#Picturebooks #School #Teaching – Tom MacInnes, Writer

Throwback Thursday Edition

From the vault, to you, wherever you happen to be. I wrote this post while I was still a teacher at Grant Sine P.S. in Cobourg. Four and a half years ago seems like a lifetime to me. So much has changed. Grant Sine P.S. is now closed. I am now retired. But, at the time, it was my favourite place in the world. The kids and their families were very special. My colleagues have become forever friends.

There was no school experience quite like the one I had at Grant Sine P.S.; especially, on a Friday.

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Thank Goodness It’s Friday….or, Not!!!!

I am not sure if it actually is Friday as you are reading this but, that doesn’t really matter. This post is not about this Friday or, any other Friday, for that matter. It is more about the symbolic nature of our safe harbours and the fragile nature of the people who seek shelter there. It is about fearing the blue skies and sunshine of free time. It is about being at school on a Friday afternoon, with the dismissal bell ringing, your teacher ushering you out the door and you, not wanting to leave. It is about the idea of home.

I am fairly confident that you, like me, view the end of the work day on Fridays as a cause for celebration. Bring on the weekend! For most of us, we work because we have to but, it is on our free time that we can relax, re-energize and slip into the comfortable clothes of the life we really love.

When you think about schools in this regard, the image that springs to mind is of the dismissal bell ringing for summer vacation, the doors of the school bursting open and the kids pouring out, hooting and hollering, throwing their books and papers into the air, heading out to the carefree world of summer vacation! That image had been my reality as a teacher for the first 17 years of my career. Everywhere I taught, the kids were as excited for their weekends as their teachers were. Everyone was happy on Fridays! Spring Break always rocked! And, don’t get me started about the giddiness of summer vacation!

But, then I transferred into the school I am presently teaching at and everything changed. I teach in the middle of a social housing complex, which means that virtually every student at my school comes from a household that relies on some form of financial assistance from the Government in order for them to meet their basic needs of food and shelter. When I first began working here, I had a vague notion of what poverty meant for me, as their teacher. I thought that everything would be fine as long as they worked hard for me. I could supplement when necessary with supplies but, an honest work ethic would be enough to help the kids enjoy a successful time in our classroom. If they were academically low, that was fine. I work with all manner of students and would happily do so with them. Basically, I walked into our classroom on the first day of school, totally and completely unprepared for what I was to encounter. Suffice to say, poverty is a bitch! My time at this school has provided ME with the real education. I am a changed and better human being for having had this experience.

It is difficult to accurately describe what living in poverty is like. For someone like me, who has a full fridge, a warm house with lots of toys and a bank account with my own dollars in it, I have no right to state that I know what it is like to be poor. But, as witness to the myriad displays of emotion, drama and humanity that unfold before my eyes, each and every day, in our classroom, schoolyard and hallways, I, most certainly, have knowledge to share. The best way I know of to even remotely convey the depth of the complex, multi-faceted, nuanced layering of issues at play when it comes to poverty, is to tell you the following true story. The story is called The Christmas Block and, honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up! Writing this for you blows my mind, even now.

One of the ways that we, as staff, dealt with the pervausive nature of poverty at our school, was to focus on developing a greater sense of community among the students and, by extension, their families, too. We tried to show them that you don’t have to be rich to be nice, to do the right things in life, to be helpful, to contribute to the betterment of the classroom/school/community in a positive way. We tried to empower them and to help to boost their self-esteem by making them realize their own self-worth as human beings on our planet. That is no small task, in an environment where everyone is beaten down and in various stages of defeat.

Among the many initiatives we enacted, was one where we actively sought out opportunites for the students to participate in events outside of the school. The thinking was, to attempt to change the public’s perecption of our school from being ” a welfare school, filled with bad kids” to being a nice school, with a warm sense of community and an ever growing list of positive accomplishments. In this light, we jumped at the chance to participate in an event sponsored by our local Public Library. It was a storywriting competition. The lure for us was that they had categories of prizes for the top stories but, also, prizes for the best rate of participation, as a percentage of the school’s total population. Being a rather small school, size wise, we thought that if we could just get each student to simply write a story that met the contest criteria then, we would automatically qualify to the participation prize. This would mean that we would get to go to the awards celebration and get our school’s name in the newspaper. So, off our little authors went.

