What we have here is a failure of imagination

I was wishing for a high school English class with whom to discuss irony when I read this last week:

That master of horror himself Stephen King is throwing the towel on fighting the monster is just a little too on the nose here. 

Birthday of E.B. White

And let us all take inspiration from Fern's mother in Charlotte's Web:

“Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly.” 

Happy Banned Books Week!

You can read more about Banned Books Week here.
The hashtag on Twitter is #bannedbooksweek and there are some Google hangouts planned with challenged authors.
Of course, the best way to celebrate is to read a banned book!

And should you think this isn't still very much an issue, check out what happened in Randolph County, North Carolina last week  Since the news has gone national, the board is now reconsidering the ban. 

Did you know the Pope had been a literature teacher?

His interview (published in English in America magazine) is going to make headlines for other reasons, but I liked the reflection of Pope Francis on teaching literature:

“It was a bit risky,” he answers. “I had to make sure that my students read El Cid. But the boys did not like it. They wanted to read Garcia Lorca. Then I decided that they would study El Cid at home and that in class I would teach the authors the boys liked the most. Of course, young people wanted to read more ‘racy’ literary works, like the contemporary La Casada Infiel or classics like La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas. But by reading these things they acquired a taste in literature, poetry, and we went on to other authors. And that was for me a great experience. I completed the program, but in an unstructured way—that is, not ordered according to what we expected in the beginning, but in an order that came naturally by reading these authors. And this mode befitted me: I did not like to have a rigid schedule, but rather I liked to know where we had to go with the readings, with a rough sense of where we were headed."

 Like many (most?) Jesuits, Pope Francis taught prior to his ordination as a priest; in 1964 and 1965, he taught literature and psychology at the Colegio de la Inmaculada and at the Colegio del Salvador.

"everyone had learned how careful you have to be when dealing with figures"

In this season of testing, a reminder from E.B. White.

Read the caterpillar for the record!

As reported here and elsewhere, today is "Read for the Record" day, when teachers, parents, librarians, and community leaders across the country all read the same book to mark the "largest shared reading experience." The event is an effort to bring attention to early childhood literacy.
This year's book is Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
You can read the book yourself, or you can hear Eric Carle read it.

And once you've read it, you can take a quiz to see if you were really paying attention to what the caterpillar ate!

And for Poem in your Pocket Day

Mr. Monfredo carried through on his mention at the last meeting and called on both the mayor and the superintendent to read the poem they'd brought in honor of "Poem in your Pocket" day.

Mayor Lukes read "The Lamplighter" by Robert Louis Stevenson (if you have a copy, you can find it also in A Child's Garden of Verses), including the gloss that Leerie is the lamplighter's name, and that Stevenson was sickly as a child (thus the "But I, when I am stronger and can chose what I'm to do" line).
Superintendent Loughlin read "Sea Fever" by John Masefield (some of whose work her father set to music), the opening lines are the instantly recognizable "I must go down to the seas again/ to the lonely sea and the sky."