According to many of the books I've read lately, here's what we can expect of our future on earth: truly rotten weather, massive starvation, inconceivable death tolls, abandoned shells of cities, genetic mutations beyond our imaginations, unspeakable violence in the streets, child slave labor, and poor personal hygiene.  On the positive side, no one will have a cell phone or computer, and car traffic will be practically nonexistent.  Still, the future, at least the future as detailed in current YA literature, is bleak, my friends, bleak indeed.  Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker only adds to this decidedly ugly picture.  That doesn't mean I don't like the book.  It's quite good. It's just that I'm starting to think that today, 2010, is as good as it's going to get.  Apparently, it's all downhill from here.

    Nailer is a ship breaker on Bright Sands Beach along the Gulf Coast in a globally-warmed and resource-depleted future.  He works with his light crew, scavenging the skeletons of old oil tankers for copper wire and metal scraps. Skinny kids, like Nailer, can fit in the crevices and ducts of the old ships, but are only valued by the crew bosses as long as they are small enough for the job.  It's grueling, filthy work, but Nailer needs this job to survive.  He lives in in a palm and bamboo shack with his father, Richard, who has been in a violent, drunken, and drugged-up haze since the death of Nailer's mother.

    Just beyond Nailer's grim, bare beach, out in the blue of the ocean, he can see the sleek forms of wealthy clipper ships, luxury vessels which torture his imagination. That is, until the day that Nailer and his friend Pima stumble upon a storm-wrecked clipper filled with the kind of riches they call a "Lucky Strike."  They think their troubles are over until they find the lone survivor of the wreck, the daughter of a shipping company owner.  In their world filled with painful choices and few good outcomes, Nailer and Pima must decide: kill the girl and stake their claim, or help the girl who promises them riches beyond what they can comprehend.

    Ship Breaker delivers plenty of action and suspense along with a heaping helping of violence.  Nailer's confrontation with his father at the book's climax is both a nail-biter and a scene of primal savagery.  The characters are not all fully realized, and Richard comes off as that brutal monster-father we've seen before.  Still, Bacigalupi has done well here.  Ship Breaker is really about the choices we make and the consequences of those choices.  Nailer faces that metaphoric fork in the road time and again, and he wrestles mightily with his decisions.  Beyond Nailer's story is Bacigalupi's warning to all of us about the choices we're making with our world today.  Be thoughful, he cousels, and seize this moment to take care of our planet.  Don't stand idly by as our world deteriorates into a muddy, toxic, drowning pool.  The whole of the future, the author tells us, is in the decisions we make right now. It's a powerful message.  Hopefully, Ship Breaker is more cautionary tale than prophecy.

The Middle School faculty gathered for a holiday party at a local restaurant.  At one point, a gal from the restaurant came into our room and asked, "Does one of you own the black Mercedes parked out front?" The room went silent for half a second.  Then we all laughed and laughed and laughed...

In the past month, I've helped both of my kids make PowerPoint presentations for school.  I begged them to do Prezis, but they were happy to do PowerPoints.  Which is fine.  But if every kid in each of their classes did PowerPoints, that means that the poor teacher had to sit through Lord knows how many of the things over the week of presentations.  Now, I don't have much sympathy for the teachers because they assigned the things and no one has ever taught the kids how to create a great PowerPoint presentation.  (Actually, my son's was entertaining.  He embedded a video from YouTube and ended the whole thing with a Blabberized Thomas Jefferson.  But, both of those sites are blocked at his school, so neither worked on the day of the presentation. But that's neither here nor there...) My point is this: PowerPoint is dangerous.  It can kill you.  It can bore you to death.  Below is a great Slideshare that addresses this very topic.

The slideshow was created by Alexei Kapterev.  Thanks to EdGalaxy for posting this.  Also check out Jesse Desjardins's  You Suck At PowerPoint slideshow from the same post.

  First, there was Leviathan. Now, there is Behemoth. Coming soon, could it be Gargantua? Colossus? Ginormity? I'm all a-tingle with anticipation as to what the title of the next book in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy will be!  Looks like I have to wait a while, though, since Book II, Behemoth, just came out last month.(Actually, I already know that Book III is going to be titled Goliath.) In addition to giving his books the best titles ever, Scott Westerfeld makes sure that the stories don't disappoint. I don't think one should tackle Behemoth without first reading Leviathan. The first book provides the exposition for the series, and the reader should have an understanding of the alternate history that Westerfeld has set up before plunging into the Dardanelles with Behemoth. Now, when I reviewed Leviathan back in February, I was rebuked by a fair reader for placing the book in the genre of steampunk. Well, here I go again, calling it steampunk to my heart's content, particularly since that's what Westerfeld himself calls it (as well as School Library Journal).  There is enough steam used in the machines of Behemoth to convince me that steampunk it is.

