Final Project

For my final project I am working on spending time researching American Indian novels. I am excited because I contacted Debbie Reese to ask her to help me locate some exceptional young adult novels and she e-mailed me back three suggestions and I was able to track down all three novels. I have spent some time thinking about novels that I have read that had the theme of American Indians in them and more often than not they were like the My Heart is on the Ground Dear America book that we looked at in class. While I'm on this topic, I was a little bit surprised to then see a Dear America book listed as a good example of Hawaiian culture in one of our coursepack readings for this week. Is this an example of differing opinions or is quality control vastly different in the Dear America series?

While I was exploring Debbie Reese's blog she had a link to a blog "How to write a historical young adult novel with an Indian theme (for fun and profit)" While it was a very humorous list, it was sad to realize it was funny mostly because nearly everything she said was true. Some of the things on her list:
Name your characters in the traditional Indian way, using the formula that has been followed for decades: an adjective or participle followed by a noun.

In one of my other classes my group just finished reading Sing Down the Moon which was a Newberry Honor book. In it there are names like Bright Morning which clearly follows the formula.

Another requirement for writing a novel:
Never, ever have your Indian characters use contractions. Indians did not do that.

We saw this come up over and over in My Heart is on the Ground

For the full text of this blog post http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2008/02/beverly-slapins-how-to-write-historical.html

I definately recommend you check it out.

I'm so glad that I will have some examples of really good novels about Native Americans to share with you at the end of the class. Hopefully after this project I can find novels to use in my own classroom that won't make me cringe when I hear some of the things that were on the list that I linked to above.

Spanish italics

When I was reading through Becoming Naomi Leon and then some of the other books that we read in class I wondered why everytime a Spanish word was used it had to be in italics. This seems to go against the idea of using a Spanish word just because the author felt it was the only word that really fit there. Italics are generally designed to call attention to something. Why an author feels the need to draw attention to words that are not English made me think. Doesn't the attention create an environment of English and not English, of us and "the other". Perhaps I'm reading into it negatively. Instead of creating a dividing environment maybe the author just wanted the reader to celebrate the differences.

Maybe even more realistically, that's what the publisher asked for so they could market it as a more multicultural book. Parents might pick up a book with Spanish words in it thinking it will be great for their kids to learn a few new words. Like I talked about in class though, I am not sure if Spanish words can really be integrated into a book like the author wants and be a prominent vocabulary lesson at the same time. You will just end up with redundancy which might frustrate bilingual readers. I tried to look up this issue online but wasn't able to uncover anything specifically.

Overall, I just find it hard to believe that an author/publisher really wants to make a sentence flow smoothly with both English and Spanish words if every single Spanish word is differentiated by the use of italics to draw attention to its use. I will try to continue looking to see if I can find any information on this use.

Addition: I found this Q & A online talking about this issue

Dear Mexican: Why are words in Spanish in your column in italics? I feel that including Spanish and Spanglish slang in articles should be read in a natural, conversational way and not be treated specially. When I read these italicized words, I feel I should make quote signs with my fingers and read them in a more American accent. Maybe that's just the way I read them, but wouldn't it be more worthy to integrate those words into the American language? Either way, it's something that bugs me in general, not really aimed at your article.
Putting the "Fun" in "Fundamentalist Grammar"
Dear Wab: Although the Mexican treats American immigration law the same way his countrymen regard the U.S. soccer team, he must grovel to the caudillos that are his copy editors, all of whom would deport me if I didn't italicize Spanish words. It's an arcane rule devised long ago by gabachos who figured gabacho readers were too pendejos to know when a word was foreign. I agree that America should integrate more Spanish words than those found on menus and place names — that's why I use so many of them. Although some Chicano authors don't italicize Spanish or Spanglish words as a political statement against God-knows-what, I like slanting palabras — it's a constant reminder for gabachos to get with the programa.

Al Capone

I was reflecting on our previous discussion of Al Capone and of literature featuring disablities (for lack of a better term) in general. It really seems to me like it is the forgotten area of multicultural literature. I tried to reflect on my own reading as a student in elementary school and while I can recall reading books about people of various races, I cannot ever remember reading any sort of book that had people in it with disabilities. In fact, the only book I can remember at all had a main character that was blind, but that was a book I bought and read on my own outside of school. In high school, students that had severe physical or emotional learning disabilities were really kept separate from the rest of the students. They rode a separate bus and had their own classroom. This complete separation is really not beneficial to anyone. Students initial curiosity can lead eventually to discrimination. That is why it seems so important to include books featuring characters like this in them. In Al Capone the sister was not the main character, but it captured her life in a way that did not make her awkward or weird. The important part of the book was the relationship between two siblings. It is important for students to see that all people have qualities that make them unique and we should embrace that instead of being afraid of it.

