades done before school is out.
  • We will conference over the Writer’s Portfolios:
  • We still need to add poetry
  • We still need to add a small expository piece

So, write, write, write! Get your assignments done! Don’t worry, be happy!