As Codell explained on her Web site, "It was surprisingly difficult to recollect a story off of the top of my head. I promised I would think about it and see if I could come up with anything else. Set in the late s, Sing a Song of Tuna Fish provides a look at Codell's upbringing in a working-class Chicago neighborhood. The author tells of her unhappy stay at an unstructured alternative school, a ferocious snowstorm that shut down the city, and her mother's plan to egg an expensive car that was blocking a fire hydrant.
Remarked Booklist contributor Ilene Cooper, "Codell's small, intimate work is the very model of what this kind of book should be. Diary of a Fairy Godmother was borne of the author's dissatisfaction with the story of Cinderella. Why didn't she ask for a wand? Set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, the tyrant boss of a waistcoat factory is visited by three spirits on the last night of Hanukkah, delivering "Scroogemacher" to scenes of battling Macabees, new immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, New York's tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and a vision of his grandchildren keeping traditions in the face of assimilation.
Though he may not have intended it, these same themes reverberated in the lives of Jewish people during the mass migration of immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Codell is also the author of How to Get Your Child to Love Reading: For Ravenous and Reluctant Readers Alike, "an exuberant treasure trove for parents who want to help their children develop a love of reading," noted a critic in Publishers Weekly.
You even bad mouth pizza. Can busy parents become overloaded? ERC: It's got a lot of stuff. I don't want parents to be overwhelmed. The more that parents know about books the better. Children don't necessarily need to be rewarded for reading or perhaps they might benefit more with other ways of rewarding reading -- besides pizza.
What about rewarding them with things that build on communication and the love of reading -- making pizza together, coupons to stay up late and read, hobby items -- things that bring families closer together. ERC: It's not that hard to think of ideas for reading. It's hard to get kids in a place where they're receptive -- especially young adults.
I see the analogy with dating: You go on a lot of dates and don't necessarily connect with anyone. You keep on going out and find the right one. Required reading can be like assigned reading dates -- most people don't connect that way. Just like booksellers, I want to put great books in the hands of great children. No child is a lost cause. I think reading aloud is essential. Reading aloud to a child is a civil rights issue, they must have it.
Older children, too. Don't get snobby about picture books. They are great for the reluctant or not-that-proficient reader to read to younger children. Also children love when grown-ups love something. I really needed to revisit the virtue of patience as technology failed us again and again.
I really needed to teach step by step, paying extra careful attention that nobody fell through the cracks. I really needed to invent new units, revisit the curriculum, reinvent my whole methodology for presenting to a roomful…now a screenful…of children. I needed to make things more hands on, create new and more dynamic projects to engage them, and with that, new ways to assess them. I had to do things differently, the children have done things differently.
And I daresay, if we are being perfectly honest, even after the best-case scenario in which we get the spread of the virus under control, if we give any credence to things like, oh, climate change, maybe deep down we believe we might have to do this again sometime in the decades to come…and next time, at least, we might know a little better how to do it. Is that so bad? So many school mission statements include creating 21st century learners. The pandemic is surely the cause of situational depression, stressful childcare crises, boredom and feelings of isolation to those families privileged not to have experienced the more enduring grief and trauma of job loss, home loss, illness or death.
But just like I had to discover as a teacher that what I was suffering was not always my fault as much as a void in receiving what I need to do better, so is it time for Americans to translate their needs into policy. In the long run this may prove more effective than scapegoating and martyring the teachers whose job it is to deliver instruction , a role I have heard belittled too often these days, as if it is some little peripheral little thing and not what requires deep relationships to really work, the thing that empowers the skills that lead to opportunity, the thing with the ability to make so many of the shortcomings of childhood ephemeral.
America uses teachers and staff as babysitters, as mental health counselors, as caterers, as custodians, and then resents them when they ask to teach remotely for the health of themselves or their own families or suggest, as Alderwoman King of the 4th Ward in Chicago so bluntly put it, we don't want to " ride two horses with one ass.
We may be a workforce comprised largely of women who are finally learning to say what we need…and some of what we need are boundaries. And, I might hazard to suggest, there's nothing wrong with your child being taught by someone who knows how to model saying no.
Grown-ups: p lease. Stop saying what a failure remote learning is within earshot of your children. Please appreciate that kids are not only socialized by other children; traditionally throughout history and certainly in times of extenuating circumstances, children were socialized by their own families, children did not spend so many hours at school, it's only our modern condition that makes us so much less practiced and makes it so scary.
You have a role to play that can make or break your child's experience and impact everyone else's as well. Remote learning can be done well with the proper mitigations at least as well as in-person learning can be done well with the proper mitigations, neither of which teachers in urban districts generally trust they will receive outside of their own volition, as evidenced by clashes…and precedent.
If you have righteous indignation about kids not returning to in-person learning during a pandemic, maybe redirect it working toward accessible Wifi and equipment for all families, a school library and trained librarian in every school, hiring enough people to clean and fix filthy and rodent-infested buildings, effecting gun control legislation, addressing food insecurity and lack of affordable health care and child care and putting a stop to the funding of schools based on property taxes and thus breaching Brown v.
Board every day I am proud of my students and the way they have carried through this chapter of what will be history. I am proud of their hard work and what they have accomplished, even while their internet connection dropped and reconnected repeatedly.
I know these kids are adjusting and sometimes suffering, I know this situation is stressful and strange, I know they do not have all the resources they need for this to be optimal. But I also know there are some kids who were socially awkward or anxious, who were distracted by social drama, bullying or neighborhood terrors, kids who needed to have more physicality than sitting at a desk all day, kids who needed more time with and attention from their families and they are shining in this moment.
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