Schneider Family Book Award

Our group conducted research into the Schneider Family Book Award. This award is sponsored by the American Library Association and is given out each year in three different categories, birth through grade school, middle school, and teens. The award honors an author or illustrator that has written about the experience of living with disabilities, either physical, mental, or emotional, for teens and children. The work must portray the person with disabilities living life to the fullest. The award was started in 1994 by Dr. Katherine Schneider and it was modeled after the Coretta Scott King award. As Dr. Schneider says, “The disability experience in these wonderful children’s books is a part of a character’s full life, not the focus of the life. . . . The bonus is that children get to experience someone else’s world which involves having a disability or having a family member with a disability.”

The award is given by a committee of 7 members selected by the ALA.

This years award winners are as follows:
Young Children- Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum by Robert Andrew Parker
Middle School- Waiting for Normal by Leslie Conner
Teen- Jerk, California by Jonathan Friesen

Another award winner was Becoming Naomi Leon which is one the books for our TE 448 class.

Organization of poetry

In class we started an interesting discussion pertaining to how the author of Bronx Masquerade organized her book in reference to the order of poems and chapters. Before class I hadn't really spent much time thinking about it but now it has raised some questions in my mind. I really enjoyed the book, especially the poetry, but I do often enjoy reading poetry. When I was reading this book I would read the chapters silently to myself but whenever I got to a poem I would have to read it aloud, I feel I can't appreciate poems as well unless I can really hear how they sound when they are being read. With that said, does it make a difference whether the poems come first or the chapter comes first? The way it was set up the reader read about the particular characters issues, then read the poem they had written. Someone raised the point that this really was opposite of how the characters in the book would have experienced it. When someone read their poem this would have been their first time looking deeper into their classmates feelings and experiences. Why then, would the author want the reader to have the background knowledge first?

What I really enjoy about poetry is the struggle combined with the mystery. Since poetry often is so brief it is difficult to understand the message the author might be trying to convey at first. It takes a lot of work to really get at the meaning behind a poem. Ultimately, you never really know if you're right or wrong, which is where the mystery comes in. When you know the author's background and reasons for writing the poem first, a lot of this is taken away. Yet I recognize that I am speaking from the perspective of someone that enjoys this about poetry. Evident even in our class, many students do not enjoy poetry and it is difficult to get them to read it. If the author was marketing this book at a junior high/high school age group she surely must have been aware of this. If her primary intention was to tell a story and have students enjoy the poetry she was writing, it may have been necessary to give background information first. This makes the poetry more understandable right away and perhaps allows the reader to track how some of the characters thoughts are expressed in his poetry.

It really is fascinating to think about all the choices that authors must make when writing a novel. So many things can impact the readers experience.

Habibi.. thoughts

I read through Habibi and when I finished it I wasn't quite sure what to think. So I decided to go through all of the coursepack readings and I still wasn't sure. Then I just sat and thought about the book for a veery long time and I realized there is a lot more to the novel than I originally caught. I found this letter that the author Naomi Nye wrote to "Would be Terrorists" http://godlas.myweb.uga.edu/shihabnye.html. She discusses how much time she spends writing in to newspapers, lawmakers, etc. regarding the United States unfair policies on Israel. This reminded me of a State News article a few weeks ago. I do not have a link for it but it was about two Arab American girls that were holding a sit in at their congressmen's office until he was willing to speak to them about the United States support for Israel in light of the recent conflict occuring there. Thinking about this side of the debate caused me to spend some time looking for examples of how Nye shows United States support towards Israel in the book and it cropped up several times. One time Liyana and her brother and directly addressing American citizens to explain to them how the United States supplies Israeli soldiers with guns and money. This is a very important issue for a lot of people but it seems like its something that does not get discussed very much. When I get some time I will need to go searching for more of Nye's writings to see how she writes about this issue even more.

Insider v Outsider

If I were to follow Shannon's personal definition of himself, then I would be nearly the same as him on all counts but gender. Growing up, many of the stories that I read were considered fairly mainstream literature and it was not hard to picture myself as any of the white female characters. They often had stories similar to mine, or at least close enough for me to imagine. Does this make me an insider? I'm not sure. I don't know how one goes about getting on the "inside". Maybe this is just because I have always benefited from being able to easily relate to literature that I am reading. Maybe I take it for granted. Does the skin color or gender or religion of the character matter more, or are the issues more important? Are the two so inextricably interwoven that they cannot be separated? I have difficulty believing that anyone can neatly fit into either group. Sometimes people can be in and then they can be out because everyone is made up of their own history and their own problems and views. I think what is important is evaluating your own stance on every text, whether it makes you feel like an insider or an outsider, and then to ask yourself why this is so. Good literature should help you look inside yourself. This can still be accomplished whether you feel like the character in the book mirrors your own life or not.