Benjamin Ludwig's Blog: Perspectives

Interview with author Annette LeBlanc Cate

After reading and reviewing Seven Little Duckling (Candlewick, January 2025), I had the privilege of interviewing author Annette LeBlanc Cate. We talked about how she became an author/illustrator, her process, and advice for young artists.

Find her online at https://www.facebook.com/AnnetteLeblancCate/ and at https://www.instagram.com/annet.lecate/ Her books are available at your local independent bookstore, and at Bookshop.org!

Where did you get the idea for Seven Little Ducklings?

Sometimes it’s hard to say where ideas come, exactly, but this one is easy! Seven Little Ducklings was sparked by looking at cute animal videos on Facebook (yes, yes, frittering my time away when I should be working, I am very good at this, possibly world-class champion level), specifically one photo that showed a mother merganser (a type of duck) followed by at least 50 little babies. Honestly hard to say if they were all baby mergansers. This prompted me say to myself, “Wow, look at that mother duck, just swimming along, all business as usual, proud as can be. Who knows how she got all those ducklings. Hey, wait a minute…!”

Seven Little Ducklings seems (to me, anyway), to have a very clear message. Did you write this book with a message in mind? Or did the message emerge out of the plot?

As a children’s author, I am very aware that a great idea is not enough on its own. It’s important, but it’s not everything. A great idea has to have enough momentum and rhythm to last 32 pages (or 40, the number I was happily granted for Seven Little Ducklings!), and – I deeply believe – has to have a real reason to exist in the world. In other words, the message. I instantly loved the idea of a mother duck with all these babies. It was a cute idea of course, but what else could it be besides just cute? The original idea thankfully blossomed very quickly, almost on its own, and with no help from me. It went like this: “Yes, a mother duck… she has all these babies…but you know what would be EVEN MORE funny and adorable? Babies who are not even close to her own species (proven by the internet that it does happen, as I cite the example of the mother owl in a tree with a baby wood duck…), maybe not EVEN BIRDS…so this mom duck, she has all these babies not of her own, but she will take them in because SHE IS A MOM, and that’s what MOMS do.”

And well, there it was. The story came together very quickly. It didn’t feel labored to me in any way, which I think is very important. A picture book has to have a message, a reason for being, but it also must feel very organic, like a built-in part of the story, as opposed to a story with a Message forced on top of it. The message that I hope shines through the silliness is that parents are there to always love, care for, and fiercely protect the children who need them, whether those children are personally hatched from them, or not! It felt very seamless, and to me that’s very beautiful!

My favorite part is when the mother duck says, “’Let’s get this straight / Five more children than eggs / They can’t all be mine...’ Then she counts all their faces / and knows that it’s fine.” Is this mother-to-all theme based on any mothers you’ve known in real life?

Oh I’m so glad that you like this part! I like that the mother is more than just heroic; she’s kind of goofy too. Because even though ducks are quite beautiful, they’re also pretty odd. I like stuff to be funny, but I also like things to be poignant, to me that’s the sweet spot I aim for. My own mother, who was always so welcoming to any friends we brought home, was definitely the “Food is love, and everybody gets fed” type. I strive to be that way, too! I remember the mother of my childhood best friend as well. She was so kind to me, always, and I will never forget that. Then there were lovely mothers of my college friends, and my own mother-in-law, who was also a very warm and giving person. Growing up in Waltham in the 1970’s, most families I knew were very large (and very Catholic). I didn’t know anyone without both a mother and a father. The Boston Globe had a column in the Sunday paper called “Wednesday’s Child” which was devoted to (mostly special-needs) kids in need of adoptive parents. As I knew of virtually no non-traditional families, I couldn’t even imagine such a thing. How did kids have no parents? How could a kid just be so adrift? This made me very sad at the time (and of course it still does), that there were children with no one to take care of them.

What were some of your own favorite books when you were little?

This is the best question of all time, and I don’t think I’ve ever been officially asked this!

When we were very young, my mother subscribed us to The Parents’ Magazine Press, and I remember these books the most. We went to the library a lot, but the books we owned are the ones most ingrained in my memory. My all-time favorite when I was little is Old Black Witch by Wende and Harry Devlin, I think because it was my mother’s favorite to read (with witch voice and everything!), so it was the one she read most often, and therefore it’s cemented into memory, specifically in the “happy memory” department. My mother read to us every night, and my older sisters read to us little ones, too. There were seven kids in the family, with 15 years between the oldest and youngest, and when I was older, I read to my little siblings.

Anyway, I was just teaching a little class at our town arts collaborative, and I brought my very, very old copy Old Black Witch to show them. It has no cover and it’s all mangled… but the art! I loved it then and I still love it. Probably my first real art inspiration, it’s got such beautiful pen-and-ink work. I learned to read, I swear, instantaneously. We had a bunch of old “Dick and Jane” style books lying around the house that I pored over endlessly. In first grade my teacher made it all make sense, and I said to myself, “Oh, THAT’S how it works,” and that was that, I could read! From then on, I read voraciously. I especially loved all the Black Stallion books (I adored the illustrations in these), and all the Marguerite Henry books. Because we had so many kids in the house, there were always books around, old books from my sisters, classics like Little Women, Trixie Belden mysteries. Once in school they showed us the movie for Charlotte’s Web. I knew I had to read the book. Then I had to read Stuart Little, and that brought me to truly feel the link between story and illustration. Garth Williams is probably my strongest art influence. Somewhere along the line I discovered the Winnie-the-Pooh books and the illustrations of E.H. Shepard, and to me, both are absolute perfection. My best friend growing up was four years older than me (and, interestingly, still is) and was always giving me books to read, and by 12 I was reading The Hobbit and Watership Down and The Once and Future King… all still my all-time favorites. I also loved Anne of Green Gables.

How did you learn to draw? What’s your favorite medium?

