Cleaning the library feels like a guilty pleasure these days. The hour before school begins, I’m supposed to be working on truancy, or going over lesson plans for my small groups: CVC words, dipgraphs, finding main ideas to short passages – stuff that’s necessary.
The necessary is boring me to tears, so I turn a jazz station on YouTube and I walk through the stacks to see which stories have fallen. All the Warrior books, the Percy Jackson books, and Captain Underpants are a hot mess. There’s a book on Colin Powell on the floor, and Jacqueline Woodson’s After Tupac and D Foster is shelved incorrectly. It’s in the poetry section.
I smile as I remove the book. I know why it was shelved where the poems are. A couple of days ago, I read from Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover to the 5th graders because I wanted to have them write, “As In” poems. What you do is take a word and turn that word’s definition into poetry. For example:
WOBBLY
tending to move
unsteadily
from
side to side
Then, you give an example of how that word pertains to your life. For example:
as in
when I get hungry
I get wobbly.
I see stars.
I think about donuts –
cake donuts –
with
pink frosting,
and,
rainbow sprinkles.
Kwame Alexander writes “As In” poems throughout The Crossover, and I used my poem and his as examples for the 5th graders. The entire book is poetry, and I told the group that, but the poems are one story. “You read this, and you’ve read a legit book!” I exclaim. “I wish this kind of stuff was around when I was a kid because reading chapter books was too hard for me.”
I say this, and heads pop up. My stomach turns and I take a breath. I think about those purple ditto sheets I had to complete: circle the subject, underline the predicate. Spell “their,” “they’re,” and “there” three times, and use each word in a sentence. What’s the main idea of this passage? You cannot read Judy Bloom, Beverly Clearly, or Katherine Paterson before you complete these worksheets. Worksheets first, then stories, Callie.
“But I loved stories,” I continued. I explained that if anyone felt like reading was too hard, or if just wasn’t their thing, here’s a book that tells a story, that has characters and situations they can relate to. Or not, but how much fun is it to follow along with someone you admire through something you’ve no experience with but find that maybe, knowing their story, you can be brave, or it’s OK to be sad, or you see the world a little differently; a little better because of the story you read?
And so we read “As In” poetry, and while they’re supposed to be writing their own poems, kids asked for copies of The Crossover or, “books like it,” and I take them to Love That Dog, Out of the Dust, and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming.
I didn’t have enough titles for everyone who wanted poetry – stories, but I pulled other titles by these authors. After Tupac and D Foster was one of them, and a student must’ve not been interested in it, and shelved it with the poetry books.
It’ll be there for her someday, I think, as I take this story to my desk, remember Tupac’s music and saying once that I wondered if his work would be studied as poetry in schools. His lyrics seemed to have more to chew on than the normal Top 40 songs I listened to. His voice always made me feel like I ought to sit up and pay attention.
Someday, that student will hear his music, and even though she might be totally different from him, lead a completely different life than Tupac lived, there will be something about what he said that strikes her. He will have shown her a piece of the world and she will want to learn more, and books like Woodson’s and Angie Thomas’ The Hate You Give will be there waiting for her.
Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage is lying upside down on a bookshelf, and I pick it up. It’s a Newbery Honor book, so I read the back to see if it’s something Hadley and Harper might want to read. An in-coming 6th grade girl detective is living in North Carolina. She was born during, “one of the meanest hurricanes in history,” I wonder if that hurricane was Katrina. This morning, I just finished reading Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere by Julie T. Lamana. It’s the story about a family in the Lower Nines of New Orleans, and it takes place from Friday, August 26, 2005 to Friday, Sepetember 2, 2005. Seven days of horror and strength, doubt and hope: I followed a family as they watched the water rush towards them when the levees broke, and I watched them as they floated out into the Gulf of Mexico on the roof of their house. I cried when the son jumped off the roof to save a puppy, and a continued to cry when the father went in after him. It’s a wretched, gorgeous story that will stay with me for a long time.
I read it because Harper was reading it, but she put it down because it was too sad. She told me she wanted to finish it, but it was making her too sad, so I picked it up and read it for her. I do not mean I read it TO her. I mean I offered to take on the story and see if I can carry some of it for her so that she could, too.
Harper underlined sentences I think she liked as she read: “‘Armani, you’ll always be my little girl, you know.’ He winked and walked off to his truck.” And, “I always liked the way Saturday mornings smelled.” The last line she underlined had to do with a man who looked like Dumbledore. I was afraid of him, and told Harper this, but she told me she thought he was good, but couldn’t read on to be sure.
Harper was right, and I told her that this morning.
“I knew it,” she said.
“The book is very sad,” I told her.
“Is it too sad?”
“Well, it’s true sad,” I said, and that’s all I knew to say. The levees broke, water drowned a community, and someone who witnessed it it wrote a story about it so that we can witness it, too. I’m thankful to know this sad truth.
Anyway, I think Hadley will like Three Times Lucky, so I email her to let her know it. “Maybe we can pick it up at the library this weekend,” I tell her.
The downtown branch, with the fairy door in one of the shelves, and a courtyard with old, tall trees and benches to sit on, and a place in the basement called, “The Secret Lab” where there are classes like Slime-Making, and Letterpress, and How to Knit. Maybe we’ll get ice-cream at Kilwin’s later because spring is finally here and maybe we’ll talk about last summer when we sat at Kilwins and watched all the tiny moons of light the eclipse cast on our bodies, the sidewalks, our ice-cream cones. Who knew the world could be seen this way?
I click, “send,” and stand up. I walk the books back to their homes on the shelves, and turn my back on the stories.
It is 9am, and time for what’s necessary.
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