    Behemoth begins just where Leviathan left off, with the Darwinist beast-ship Leviathan racing toward Istanbul as World War I rages.  Still aboard the Leviathan are Midshipman Deryn/Dylan Sharp, a tough-as-nails teenaged British girl disguised as a boy, and Alek, royal son of the murdered Archduke Ferdinand, on the run from the Germans who want him dead. Of course, there are epic battles to be had with the Clankers, that is, the Germans and their "mechanikal" war machines. Alek manages to escape the Leviathan and disappear into Istanbul.  Here, he joins a revolutionary group set on overthrowing the Turkish sultan.  Deryn, meanwhile, is sent on an almost suicidal mission to ensure that the newest Darwinist creation, the enormous and deadly Behemoth, can get through the Dardanelles strait, ensuring a major victory for the British. Finally, Deryn and Alek meet up again in Istanbul and plan their most ambitious mission yet. Both teenagers have a highly personal stake in the war, too: While Alek hopes that he can help bring about peace in Europe and Asia, Deryn hopes that Alek can one day see her as more than a trusted commrade.

    In Behemoth, Westerfeld manages an amazing trick: He juggles so many characters and plot threads and action-packed scenes at one time, and he does it so well, that this book is even more of a page turner than Leviathan.  The city of Istanbul, the dramatic, exotic, and mysterious center of the Ottoman Empire, comes alive under Westerfeld's pen; its winding alleyways and bustling bazaars almost make the city a character itself. Deryn/Dylan proves to be more clever and capable now than ever, even as her "boyish"

We should be celebrating the printed word more loudly and more often nowadays.  As educators we are all painfully aware of how the electronic word has infringed upon the territory of books, and some of us still hold out hope that the book will endure.  Now that I'm a librarian, I see that plenty of kids still want to hold that bound volume in their hands and take in the fully sensual experience of reading in that form.  

       Author Neal Shusterman is coming to visit my daughter's school this month. Could I be more excited?  Her language arts teacher mentioned this, almost in passing, on Curriculum Night.  As soon as the words crossed her lips, I looked down at the book I'd brought with me to read between presentations: Bruiser. Could it be?  Really?  My absolute fav-o-rite author, coming to central Ohio in just a matter of weeks?  If you've read my blog in the past, you know that I've reviewed a bunch of Shusterman's books: Unwind, Everlost, Everwild, and now Bruiser.  Each is a kind of gift from Shusterman to future writers and present readers, an offering of what great writing sounds like and how it makes us feel.

    Bruiser is a sharp, potent guzzle of a book.  It's not a sweeping epic kind of story like the Skinjacker Trilogy books.  Instead, Bruiser focuses intensely on three characters, their interactions, conversations, and growth.  The plot moves forward tentatively, in short puffs and peaks, until the achingly beautiful climax squeezes and twists the reader's heart like a soaked sponge. 

    Sixteen year-old Tennyson is not happy when his twin sister Bronte starts dating Brewster Rawlins, a hulking loner known at school as the Bruiser.  Bronte has a soft heart for stray dogs, and at first she thinks of Brewster as just that- a stray, ripe for rehabilitation.  But the twins find that there is much more to this painfully shy and reclusive boy than meets the eye.  Brewster lives with a horrible secret, an unexplainable power that causes him to absorb any pain experienced by the people he loves. As Brewster comes to love Bronte and befriend Tennyson, the twins find that their cuts and bruises suddenly disappear and show up on Brewster's body. But it's not only the physical pain that Brewster takes from them; he takes their anger, hurt, and sadness, too. And he's been doing so all his life, subsuming the painful abuse suffered by his little brother Cody at the hands of their alcoholic uncle. 

    Bruiser is narrated in alternating chapters by Tennyson, Bronte, Cody, and Brewster.  Each voice is distinct and believable, particularly Brewster's.  His chapters, told in free verse, are poetic, tragic, and deeply introspective.  And Tennyson evolves beautifully from an arrogant jock and bully to a compassionate young man.  At the heart of the book are the themes of sacrifice and love: Would you sacrifice your own happiness if it meant that those you love would feel no pain?  Is Brewster's power to take away the pain from those he loves a gift or a curse? And how can a person be happy knowing that someone he or she loves must feel so much pain?  Bruiser is an intense, almost violently emotional e

I have officially taken over the role of Head Librarian for the middle school library!  The Reinberger Middle School Library was established in 2004, pulling grades 5 and 6 from the lower school library and grades 7 and 8 from the upper school library.  Since its inception, the middle school library has grown and flourished under the same head librarian, who was not me.  So, taking over has been a bit daunting.  I feel like I'm treading on pretty hallowed ground.  I want to bring my own ideas and conceptions into the library, but I also want to honor the woman who came before me.  It's a bit like walking a tightrope at the moment. I've rearranged some furniture with trepidation.

I have been charged with bringing the library into the 21st century.  One of the reasons I was given this position was because of my commitment to learning and teaching about educational technology.  Luckily, I don't have to do it all on my own.  We have amazing tech people at our school. 