I feel like I didn’t really learn to draw. I just could! Always could. It was very natural to me. I think somewhere there is a picture of me on my fifth birthday, and I have the most amazing present: a sketchpad of very grown-up paper! This was AWESOME, fancy paper just for me! With six siblings, there weren’t many things “just for you.” I’m not meaning this in a sad way, it’s just how it was. Even though I drew well, I wasn’t the only one who drew, all of us kids did. We went through so many of those cheap manila doodle pads that my mother cut up brown paper bags for us to draw on, and I think my father absconded with a huge chalkboard from his office for us, and that was absolutely the BEST. We drew constantly, all of us, making up stories as we went along. If we got a new box of crayons, I would sneak off with the black one. That one was MINE, the best for drawing. When I used up the black crayon I would move on to the brown, because that was second best. Then bittersweet, which was an okay red-brown, then blue-green. For some reason I did not care to draw with purple, even though it was dark. Do you get the feeling I was rather a strange child? We had coloring books, and I liked those. Coloring was acceptable to me as a past-time, but clearly NOT as important as drawing.

When I was a kid, there was a store within walking distance of our house. It was called “Moe Blacks,” and it was a sort of a precursor to the big odd-lot stores you see nowadays. You could get all sorts of interesting things there. They had a stationery section, and you could buy a little set with a bottle of black India ink with a dip-pen, which fascinated me. I HAD to learn! Then I found that the paint-and-art-supply store downtown sold all the little separate pen nibs from tiny drawers in little cases (My favorite way to buy anything! My childhood art store is still open, and they still have the pen nibs. These are getting harder and harder to find. I had to make an emergency stop there for them when I was working on my dragon book), and that was it. Virtually every dollar I earned from babysitting went to the art supply store. All these years later, simple crow-quill dip pens and black ink is still my favorite way to work! I’m most happy and comfortable in the black-and-white world. Dark smeary mysterious pencil and charcoal too, but black ink will always be my favorite!

Do you consider yourself more a writer or an artist?

Definitely an artist! I went to art school to learn to be an illustrator, but have never taken a writing class of any kind. Whenever I write anything, it feels very much like I am hanging onto a cliff by my fingernails, even right now as I am writing this. Sometimes it feels like I’m completely over my head, and the agonizing hard work of writing makes me feel very sorry for myself, causing me to wail in self-pity about how I, a complete fraud, have no business doing this, and how I am absolutely over-stepping my boundaries. Whose idea was this anyway, actually writing books, not just sensibly drawing the pictures?

But honestly, I have always written. I was a good-enough writer all through school, also a prolific letter-writer and endless notebook-scrawler. I knew if I wanted to bring all the stories in my head to life, there was going to have to be some hard work. Drawing is easy, writing… not so much!

Something that struck me when I read the book is how perfect it is for reading aloud. Did you read it aloud to anyone while you were writing it? Also, what role does reading aloud play in your creative (writing) process?

Oh, I am SO happy you noticed this! I love that sometimes people mention that my books are fun and easy to read out loud! This is very important to me.

Yes, I do read aloud as I write, and I am actually reading this out loud right now! There are a few reasons why. The first is that yes, I am sensitive to the fact that deep down I don’t think I’m a very good writer; I make a lot of grammar mistakes and such, and I feel I will notice the mistakes more if I hear them. I like my sentences to feel put together right, to have a good cadence and rhythm, to have interesting words in the right places, and not having them stick out awkwardly. Above all I need to sound like myself – really myself, not someone kind of like me, someone putting on airs. It has to be authentically me.

Reading out loud really helped me with my second book, Look Up! It’s a non-fiction book about bird-watching, and there was a LOT of information to fit into a very small number of pages. I had to be clear, and reading endlessly out loud helped me to understand where things were confusing (If I was confused, that was bad enough. Imagine the poor reader!), and this also helped me maintain my own personal voice, even as I felt so out-of-my-depth. It made me feel grounded. Even if I was writing something hard, it was still me in there! I know I have my weaknesses: descriptive language and just getting characters to move through a story. It wasn’t apparent just how hard this sort of thing was until I lived through my third book, A Dragon used to Live Here, an early grade chapter book of nearly 300 pages… whew!

I also am a huge believer in the power of reading aloud to children, and want to make the experience as easy and fun as possible. As a mother of two, I understand that when a book is not so fun to read out loud, it is not likely to stay in the rotation. I read to my sons a LOT, and there were some books I had to hide because they just felt like too much of a chore. I read to them even through their teens, and even now that they’re pretty much grown up, we still sometimes read out loud on vacation, usually local ghost stories, that sort of thing. Dave Barry travelogues are also very popular. Books that are well-written are a delight to share! I would like people to feel that about my books.

What advice do you have for students whose families (or friends) might discourage them from pursuing a career in the arts?

I so badly want to be able to say, “Don’t listen to them! Follow your heart and go for it!” but I know that is very vague, so vague that it isn’t exactly helpful. I wish it was that easy, but it isn’t! Life can be hard, there’s no sugar-coating that – and the people who tell you being an artist is no way to make a living are most likely are telling you that because they care about you, and don’t want to see you struggle. A career in the arts is never a sure thing, but if you know, deep in your heart, that being an artist is what you need to be, if you feel that compulsion, I think you owe it to yourself to try. And this is where I can give the only advice I have, and that is to keep an open mind, and know that there are so, so many ways to be an artist, so many ways to get there, so many paths. Those paths aren’t always terribly clear-cut. It may take longer to get there than you think, and when you get there, it might not be what you thought it would be, but that might be okay, too. Here’s my most practical wisdom: Keep learning! Try to take art classes, meet artists and learn from them! Work on your own. Draw on your own! Fill a sketchbook with drawings of your room, your sneakers, your cat, your own beautiful face in the mirror. Write. Keep a journal, write about the things that make you happy, make lists of all the things you find annoying (and illustrate them, of course) play music, and try to make friends with people who like to do this stuff, too! When you can, go to museums and galleries, go to art fairs, figure out what’s the kind of art that makes your heart soar. Look at art books, read about famous artists, try to look at the world through their eyes, but understand that seeing the world through YOUR eyes is what being an artist is all about. Know your voice is valid and think about where your own voice, your own way of seeing, might take you. Keep your eyes, and your heart, open!

