Monica Edinger's Blog, page 97

A Cosmic Video of a Cosmic Visit

Recently my class had the wonderful experience of a Skype visit with Cosmic (and Millions and Framed) author Frank Cotrell Boyce.  We videoed it, edited it, and the result is available to view at my school's website here.  (For anyone interested it also gives a sense of my classroom and students — they asked wonderful questions!)

Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers' We Are America

Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myer's We Are America provides a personal and moving window into what it means to be American.  Here are father and son on the inspiration for the book:

A Pair of Newbery Winners

Yesterday I was honored to moderate a discussion with this year's and last year's Newbery winners Clare Vanderpool and Rebecca Stead for a whole auditorium full of Random House folk. Clare and Rebecca were fantastic, of course. Among other things they talked about THE CALL (the early morning phone call informing each that they'd won the award), school visits, writing, setting, genre, family, and a whole lot more. Clare and Rebecca's responses to my questions made me realize how much Moon Over Manifest and When You Reach Me have in common —  a strong sense of place based on each author's own experiences, intriguing and unconventional threads of plot, a setting back in time, and more.  Thank you so much, Random House, for inviting me to do this.

photo from @randomhousekids

Monsters

I recently read A Monster Calls written by Patrick Ness from an idea by the late Siobhan Dowd. Because it doesn't publish in the U. S. until September I was going to hold off writing about it, but the announcement of Bin Laden's death following so closely on the anniversary of Hitler's made me change my mind.

One of the many extraordinary aspects of Ness's work is the way he presents the nuances of good and evil and complicates the very notion of monster. In his earlier Chaos Walking series the monsters were absolutist and terrorist humans involved with the colonization of a planet, each one convinced that the dreadful things that they did were done for righteous reasons. In A Monster Calls (the first chapter can be read here) the landscape is not literally as vast as a planet; instead it is the smaller world of a boy in emotional anguish. Yet even in this very intimate environment the monsters are just as complex and almost equally unfathomable.

As I consider the understandable responses to the deaths of real life monsters like Bin Laden and Hitler, I'm reminded how complicated good and evil are. And also, that the end of a bad person doesn't mean the end of bad things, sadly.

One of My Favorite Saints

As a young person I loved Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan and recall memorizing one of the title character's monologues for some reason I can't recall. What I do remember is that it was the time of the Vietnam War to which I was passionately opposed and so I was quite obsessed with Shaw's pacifism. Around that time I also became a lifelong fan of Tom Lehrer, the witty mathematician at the keyboard. And so thought of both when I saw the following clever video of a song from a very worthy project described by one of its participants here.

Lucy Knisley's Vision of Harry and Co

Above is a tiny taste of Lucy Knisley's delightful compressed comic renditions of the first four Harry Potter books.  Via the very sharp-eyed Phil Nel.

Suzy Lee's Alice

Thanks to Phil Nel for pointing me to this post about Suzy Lee's Alice in Wonderland.  As soon as I saw it I realized I had the book, but had it long before I'd seen any of Suzy's fabulous picture books (such as Wave and Mirror). Now looking at it I recognize her style completely.  Delightful, of course. And eerie, of course, too.

Peter Hessler on Mortenson

For years, I've found it hard to talk about Mortenson's books. They often come up in conversation, because I'm a former Peace Corps teacher who lived in Asia for more than a decade. And yet that experience made me wary of any simple narrative that involves an American helping people overseas. Like many volunteers, I often felt overwhelmed and ineffective; it took two years of diligent study just to gain a decent facility with the Chinese language. I was still making cultural mistakes up until the day I left. If anything, I felt most positive about the Peace Corps experience because my impact was limited—I left without building anything, or changing the culture, or revolutionizing classroom patterns in my school. I always viewed it as an exchange: there was some value to my teaching, and in the meantime I learned a great deal from my students, colleagues, and friends. It seemed a tiny part of an incremental, long-term process, as China engaged with the outside world. And the key element was that the Chinese remained in charge—it was up to them to improve their country.

The above sentiments are excerpted from the New Yorker's Peter Hessler's thoughtful piece "What Mortenson Got Wrong".  My own Peace Corps experience in Sierra Leone has caused me to feel similarly and I also struggle with the way so many (especially the young people at my school) are inspired by charismatic outsiders when they chose to contribute.  One of the many things I appreciated about my Peace Corps experience was being forced to do it for two years, not one or a few months. As Hessler points out it takes a long time to even begin to get a handle on a culture so different from one's own.

Cosmic Skyping

Yesterday my class and I had a fabulous Skype visit with the delightful Frank Cottrell Boyce.  I was a big fan of his book Millions and then became an even bigger fan of his latest book, Cosmic.  I love reading it aloud and can say with complete assurance that the three classes I've read it aloud to are as enthused about it as I am.

While I was excited about yesterday's opportunity I also was nervous.  It is one thing to Skype with one person, computer to computer, and quite another to do it with a whole class.  Also, I'd finished reading the book a while ago — what if the kids had forgotten it or had lousy questions for Frank?

Turned out I had no need to fret.  One of our wonderful school tech folks set everything up and used a camera to zoom in on the different kids as they questioned Frank and saw to it that all went smoothly. And the kids' questions — they were excellent.  Frank told us all sorts of great things about his development as a writer, much about the inspiration and writing of Cosmic, and a bit about his newest project — a sequel to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He showed us the cover and it looks fun. While I'm always a bit skeptical of this sort of thing (another author taking over something from a deceased author), I've liked so much what Frank has done to date that I'm hopeful.

We recorded the session and, once it is edited down, plan to put it up on the school's website.  In the meantime do read my students' virtual thank you notes on their blogs.  The links are all here.  My thanks to Frank and Walden Media for this great experience.

The Complexities of Help

My experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone in the 1970s, my work there and subsequently with a variety of NGOs, a graduate degree in International Education, my later travel to various needy spots in the world, my work as an educator, and my observations of the way well-intended outsiders (adults and children) respond to humanitarian issues world-wide has made me very aware of the complexities of help. And so reading Jon Krakauer's piece on Greg Mortenson had me saddened to see such well intentions go so far astray, but also hopeful that it will be a wake-up call to others who mean well and want to help.