In my class, we had to write a story about any topic we wanted, as long as it was 100 words long. Sweet! No problem! We could do it, even if it took us a couple of weeks! As the children wrote, their stories were woefully-unimaginative. This was not surprising due to the lack of literacy in their homes. It is hard to become a creative and expressive writer when no one has ever read a bedtime story to you in your life. But, even with the low quality of most of the stories, one stood out as even weaker than the rest. It was from a boy named Tom* ( I am using my name, for the sake of privacy). Tom was a unique student for several reasons: one, he had shown an above-average level of ability with Mathematics. This gave him the reputation among his peers, as being one of the smartest kids in the whole school. Tom was, also, unique, in that he had a tremendous amount of pride and, routinely, refused any of the free food, clothing or school supplies that his classmates so eagerly and consistently grabbed up. So, when it came time to read Tom’s story, I had hoped that it would be one of the few to demonstrate a decent amount of skill.

Tom called his story, “The Christmas Block”. To summarize it, the story read….it was Christmas morning. His only gift was a wooden block. He liked it. He put it down to go outside to play. When he returned, the block was gone. Someone had stolen it, he was told. The end.

My initial reaction was one of disappointment. Who writes a story about a block for Christmas?! What changed my thinking was when I showed this story to a colleague who had been at this school much longer than I had. She was far more familair with the inner-workings of the neighbourhood that I was. As she read it, she said, “I think Tom is trying, in his own cryptic way, to tell you that something bad happened to him at Christmas. If I was to guess, I’d say he is trying to tell you that his parents took his gifts and sold them for food or drugs or cigarettes or whatever.”
To say that I was stunned is an understatement.

I conferenced with all of the students about their stories. When it came time for Tom’s conference, I was pumped. I asked him to tell me about his story. He just repeated that it was about a block that he had lost. He was very tight-lipped about it all. I asked him if he had lost the block in real life. He said it was just a story. I asked him if he or anyone he knew, had lost birthday or Christmas toys. He replied, without looking up, that lots of things happen in his neighbourhood. I asked him again, if the story of the Christmas block was a real story. Tom got up, smiled a sheepish smile and, as he began walking away said, thanks for the contest.

Tom was the sort of student who was never going to admit what had actually happened to him nor, that it had happened before and would, in all liklihood, happen again in the future. But the more I poked around, trying to uncover the truth, the more convinced I became that, in fact, Tom had had his Christmas gifts taken from him by his parents and so had many other students. In fact, the systemic looting of children’s possessions to help fuel the addicitions of their caregivers was, as it turned out, quite a normal part of life in my school neighbourhood. No one was outraged by it. It was just how the world worked, in the eyes of my students.

As I came to understand this more, I began to recognize the connections between what was happening at home and some of the behaviours I was seeing at school. For instance, almost all of the kids were, what I would call, hoarders. Their desks were crammed full of anything and everything that we had done in class. At first, my Type-A personality was such that Desk Clean-out day was a regular feature of life in our classroom. But, I soon came to realize that everything that was going home was ending up being put straight into the garbage. There were no refrigerator art galleries in these homes. I began to learn that if the student valued their work then, it needed to be honoured on the walls of the school because, that was their only chance to be recognized as being special.

The story would end here, if not for a bit of luck with the contest. Our school was awarded the prize for best rate of participation! That was awesome but, what surprised us all was that, Tom’s story was selected for special recognition. We had been contacted and asked to nominate someone who was not known as a writer but yet, had produced noteworthy work. I thought of Tom right away. I sent an short, explanatory note along with his story. The judges read his story and deemed it worthy. So, Tom and his whole family were invited, along with me, to go to the Gala Awards ceremony at a fancy-schmancy banquet hall downtown. This was not the sort of place that families from my school normally frequented.

The awards ceremony was scheduled to begin at 11:00 in the morning. Tom and his family were downtown by 8:00am. I know that because I was running an early morning errand and saw them walking around the banquet hall, trying to find their way inside. When I arrived, I found them seated in the front row of chairs. The whole family was there; Tom, his older brother, his mother and father, too. All of the men had gotten haircuts. They were wearing new dress shirts which came from the Dollar Store, according to Mom, who was very proud of her men.

The emcee of the ceremony was a local author of some reknown. He had quite a dramatic flair and proceeded to work his way through the various prize categories by reading snippets of each student’s winning entry. As he did this, I thought about what might happen when he read Tom’s story about his parents stealing his Christmas gift……with them sitting in the front row!!! But, as it turned out, I didn’t have much to worry about. Our emcee turned Tom’s plain-sounding little story, into a melodrama worthy of the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV specials. As an orator, he had Tom’s words fill up the entire hall. The story sounded glorious! Tom’s family were thrilled. As Tom was called up to receive his award, he kept his head bowed the entire time, even as the applause of the crowd filled the room.

His mother hugged me and thanked me for helping her son to have such a wonderful moment. Tom’s dad shook my hand. Then, they turned quickly away and melted into the sunshine outside and went back home.

Like I said, I just can’t make this stuff up!