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Published on June 07, 2025 08:19

A Rainbow Collection: The Day the Shelves Got Colorful

My latest article, A Rainbow Collection: The Day the Shelves Got Colorful , was published in the February, 2025 print edition of School Library Journal, as well as online here . The full text of the article is below.

Montage by SLJ. Source art: Getty Images

I was out for one day. One.

It was my final year as a fifth to eighth grade language arts teacher. I was studying to become a library media specialist and the class I was taking at the time was called Cataloging and Curation. I had call numbers, genres, and access on my mind.

Inspired, I decided to have my seventh and eighth graders generify our classroom library, which was previously organized only in terms of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

It would take us four days, or four classes, to sort the books into genres. From the very start, the kids did a great job and had some important discussions about genre. What’s the difference between Adventure books and General Fiction? Should there be a Romance section? Is YA always characterized by romantic elements? In addition to these ongoing conversations and decision-making sessions, I did a lot of weeding.

There was a student in my homeroom, a fifth grader named Aria. Artsy and supremely talented, she was always sketching in her notebook, coloring, and cutting shapes from colored paper. She was also the unofficial class leader. If Aria said the class was going to play Museum during recess, the class played Museum. If she said it was time for quiet reading, then that’s what they did.

She let me know that the younger students were jealous that their older counterparts had been involved in organizing the classroom library. Aria further remarked that the newly organized books looked boring. She liked the way books looked in our local bookstore, with forward-facing covers and stacks artfully arranged on tables.

On the fourth and final day of sorting the books into separate piles, which happened to be a Friday, I let the students know that I’d be out on Monday. One day.

“Don’t touch the books, please,” I told all my classes. “They’re grouped and piled according to genre. We’ll alphabetize and get them on shelves when I return.”

Monday came and went. I returned to school the next day to find a note on my door. It read, “We fixed the books!” The handwriting was unmistakably Aria’s, complete with her signature, long-stemmed final a arching up and over the letter like an @ sign.

When I walked in, I immediately saw that the books were no longer on the counter. They were on the shelves and, from my distant vantage point, the sight was somehow beautiful.

But how had the students alphabetized the books so quickly in so little time? Each class was only 55 minutes, and I’d left multiple reading and writing assignments. Instantly I imagined students in all four grade levels working together, placing the circle stickers I’d purchased to mark fiction, nonfiction, and poetry on the book spines. I imagined older students helping younger students. But I hadn’t told anyone where the stickers were and they weren’t easy to find—behind the highlighters and boxes of dry-erase markers in the closet. Maybe they’d gone exploring and found them on their own.

As I walked towards the books, I marveled at how nice they looked on the shelves. The colors seemed to flow together like a rainbow.

A rainbow? Sure enough, there were red books on the far left, yellow followed by green, then blue in the middle, and purple on the far right.

They’d organized the entire classroom library—upwards of 2,500 books֫—according to the visible spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. The black, gray, and white books were on a separate shelf at the front of the room. There were no stickers anywhere.

All four days of sorting had been undone in one 55-minute class period by a single class of fifth graders, led by Aria, whose artistic sensibility demanded a different kind of order—one that she’d imposed with perfect mathematical cut? Not sure why it’s scientific precision.

Every staff member had an opinion. The social studies teacher was impressed by the different perspective. The math teacher couldn’t understand why we weren’t using the Dewey Decimal System. The science teacher, who openly admits he doesn’t like to read, was proud that his students remembered the correct order of ROYGBIV.

And me? I went through a range of emotions. First I was surprised, then mad. But the anger was short-lived, replaced by a feeling of dumbfoundedness. Finally I was just plain worried because I had to tell Aria and her class that this new system wasn’t going to work, and the older students, who worked so hard to organize the books by genre, would have a fit. (This is all new/revised.)

Then Aria herself arrived. Instead of waiting for me to act surprised and pleased, she had questions.

The biggest had to do with the tan books, she explained. Is tan closer to white or brown? Where does brown fall on the spectrum? These are important things to consider, and they led us to Google. Turns out brown falls between red and orange. Even so, Aria explained, a very light tan can seem off-white. So does it belong with the white books or with the brown?

These questions were so interesting—downright exciting—that I let the rainbow stand, and we continued our discussion into the week.

Meanwhile, one of Aria’s friends tried to find a copy of The Witches by Roald Dahl (yellow) and couldn’t find it anywhere. Another wanted The Hunger Games (black). Though several friends had a vague memory of the cover being darkish, they had to look it up on Amazon to settle the dispute.

Eventually Aria figured out that organizing by color wasn’t the most efficient system for finding books. She decided that organizing in terms of “what they’re about” (her way of expressing genre) would be better. We arranged to have her work with the seventh and eighth graders to reorganize the books from scratch. They were furious, at first, but when they saw how sincere Aria was in her desire to create a usable system, most of them came around.

In the end, I realized that any organizational structure imposed upon a set of books—or anything else—poses challenges, all of which require an inquiry approach to resolve. It’s important to differentiate between inquiry and research here. Research is the process of finding a specific answer—the answer, as it were. Inquiry is the process of asking questions to plumb greater depths. Or better, how a circle of questions can reveal different perspectives on a given topic.

Research could never yield a universal solution to the problem of organizing a library, because different communities have different organizational needs and preferences. Inquiry, on the other hand, allowed Aria to understand that there are different ways to do things. She learned that there are decisions she herself would have to make, and that as long as she gathered enough information, she had every right to make them. She learned color theory, too.

