At Albina Press on Hawthorne

"No, Sabbath! It all comes back to Sabbath!"

The Unexpected Question

Yesterday during class, while my eighth grade students were writing their responses to the songs we listened to about the Vietnam war, Ashley raised her hand and called me over. "Ms. Nelson, this isn't about this, but--can we cross dress for Halloween?"

"Uh, I don't know why not."

"My sister had been a guy for three years."

"For Halloween?"

"Yeah. And everyone always falls for it."

Another Thing Someone Else Saw

From Rachel Sakry:

I had an "I love Portland" moment today that I thought you might appreciate: I was at the farmers' market downtown during my lunch break, and there was a busker playing saxophone. So, he starts playing the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars, and out of nowhere this other guy rides by on a unicycle playing the main theme from Star Wars on bagpipes.

...a delightful task to any boy or girl...

I'm reading* the 1909 selection of The Arabian Nights; Their Best-Known Tales edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish (reprinted by Atheneum Books).

Ms. Wiggin's Preface cracked me up, especially this:

"It would be a delightful task to any boy or girl to begin at the beginning and read the first English version of these famous stories, made from the collection of M. Galland, Professor of Arabic in the Royal College of Paris. The fact that they had passed from Arabic into French and from French into English did not prevent their instantaneous popularity. This was in 1704 or thereabouts, and the world was not so busy as it is nowadays, or young men would not have gathered in the middle of the night under M. Galland's window and cried: 'O vous, qui savez de si jolis contes, et qui les racontez si bien, racontez nous en un!'"

Obviously, this was a hundred years ago, and the world was not so... something as it is nowadays. I haven't taught a boy or girl yet who would find it a delightful task to begin at the beginning, though I did give Deanna a copy of Arabian Nights today since she's obsessed with mythology.


*re-reading? I know all these stories, but who knows where from.

Footnotes and other awesome things

Incidentally, this is my fourth blog post in a row about kids and reading. Incidentally, maybe not coincidentally (although I thought I knew what each of those words meant, but then in looking them up and trying to figure out specifics, I got confused. Oh, vocabulary. It's good for me to be reminded of how confusing dictionaries can be, even when you're a grown-up and like them and know how to use them and even mostly know what the words mean that you are looking up!).

I just finished Sharon Creech's fabulous Heartbeat, another of her great mid-grade novels written as a series of poems. In Heartbeat, the poems are by our heroine, twelve-year-old Annie. This one made me super happy:

FOOTNOTES

In school we are learning footnotes.¹

It made me laugh to hear them called
FOOTnotes.

I pictured little notes on my feet
and could not stop giggling
as Mr. Welling tried to explain
why we needed to do footnotes²
and the exact, correct format

and we had to practice everything exactly right
with the commas and the colons
in the right place

He was very
par-tic-u-lar.

And I liked getting everything
in the right place
and knowing there was a plan
for how to do it right

but then I could not get the footnotes
out of my mind
and started putting them everywhere--
on spelling tests
and on math homework--

and just about everywhere
where I wanted to add a little explanation
(which you do not normally have a chance to do
on tests or homework)

but I am not sure all of my teachers
appreciate the footnotes³

and now I am dreaming
in footnotes

which is a peculiar thing.

I dreamed of running past the barn
and in my head I saw a footnote
which said
Faded red barn
and when I passed the church
I saw a footnote
Old stone church
and on like that
footnotes for every little thing

and when I stopped at the red bench
and looked at the soles of my feet
all the little notes were printed there
in charcoal pencil

and somehow it pleased me
that the notes were there
imprinted on my feet--

footnotes.


________________________________________________________________
1. Like this.
2. To show where we found information, or sometimes to explain something further.
3. One teacher wrote "Very amusing," but another put two angry red question marks by each footnote.

OMG

Donna has been saying this for the past year at least, and she was the first one I heard saying oh em gee instead of just writing it as an abbreviation. But yesterday I was reading a student's essay to the class at her request, and when I got to the dialogue and read "OMG" as "oh my God!" I was corrected: "No no no! O M G!" so I read it over the right way.

Loose connection being, I was just reading the first post on the YA for Obama blog, by Judy Blume, and loved the second comment, by L.K. Madigan: "Thank you so much, Judy! (OMG, I just called Judy Blume 'Judy'!!!)"

The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Horse

Googling "Black Beauty" for some small detail for something I'm writing, I came across this and laughed really hard: "Sewell’s intention in writing the book was to promote the humane treatment of horses. Called the 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse,' Black Beauty is credited with having the greatest effect on the treatment of animals of any publication in history. The book resulted in legislation protecting horses and a changed public attitude about animal pain and the traditional and fashionable practices that caused suffering for horses."

Source: http://www.enotes.com/black-beauty