Since working at this school, I have seen how poverty really affects my students. How it creates environments where the students view parents as people who will protect you with one hand while stealing from you with the other. Being raised in such an environment means that my students don’t react to material possessions the same way as other children might. Incentive programmes don’t hold any sway here. I can’t tell a child that if they complete X-number of tasks they will earn a reward because, they know their possessions will just end up being stolen or broken at home. The normal mentality of striving to achieve a goal doesn’t work here. There is a disconnect between the wishes of my students and the reality of their lives. Nobody writes letters to Santa at my school. It is a vicious, negative existance, from my point of view but, from the point of view of my students, it is just life. It is so messed up. But, poverty is messed up, too!

So now, when the dismissal bell rings on a Friday afternoon and the kids don’t really want to leave…I have developed a greater ability to understand why. I counter this, the only way I really know how, I hug every one of them who seem to need it. Then, they are wished a good weekend and I stand in the doorway and watch them walk toward home.

If The Library Was On Fire

In the middle of my teaching career, I spent a few years out of the classroom in the glorious role of Teacher-Librarian at a large elementary school in Bowmanville, Ontario. For those of us who adore Children’s Literature, being a school librarian is about as good as it gets. Not only did it become my professional responsibility to read books aloud and promote literature at all grade levels but, it also became my duty to go shopping for new books to augment what was already on our shelves! Book catalogues from various publishing companies would fill my school mailbox so, a lot of my professional reading became familiarizing myself with the latest books on the market. There were a lot of reputable publishing companies vying for my attention and my school budget but, the company that I eventually came to love above all others was called Groundwood Books. The creativity, originality and quality of the books they published impressed me. The very first book I ever ordered from them still impresses me to this day. It was a Picture Book biography of Charles Darwin called The Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life is written and illustrated by Peter Sis. Peter Sis, originally born in what was then, Czechoslovakia but, now living in the United States, is an award-winning illustrator. His penchant for detailed illustrations presented in unique and creative ways is on full display in this story of the life of Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species. At the moment of purchase, it was unlike anything Picture Book for children that I had ever seen.

Darwin’s life experiences aboard the HMS Beagle, his meticulous record-keeping and cataloging of the new species of plants and animals he encountered; especially on The Galapagos Islands, the political fall out of publishing The Origin of Species and the personal toll it all took on his life are all afforded great care and detailed expression by Sis. Each new page is an encyclopedic exploration of Darwin’s exploits and discoveries. Consequently, The Tree of Life stands as one of those Picture Books best enjoyed in one’s lap, curled up in a cozy spot, so that every image, every position of an object, every placement of a word or a phrase can be savoured and relished for the beauty it possesses upon the page. This is a book meant to be read in standard, horizontal fashion but, also, upside down, sideways and even, with flaps that open to reveal the magnum opus which is The Origin of Species depicted visually.

I can remember the day this book arrived at school. That particular day, third period, I had a Grade 6/7 class visit the Library. This class was led by a teacher who believed in the importance of books and reading so, when his Library time came, he always accompanied his class and read silently with them for the entire period. Because this is what he wanted with his period in the Library, I always acted as the good role-model and read long with the class, too. This day, I read The Tree of Life by Peter Sis for the very first time. As those Grade 6 and 7 students sat quietly reading their books, I was sitting there having my mind blown wide open! What a wholly and completely different take on the traditional biography. I remain as captivated by this book today as I was when I first read it fifteen years ago.

Even though I stopped being a Teacher-Librarian years ago, I have still maintained my connection with Groundwood Books and continue to receive their catalogues in the mail at my house. The quality of the roster of books that they publish remains very high, in terms of the beauty of the writing, the artistry of the illustrations and the topical nature of the themes being discussed.

What a joyful time it was being surrounded by such amazing literature all day long, every day, in that school Library. Some times, I would find a quiet moment while I was there and I would play an imaginary game with myself in which the library was on fire and I only had time to save a handful of books before I had to evacuate through the door. The longer I stayed in that role as Teacher-Librarian, the more books I read and the harder it became choose which ones I would save as the flames licked at my heels. But, no matter when this scenario played itself out in my mind, The Tree of Life by Peter Sis, was always one of the books that I was determined to risk life and limb to save.

It is just that good.

What’s The Name of the Tree?

If you know me at all then, you will know that I love books and stories. In particular, I love Children’s books. Over the course of my thirty-year teaching career, I have read thousands of books aloud to my students; some of which have come to hold a special place in my heart because of the content of the book, the beauty of the illustrations or the purpose that the book served at the time. I have decided to share some of those books with you in this blog. I think reading aloud to children is important and it all starts with a reader, a listener and a good book. Here is today’s special book. Enjoy.