Sometimes a teacher’s job is to make lemonade out of lemons, or in this case, letting a rainbow grow from what otherwise might have been a functional (and uninspired) paint-by-number. Ultimately, the systems of organization we adopt, choose, or invent are reflections of ourselves. As a new librarian at a new school, I think a genrefied collection driven by student input is probably the way to go. I don’t know it will ever have quite the same visual impact as Aria’s library. But I do hope that it will inspire the same level of inquiry.

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Published on February 25, 2025 10:51

Interview with author Lisa Rogers

Lisa Rogers became inspired to write for children during her career as an elementary school librarian. She is the award-winning author of the picture book biographies Beautiful Noise: The Music of John Cage, illustrated by Il Sung Na (Random House/Anne Schwartz Books); 16 Words: William Carlos And “The Red Wheelbarrow”,” illustrated by Chuck Groenink (Random House/Schwartz & Wade), and the rhyming picture book Hound Won’t Go, illustrated by Meg Ishihara (Albert Whitman), inspired by her rescue dog. She has several other books coming out soon, including Joan Mitchell Paints a Symphony (Astra/Calkins Creek, February 2025), which I interviewed her about recently. Our conversation is below!

(One final note before we get started - To order signed copies of Lisa’s book, visit Wellesley Books’ website where you can place an order online. Or, if you’re in the area, stop by 82 Central Street Wellesley, MA 02482. Always support independent bookstores! )

First, I have to say I really loved this book! I didn’t think of it as a picture book at all, but as a biography about an artist written specifically for other artists. What are your thoughts about the intended audience for Joan Mitchell Paints a Symphony, and for picture books in general?

Thanks so much for your kind words! I am glad that you loved this book, and I hope readers do, too. One of the reasons that I write nonfiction picture books is to inspire others. When I was in school, I wanted to know how people became who they became. How did a scientist come to a discovery? How did an activist gain the courage to act? How did artists and writers find inspiration? I’m fascinated when I learn something about that inspiration. I want to share that with others, so they too might be inspired to try something that seems out of reach.

For Joan Mitchell Paints a Symphony, I wanted to show how she used her emotions and memories to make her artwork. Even if you don’t make art, you might be inspired in other ways by looking closely at her artwork. Think of a connection to your own experiences. Think of how it makes you feel and what it makes you wonder about. Can you "see" a place or people you love in your mind? Can you put yourself there in your imagination? That’s what Joan Mitchell did.

Readers can learn something from every book. I strongly believe that picture books are for everyone. Picture books are created with a great deal of care and have depth and layers of meaning that anyone, of any age, can appreciate if they take the time to think and feel.

And similarly, do you think artists are different from other people? Joan Mitchell was pretty amazing!

Artists (and writers) are like other people in most ways, but one way in which they might be different is that they have an inner thought process that fosters creativity. Maybe they pay more attention to what’s around them. Maybe they take more time to think about what they see and hear. Maybe their emotions become an important part of what they create.

Notice the incredible variations in the way people paint and draw and the way they write! All types of art and writing have value. To me, what’s most important is for each person to create something that’s true to who they are, and to not compare themselves with others. Our own way of creating is an incredible strength that makes our work important and true.

When you were in school, did you consider yourself an artist? What were your dreams?

I wanted to be an artist. I loved the illustrations in books, and I loved looking art in museums. I sketched things around me and made a series of cartoons with my own characters. I drew all the time, but was not brave enough to take art classes until I was an adult. Now, I paint and draw as a way to understand what I’m feeling, and that helps my writing.

I also wanted to become an author. I remember writing a poem sitting in a peach tree in my backyard! When I was old enough to work, I took a job shelving books in my town’s public library. I dreamed that one day my book would be on those shelves. I never met an author until I was an adult, so I had no idea how to make that happen. Now, it’s much easier to meet authors and illustrators virtually and in person and learn from them. If you dream of becoming an artist and/or writer, don’t wait! You can draw now, and you can write now, and create in your own, unique way.

I think it’s really neat that you wanted to be an artist when you were in school. A lot of students want to become illustrators, or dancers, or songwriters, but they just don’t know how to get started. What was it that made you decide to finally take an art class? Also, did you take any classes on how to be a writer?

When I signed up for an art class, it was because finally decided that it was time to learn more about creating art. I was always worried that my work wouldn’t be good enough. I now know that the wonderful thing about the arts is that, while you can always learn, you will have your own style, or find your own style, in any art form. Comparing yourself to others limits yourself instead of helping you grow.

My wish for you is to feel brave enough to try something new. It might not be perfect at first. It most likely won’t. But you will have made something! That’s a huge achievement. With my stories, the first draft is never perfect. I revise and revise and sometimes rewrite the entire story in a new way. With my paintings, I go back and add paint and sometimes paint over it all and start again. If you don’t ever start, you have nothing to work on and improve.

I have taken many, many classes and attended many webinars and conferences on writing. I still do! Learning and growing as a writer is important to me. It keeps me fresh and every time I take a class, I come away with new ideas on ways to write my stories. Spending time listening to others talk about their creative process can open new ways of thinking about my work.

I think students will be surprised to hear that you paint as a way to understand what you’re feeling. We’re often told that art is a way to “express ourselves,” but what you’re talking about seems very different. Could you talk more about how people can use art to understand something, as opposed to express it?

When I paint, I’m switching my creative brain to something that seems different than writing, but both painting and writing are acts of bravery for me. I have to feel something about what I am creating. Like my best writing, my best paintings come when I reflect on what I am doing and the inner reason for doing it. Not because a color looks good there or a word seems right there, but because I have something to say in words and in paint. It takes time to figure out what that something is.

I think that what I am trying to find is what writers call "the why." Why is it important? What does it mean to you? It can also be called the heart--something you must feel deeply. That heart is a way to transmit the feeling to others who read or view your work.

Figuring out the heart of the story can be the hardest part of writing. I think understanding why you are writing something, or why you are painting something, is the key to making a good painting and a good story.

So I’m working out what is it I want to express with my words or with my paintbrush. I am discovering that as I am painting. The painting or the story becomes an expression of what I am feeling, but the actual painting and writing is where I discover that feeling.

Since you’re both an artist and a writer, what do you think is the most difficult thing about being an artist?

The most difficult thing about making something is to trust yourself. The writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

"Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string...The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows that that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."

My take away from that is: There has been no one like you ever before. That is really wonderful! Just by trying something new, you bring something special to the world!

(Interviewer’s Note: You can learn more about Lisa Rogers and all her books at https://lisarogerswrites.com!)

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Published on November 27, 2024 09:44

Jumping Ship: Why I Became a School Librarian

(My article, Jumping Ship , was originally published in September, 2024 at Teen Librarian Toolbox , a blog hosted by School Library Journal. You can read the original article here . )

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m jumping ship. I’m leaving my role as language arts teacher.

It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. See, for a long time I’ve had my sights on something greater, on another boat anchored not far away. Getting there would take some swimming, but with hope and inspiration keeping me afloat, I’m confident that I can reach the vessel H.M.S. Librarian.

High School or Middle School Librarian, that is.

Yes, groan. But I’ve done my own share of groaning before coming to this decision – which, as I said earlier, was an easy one to make.

There’s always been an overlap between the role of English teacher and school librarian, and it comes down to one obvious word: books! I became an English teacher because as a kid, I loved to read. Libraries and bookstores were my favorite places to be, and I visited one of each every day on my walk home from school. I loved reading stories and writing stories. I especially loved English class, where I could engage in both of those activities. But in English class, my love of books quickly expanded to a love of inquiry as well, because I had several teachers who took an inquiry approach to the books we read together.

For me, inquiry meant – and still means – asking a question in order to discover new ideas that we didn’t know existed. My teachers started with questions like In what ways was the story of Adam and Eve foundational in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon? and quickly taught us to move to How is Eve portrayed in different cultures? and then, Is there a difference between how characters of different genders are portrayed in literature?

The discovery of new questions, after all, is how we learn. I knew that the only life I’d ever be happy living was one filled with inquiry and books. So when it came time to apply to college, applying to the University of New Hampshire as an English Education major seemed like the best possible idea. To me, English teachers were rock stars, and lots of them were affiliated with UNH: Nancy Atwell, Donald Graves, Don Murray, Linda Rief – the list goes on. After graduating with a masters in my field, I became a middle school language arts teacher.

I loved every minute of it.

I could get kids excited about books by modeling the inquiry process. After reading Varjak Paw (S.F. Said), with a group of sixth graders, I could ask, “Which of the seven skills in The Way do you think is most important?”

“Shadow Walking!” someone would say.

“Moving Circles!”

“Awareness!”

“Hmm. I wonder if any of these things are real. I mean, I wonder if they’re part of an actual martial art, or something.”

“Can we look it up?”

And then we’d look up the origins of kung-fu, which leads to questions about Buddhism’s spread from India to China, which leads to questions about how martial arts can somehow be wrapped up in religion.

In sixth grade.

But things changed, over the years. Now, thanks to the Common Core State Standards, No Child Left Behind, and the many standardized tests I’m required to administer, I’m forced to ask very different sorts of questions. Now I have to questions such as “Which line from the text supports the idea that the author is trying to sway our opinion?” and “Without giving your personal opinion about the message, what is the message of this poem?” and “Given these two essays on the same subject, how does the structure of each contribute to its own meaning?”

Of course, these things are all easily measured, and very easily reduced to a four-item multiple-choice question on a standardized test. But tests are finite, unnatural things, and so the questions end, right then and there. They don’t connect to other questions.

And I have to point out that there’s nothing wrong with them at all, in and of themselves. Teaching students to back up claims and cite evidence is extremely important. But such narrow, stay-in-your-box skills have become the sole focus of a middle school language arts curriculum.

Which brings me to the greatest fault of the Era of Standardized Testing in which we now find ourselves: the tests have convinced us that if something can’t be easily measured, it isn’t worth teaching.

Inquiry has become essentially hollow, in an English class. Its soul has been emptied. In fact, most people confuse the term inquiry and research, thinking they’re the same thing. Of course, librarians know the two terms aren’t synonymous at all: Research is about finding answers; inquiry is about finding new questions to ask. But since finding new questions isn’t a task easily reduced to a question on a standardized test, inquiry has disappeared from the English curriculum. It’s the beast we can’t control with multiple-choice answers.

Most ELA teachers are required to post, each day on the classroom wall, the precise standards that are being taught. The same thing happens in math, science, and social studies class. Students know – because they see the standards printed– that they’re in school not to explore or to discover, but rather to be trained in a very narrow a set of skills. The message is clear: We don’t care how creative or unique or clever you can be. We certainly don’t want to know what you wonder about. We just want you to learn this because it’s on the test.

Now, there’s certainly a lot of exciting work going on in language arts classrooms, but it’s only permitted when ELA teachers find ways to weave the standards into it. Anything that’s truly exciting can’t be taught for its own sake. Everything, even inquiry, is at the service of the standards.

The only mention of inquiry in the Common Core appears in a single strand of the 6-12 Writing Standards, Research to Build and Present Knowledge:

Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and refocusing the inquiry when appropriate.

The phrase “when appropriate” is significant because it suggests that students ask a new question only in certain situations. We can assume those situations include times when there aren’t enough resources on a given topic, or the student discovers that the topic is too narrow. The strand doesn’t ask students to actively pursue new questions; it only asks them to adjust his sights if the situation warrants it. But in true inquiry, asking new questions is the whole point.

If research (answering a question) has completely replaced inquiry in the ELA classroom, then we’ve put the cart before the horse, you might say. We see trees but not the forest. There are lots of other metaphors we could apply. No one even tries to deny the fact that we “teach to the test,” now. Last year, when it was announced that our district would adopt a canned curriculum for ELA, my building principal said to me, “Ben, if the standards are imbedded in the tests, and the new curriculum teaches the standards, then really, we don’t even need grades anymore. Everything is becoming streamlined.”