The Name of the Tree is an Bantu tale retold by Cecilia Barker Lottridge. The illustrations are masterfully done by the great Ian Wallace. This book is magical and has always been one of the first books I read aloud each year to my Primary students. Let me tell you why.

The first week of school is always a very important time when it comes to creating a culture in a classroom. In addition to introducing the rules and routines that will form the operational structure of your classroom, the first week of school is when you begin planting the emotional seeds that you hope will bear fruit over time in the form of increased self-confidence, initiative, creativity and inner peace. You can call this establishing the tone of the classroom, if you like. As a teacher, almost nothing is more important at the start of any school year. If you create a welcoming, safe space for children; a space that values and celebrates the special qualities inherent in each child then, chances are good that your students are going to want to come to school each day and that, once there, they will give you their best effort because they will trust you, as the classroom leader.

***If anyone is interested, I can write a post that specifically addresses the various ways I create a welcoming tone in my classrooms but, for now, I will focus in on the role reserved for The Name of the Tree.

I value the importance of being a literate human being. In a society that is fuelled by information, being literate helps me to successfully navigate through the sea of news and images that fill my TVs and tablets and phones and computers. Being literate helps me to critically evaluate the information I am receiving so I can make intelligent decisions based on what I read. Being literate is a Life skill as important as any other.

But these days, when students come to school, they do so more with a game-based type of skill set that is important for operating technology and for the creative element that comes from game play and from coding. But, increasingly, children come to school these days without the language-based experiences that come from being read to from books. I was read to as a child. I read aloud to my own children at home. But, more and more, children are being raised in households where screen time trumps book time. Therefore, one of my most important jobs as a Primary teacher at the beginning of a school year is to help my students to develop an interest in reading the books that fill our classroom. Because, as you know, reading books is all about developing vocabulary (which is the foundation of personal self-expression), learning information (which is the foundation of our knowledge base) and developing a sense of wonder and imagination (which is the foundation of personal creativity).

When I extend my invitation for my students to join me in the wonderful world of reading and of books, that invitation comes in the form of The Name of the Tree. As the children sit around me on the carpet that first or second day of school, I inform them that the book I am about to read is magical. I tell them that the book contains a trick to help them remember important things in their lives. In fact, I make them a challenge and predict that once they learn the name of the tree, they will never forget it for the rest of their lives! I tell them that if I meet them at the mall or a park or wherever in twenty years and ask them for the name of the tree, they will remember it instantly because, once they learn the trick of remembering, they will never forget.

The short strokes of this story are that there has been a drought in the jungle and the animals are all starving. So, they decide to leave their home and search for food elsewhere. On their journey they come to a tree that is filled with delicious fruit. However, the branches are too high for even the giraffe to reach; the bark to smooth for even the monkey to climb. An elderly tortoise informs the groups that this is a magical tree that will only lower its beaches if someone correctly states the name of the tree. Various animals travel back, one at a time, to their original homeland to ask the King of the Jungle, the lion, (who has stayed behind when the others left) for the name. He tells all who ask but, because of over-confidence or carelessness, each of the animals has misfortune befall them on the trip back to the tree and none are able to say the name of the tree once they return. Finally, a young, small tortoise offers to go. The other animals mock the tortoise because it is so small and young (at which time, I point to my students that they are all small and young, too). Hmmm! Anyway, as you may expect, the young tortoise learns the name of the tree from the Lion (in a comical exchange that draws laughter every time I read the story), remembers the name of the tree using a memory strategy (which is the “magical” element of the story) and helps save the rest of the animals from starving.

After the story concludes, I make a point of reinforcing the memory technique by having the kids chant the name of the tree, just like the small tortoise does. Then, throughout the course of the day, I ask random students at random times to tell me the name of the tree and then, I always make a big deal about it, “See! I told you that you would never forget! I knew you would remember! And you always will!” When the kids are in the hallway, getting ready for recess, I will ask a former student who happens to be wandering by for the the name of the tree. Nine times out of ten, they remember on the spot. If they hesitate, I hum the melody of the chant and it comes back to them. Like magic.

This book! That story!

Once the kids hear this story and learn the “magic” of it, their interest in other books in our classroom collection is usually piqued. At this early part of the school year, I need to open the door to the world of books and have the kids willingly walk through. Once they demonstrate their willingness to, at least, look at books then, I can help them on their journey to becoming readers. The Name of the Tree has been the key that has unlocked this door for my students for the past few decades now. As such, it is one of the most important books I have ever owned. My students and I are forever indebted to Cecilia Barker Lottridge and Ian Wallace for their efforts. Generations of young readers have been born because of this book. This post is my small tribute.