I’m all for revising grading standards, but I’m not so sure that all students in a given class would perform equally well in the annual footrace if we forced them to wear the same size-eight boys’ sneakers. Plus, not all students want to race. This if/then, oversimplified, let’s-maximize-efficiency logic that administrators so often tout smacks of factory-model education, which of course is exactly what standardized testing has always been about.

The result, in the end, is that most students are far less motivated to learn. And teachers are far less motivated to teach.

I was miserable when Era of Standardized Tests began, even more so when I was handed a canned curriculum. I hadn’t signed up, as the saying goes, for any of this. I wanted to teach inquiry for inquiry’s own sake, which is what I set out to do in the first place, and had been doing up until the Era of Standardized Tests began.

But a few years ago, something miraculous happened. Because I loved books so much, I’d been writing my own for years and years. I had stacks of unpublished novels, some in drawers, some on the computer. In 2017, my debut novel, Ginny Moon, was acquired by HarperCollins/Park Row Books. To help promote the book, my publisher flew me to Atlanta for the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting. I went to share and sign ARCs of the book for hundreds and hundreds of librarians. A lot of them were school librarians, of course. My publisher arranged for me to have dinner with a group of about twenty of them. When I sat down with this group of amazing people, my eyes were opened.

Because they taught inquiry, every single one of them.

They taught it while co-teaching.

They taught it through the research lessons they taught.

The taught it while helping students select books to read for pleasure.

I was flabbergasted. Had I been blind? Asleep? I wasn’t sure. In the end, I concluded that I’d been so tangled in my own subject’s trees that I hadn’t noticed there see was a whole other forest to explore, and that it was right down the hall. Regardless, I saw a vision that matched my true goal as an educator. I knew that I wanted – no, needed – to become a school librarian. Immediately.

But I was on tour, and would remain so for the next two and a half years.

And then Covid hit.

And my wife’s mother moved in with us, and passed away.

It would be four full years before I was able to apply to a library certification program. I finished my coursework this past May.

Librarians help students get the information they want, and discover the questions that they want to ask. Inquiry is at the heart of everything they do. It says so in their standards. In the AASL Standards Framework for Learners, there’s an entire category for Inquiry. It’s one of their six Shared Foundations and Key Commitments, and is even mentioned in two of the non-Inquiry categories.

I don’t know if we’ll ever exit out of the Era of Standardized Testing. I don’t know if inquiry will ever be a priority in the English classroom again. But I do know that librarians have made it the foundation of their profession, and that for me personally, sharing books and questions with students is much more important than teaching them to defend whatever claims they might have been handed. The goal of education should never be reduced to imparting a finite set of skills. We might train animals this way, but not freethinking human beings. The purpose of education should be to open a students’ minds to new possibilities and perspectives. I’d rather teach them to swim from boat to boat or island to island in a quest for knowledge rather than to stake their claim on only one.

This past spring I signed a contract to become the middle school librarian at a K-8 school in my district, and couldn’t be happier. But if I’m honest, I think a bit more inquiry earlier in my career might have saved me a lot of time and heartache.

References

American Association for School Librarians. (2018). AASL Standards Framework for Learners Retrieved from https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AASL-Standards-Framework-for-Learners-pamphlet.pdf. American Association for School Librarians.

National Governors Association for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). English language arts standards. Common Core Standards Initiative. Retrieved April 22, 2024, from https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/6/

Said, S. F. (2003). Varjak Paw. David Fickling Books.

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Published on November 04, 2024 06:18

Attention NH Teachers and Librarians!

This entry is sort of an unintended Part Two of a previous blog entry, which I wrote about here, back in February.

An exciting thing happened this past winter: our school invited David Elliott, my all-time favorite author of children’s books, to come visit. He graciously agreed to speak with grades K through two in the morning, three and four just before lunch, fifth and sixth right after lunch, and seventh and eighth graders before the end of the day.

I was fortunate to attend the presentations for grades five/six, and seven/eight. The last of the two proved to be the most exciting because several of our students had read David’s novel in verse, Bull, a work of utter poetic genius, which is a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur. I’d read Bull myself, and loved its bold and complex portrayal of Poseidon, who opens the novel with the sentence, “Whaddup, bitches?”

The novel contains some unquestionably crude material, including an instance of the f-word. But our reading specialist had invited David to discuss his books with our students, and the principal had approved and paid for the visit. What was there to worry about?

A few days after the presentation, the school secretary approached me. She said that there were enough funds to order several of David’s books, which he would sign. I asked for a bunch. Knowing our seventh and eighth graders’ interest in Bull, I asked her to order several copies of that title in particular.

“How many?” she asked.

“How many can you get?”

“As many as you want.”

We had 14 eighth graders. I figured about half of them would appreciate a signed copy.

“Maybe seven?” I suggested.

“No problem!” she replied.

A week later the books arrived. I found them on my desk right after I returned to the classroom from lunch duty. All of them were signed with bookplates. I set them aside, intending to offer them to the eighth graders the next day.

Minutes later, when my seventh graders arrived for class, one of them noticed the stack of books and asked to look at one. I handed it over, and he started reading immediately. Because it’s a novel in verse, he turned pages pretty quickly.

“Mr. Ludwig?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Um, check out page six.”

Page six had the f-word on it.

I wasn’t surprised. Like I said, I’d read the book. But this student hadn’t, and he was shocked.

“Is this OK to have in school?” he asked.

“Of course it is,” I said. “These books are for eighth graders, and they’ve all seen the f-word before. Besides, we invited the author to come to our school, and the school bought the books. It’s all perfectly acceptable, as long as we know that we don’t use language like that ourselves.”

“So I can read it?” he said.

“Sure,” I replied.

Word got around fast. Several seventh graders were equally shocked by page six. As part of a project for my Inquiry class, one of them decided to ask the principal how she went about making decisions regarding what makes a book “inappropriate.”

The next morning, my principal wanted to see a copy. I sent one down to her.

Apparently, she hadn’t read the book. To her credit, she read the first 50 page, right then and there.

At recess she came into my room and said three things.

First, she said there were multiple uses of inappropriate language in the book.

Second, she said there was quite a bit of sexuality in the book.

And third, she said that this book had no place in our school, and that I should find a home for the seven copies we purchased. I wasn’t allowed to give the copies to individual students as originally planned. Further, I couldn’t write to individual parents to ask if I could give their child or children a copy. In effect, the books had to disappear. Immediately.

I wasn’t in a position – literally – to argue. As an English teacher, I was obligated to follow the requests of my administrator, and it didn’t seem like a good time to mention that she herself had approved Mr. Elliott’s visit as well as the purchase of multiple copies of Bull. But I was also studying to become a school librarian, and couldn’t help but consider that, if I’d been a librarian already, I might have more leverage. As things stand, our school didn’t even have a librarian. We had a digital learning specialist who happened to be in charge of checking books in and out of the library, but that’s all.

Our school had no policy to address a situation such as this. Bull isn’t a book that was to be added to our library’s collection. I wasn’t trying to teach it as a whole-class text. It was just a book with mature material delivered in an intentionally crude way.

I put the books in a closet at home, and proceeded with the rest of the school year.

Meanwhile, the seventh grader who found the f-word asked his mother to order the book for him. Several other students did likewise. Kids who generally didn’t love reading were excited to read and discuss the novel. Everyone started looking up Greek mythology.

I don’t know why we’re scared of the f-word. I don’t know why we’re so squeamish about how babies are made. Is making babies, say, more offensive than killing? Why are we so afraid of language? In middle school, students have read whole-class texts for generations that feature war, racism, and murder. But sex? No way. We can’t mention sex. We can’t give them the impression that sex is necessary or even desirable. We can’t talk about how it can be used as a weapon. We can’t acknowledge that it’s literally where we all come from.

I don’t know. I think it’s all a bunch of bull – which is probably why I’m so excited to switch from the role of English teacher to that of school librarian.

If there are any teachers or librarians out there who want an autographed (bookplate) copy of David Elliott’s Bull, please drop me an email! I’d love to send one of the seven signed copies your way, free of charge. I’m at ben@benjaminludwig.com. First come first serve!

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Published on June 16, 2024 07:19

Best News Ever!

A lot of you know that I’ve been studying to become a school librarian. My coursework won’t be complete until mid-May – but even so, I found a job! Just this past week!

I’ve been on this journey for a very long time. But aside from being a long journey, it’s also been a surprising one. In fact, I’ve written an article about it. The article will run in Teen Librarian Toolbox (a blog published by School Library Journal) this coming October, and I’ll be sure to share the link when it’s available. Meanwhile, what I want to express here, in this entry, is that although earning a teaching certificate as a school library media specialist is fairly straightforward, actually becoming a school librarian is extremely difficult in New Hampshire! Here’s why.

First, there aren’t very many school librarian jobs available in NH. There’s one in every high school, but many K-8 schools don’t have one at all, opting instead for a digital learning specialist who helps students check out books. It’s safe to say that as a state, New Hampshire doesn’t value the role of school librarian the way many other states do.

Second, because it’s fairly rare for a teacher in New Hampshire to be certified as a library media specialist, the position is on the state’s critical-shortage list, which means virtually any teacher in a school can accept the role of school librarian as long as she/he is willing to take a few courses. And when I say “few,’ I mean two. As a result, principals are likely to “hire from within” rather than find someone who’s gone through an entire certification program.

Third (and finally), school librarians tend to stay in their roles until they retire. I don’t blame them. What job could be better? You get to share books and research methods with students, organize book groups and book talks, host visiting authors, co-teach, and provide PD for faculty. School librarians have been taking a lot of heat for the work they do (check out the work Amanda Jones has been doing, if you’d like to learn more), but they’re on the front lines of defending the right to read. They believe in what they do, and are unlikely to look for work outside of education.

Put those three things together, combine it with the fact that most people can’t uproot and move to accept a job in another state, and you can begin to see just how challenging it can be to find a school librarian job in New Hampshire.

About a month ago, a position opened at a local K-8 school. Not just any school, though: one that happens to be part of my own school’s SAU (School Administrative Unit), which is comprised of seven K-8 schools and one high school. I was astounded. After talking to some folks, I learned that the person who was leaving had some family issues that needed her attention. She would be relocating.

Anyway, I applied, and received an invitation to interview. I thought for sure the position would be snatched up by a teacher from within the school, but miraculously, no one wanted the job. Then I thought it would go to someone with more experience from outside the district, but (again, miraculously) it didn’t. Somehow they picked me, fresh out of a certification program, and let me tell you I AM VERY HAPPY!!!

And fortunate!

But most of all, I’m grateful. So grateful I can’t accurately express it.

Stay tuned for that article in October. It will explain a lot!

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Published on April 20, 2024 10:20

What’s a Book Godparent?

Recently I saw a post by author Katy Metzger on Twitter/X. It stopped me cold, when I saw it. I asked if I could interview her about the idea, and she said yes. Below is our conversation about what it means to be a “book godparent.”

__________________

Ben: Different cultures and communities have all sorts of ideas about what a godparent should be, but what they all have in common is the role of the caretaker. Growing up, did you have a godparent? Are you a godparent to anyone? Did you know anyone who had a godparent?

Katy: My familiarity with the term "godparent" really just comes from movies and TV. It was always understood that my grandparents would take care of me if anything happened to my parents prematurely, assuming they were still around themselves.

Ben: I have to admit, when I saw your post about becoming a book godparent on Twitter/X, I was really struck with the originality and the intimacy of the idea. Could you tell us how you first encountered the term “book godparent”? Also, now that I see the term here on my screen, I’m wondering about the term itself. Is it “book godparent” or “godparent to the book _____”? How would you recommend referring to the idea?

Katy: I think you could phrase it either way. I can’t say for certain that I came up with this term, but that’s how I chose to phrase the concept when I posted on X/Twitter because of how my friend asked me to do it. She sent me a DM over Instagram out of the blue that started with, "Can I tell you something morbid and ask you something difficult?" Which, of course, intrigued me. She then proceeded to tell me about how the friend of one of her daughters lost her mother, that the woman had only been 49 years old. She told me how that had been upsetting on multiple levels because, as a mother herself, she grieved that this little girl would now grow up without her mom. She then said she wasn’t going to ask me to raise her children if something happened to her, but she did want to ask me to "raise her book baby."

This "things I could leave undone" fear was something I’d felt while querying, that idea that my books might never make it into the world. But, fortunately for me, my mom is a self-published author and could’ve handled that for me. Not everybody has that backup option. I knew we couldn’t be the only two people to ever worry about this, so I decided to post about it. Thinking about a solution like this one might relieve some of that anxiety.

Ben : Wow! I was completely surprised by your answer because my own experience with godparents is that they’re sort of like co-parents. I mean, yes, the godparent is prepared to assume the role of guardian if the actual parent passes away prematurely, but there’s also a special relationship that exists between the godparent and godchild, sort of like a having a special advisor or confidante. So with that in mind, I really thought that a book godparent would be someone who would champion the book and help support it as it worked its way through the publishing process.

But now with this new perspective, I’m starting to see that this idea has even more potential. I don’t about you, but I’m sitting on three unpublished manuscripts right now, all of which I’d like to see in print someday. What happens to them if I die? I mean, a lot of folks have wills, but do writers with unpublished manuscripts leave their manuscripts to a certain friend or family member?

Something else I’m wondering now, based on what you said about your mom being a self-published author, is the extent to which an author might ask someone to publish the book. I suppose it depends on the individual situation. But it makes sense (to me, anyway) that the person chosen to be a book godparent should be someone who had enough understanding and experience in publishing to get the job done.

Katy: Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about that aspect of godparenting when I decided to use the term. I was more focused on the function that I’d been asked to fulfill. I’ve worried less about my manuscripts being unpublished since my series got picked up by Future House Publishing. The books are all written, so there would be some editing involved, but I feel pretty confident at this point, all five will make it into the world. And yes, I think a person’s writing credentials should matter if you’re going to ask someone to play that role. The average person has no idea what goes into publishing a book. It still mystifies my husband how many editing passes I do, and I have a publisher taking care of most of the process. Self-publishing is so much more involved.

When Anna asked me to do this, she told me that the book was in beta, so if something happened in the near future, the book would need editing, but that she would have funds set aside to cover the process. I think that’s fair. If you’re going to ask someone to finish the task for you, don’t make them pay for it. The more preparation you can do beforehand would be helpful as well. Pick out your editor, cover designer, etc. if you can. That makes it far more likely the book the godparent sends out in the world will match what you envisioned. She put me into her formal will, so this is very official.

Ben: What is Anna’s book about? How did you meet her?

Katy: Anna’s book is about a young woman named Abby who (according to Anna herself) is "trying to move past a bad break-up by filling her plate with activities and doing things to make her parents proud. When her brother moves across the country, she makes a rash decision to follow him. She falls in love in the process. Her decisions continue to go wrong until she learns to make choices based on her own desires."

I met Anna through the #writerfriendschallenge on Instagram, which provides posting prompts for writers who need content ideas. When I posted that I was looking for ARC readers for The Talismans of Teregrin, the first book in my YA urban fantasy series, she volunteered. She loved it and supported me a lot on Instagram, and that led to more interaction. I found out we had a lot more in common, like being close to the same age, having kids, enjoying running, reading some of the same YA fantasy books, etc. We just really connected, even though we don’t write the same genre, and she’s become one of my closest writer friends.

Ben: It’s so cool that you met Anna through Instagram, and that she was an ARC reader for The Talismans of Teregrin. Do you remember what she liked about the book?

Katy: Anna said, "I was immediately taken in with the book cover for TOT. I just knew by looking at it that it would be a great story. I was right. I was immediately drawn into the excitement from the start of the book. I kept reading it to find out what would happen to the two main characters that I strongly connected to. The promise of the premise has kept me hooked thus far in the series."

Ben: So Anna’s character wants to make her parents proud, but eventually learns to make decisions based on her own desires. Does she eventually reconcile the relationship with her parents? I’m wondering because all this talk about godparents has me thinking about parent/child relationships. After all, the parent/child bond is forever, and I think the same sense of permanence applies to godparents/godchildren.

Katy: I asked Anna. Here’s what she had to say: "Abby realizes pleasing others doesn’t make her happy. She learns this partly through seeing choices her parents make that surprise her. They make some big changes that rock Abby’s sense of stability. By the end of the book, their relationship changes in that Abby doesn’t run home for all her problems. She grows up and handles them."

Ben: As we draw to a close, do you think the idea of a having a book-godparent is somehow connected to found-families? I know that when I was growing up, it was frowned upon in my family to choose a godparent who wasn’t directly related .

Katy: I think that having a book godparent would have to be a found-family thing unless you have writers in your family. I’m fortunate to have my mom who knows the ropes, but most of my supports come from friends I’ve made on social media in the writing community...my betas, my ARC readers. I don’t think you can ask this of someone who doesn’t get it. Maybe a spouse who’s really wired that way and wants to do that in your memory, but it’s such a big undertaking. I wouldn’t want to put that on my husband.

Ben: Finally, could you tell us the name of Anna’s book? Is she looking for a publisher at this point, or maybe an agent?

Katy: Anna let me know that there isn’t a title yet, but said, “I will probably self-publish, but I’d like to explore my options first."

Ben: Thanks so much for your time, Katy!

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Published on March 29, 2024 13:01

What’s a Book Godparent? An Interview with Katy Metzger