One thing that I'm working on now is improving the library website.  Right now, the entire "site" is on Moodle, which the students reach through the school intranet.  The page consists of little more than links to local library catalogs and our library databases, a school calendar, links to resources for some classroom projects, and a decent picture of kids working in the library.  It's not much.  So, I've started to do a bit of research on great library websites and wikis and how to build one.  Here's what I've gleaned so far:

In order to build a good website or wiki, you have to know your audience and your purpose.  What do you want students (and faculty, hopefully)to get out of the site.  Brainstorm a list of your top priorities. I love me my Stickies, so I used one for my list:

Now, time to look out on the web at some library sites that are both informative and attractive for students.  Where do you find these? I've found listservs to be invaluable for this.  People who post to listservs want to share; that's what listservs are for.  So, post a request: What does your website/wiki look like?  Send me links!  You'll hear back from plenty of people if your listserv is well populated.  Don't belong to a listserv?  Google the term, and voila!

A few library sites that I like:

Naomi Bates's site for Northwest High School in Texas

S.C. Lee Jr. High School, also in Texas

Scarsdale Middle School Library, in New York

Westmont WIki, a wiki for Westmont School in Chicago.

 "As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct. Click through the gallery...to see examples of endangered professions, from milkman to telegrapher, and hear from people who once filled those oft-forgotten jobs."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060&sc=nl&cc=es-20100328#iframe_height=300

via www.npr.org

An interesting tidbit from NPR. Do you remember icemen and switchboard operators and pinsetters? These are jobs we call obsolete today, but what jobs will be obsolete in 20 years? 50 years?

    It's been a while since I've read a book like Lauren Myracle's Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks. Actually, I should begin this post by saying that there is NO WAY that this woman's last name is actually Myracle, is there?  It sounds like the last name of a character on a Disney Channel show.  If it is a pseudonym, it's way over the top.  If it's her real name...well, it sounds like she made it up anyway.

    But getting back to the book. As I said, it's been a long time since I've read anything like Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks.  It's hard core 21st century girly stuff. Hard core. Like with teenage girls having conversations about The Hills and hair extensions. Like with rich, white girls from private school whose biggest problems are that PE class sucks and the guys they like are just too hot to notice a girl without big boobs. Rich, white girls with names like Peyton and Trista who cry about Daddy issues. If it sounds like I hated this book, here's the twist: I didn't.  Do I think it will soon replace The Giver on school reading lists? No.  But will girls between the ages of 12 and 16 or so love it? Most definitely, yes.

    Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks is narrated by high school sophomore Carly, who lives with her parents and her sister Anna in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta.  Carly comes home from a summer of roughing it in the mountains of Tennessee, and little sister Anna, who will be a freshman at their Christian private school, has blossomed into a beautiful, buxom young lady.  Carly knows that all the boys will be drooling over Anna at their school, while the only one who likes Carly is Roger, the cute, but decidedly not hot, guy with the Dutch accent.

    The school year begins, and as the months go by, Carly's ultra-close relationship with Anna is put to the test by everything from supermean PE teachers to mutual friends with questionable motives to high pressure parents.  Carly yearns to be different from the pretty, rich, and shallow crowd, and she begins to question her exclusive circle's core values.  At the same time, Carly is having a hard time accepting the new and maybe not-so-improved version of her little sister, and she's not sure she really wants to continue to be Anna's rescuer.  Mix in a hot new boy named Cole, a party that was never supposed to happen, and three baby ducks, and you've got one very confused teenager doing emotional flip-flops through sophomore year. 

    Just as baby ducks are not chicks (and, yes, that distinction is important to the book), Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks is not truly Chick Lit. Carly is far from immune to all the trappings that the good life has given her, but she's smarter and more reflective than typical Chick Lit heroines.  This is Duck Lit.  Carly's a not-quite-ugly duckling who is trying to grow into an enlightened swan. Teen girl readers will relate to Carly's desire to break out of the mold she's been poured into, even if they can't understand what's so awful about having to go easy on Mom's Platinum Visa in Urban Outfitters.   

    I think I'll label Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks a guilty pleasure. It was a totally fun, easy read. Teenage girls love Sarah Dessen and Meg C

I owned a poster of John Scieszka's adorable Seen Art? before I'd ever read the book.  I think I picked up the poster at a bookstore in upstate New York while attending a teacher conference. The book is whimsical and, well, adorable, but that's not why I'm referencing it in this post.  I'm intrigued by the question brought up in the book's title.  Now, Scieszca's "Art" is an actual person, a boy being sought by his little friend who has lost sight of him and looks for him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  But, I want to ask you, your Uncle Art notwithstanding, have you seen art lately?  I mean, really seen art?

    I have.  A lot of it. A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend The Clarice Smith National Teacher Institute at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), in Washington, D.C.  For an entire week, I looked at art, talked about art, discussed how art can be incorporated into the curriculum at school, and dabbled in a little technology, too.  It was the week of my dreams. 

    The group consisted of about twenty teachers from the eastern half of the US, as far away as Ohio (me) and Alabama.  The goal of the Institute is to get teachers comfortable with art and technology together, and to find ways to use art seemlessly in the curriculum.  We started the week with a gallery walk and talk through SAAM with curators and education specialists from the museum.  They modeled for us the methodology that they wanted us to take from the experience, that is, how to talk about art with students, how to get them to slowly look and look and look again at art and articulate in words and on paper what they're seeing.  It's an inquiry-based discussion strategy that goes something like this:

    -What do you see? (a basic "What's going on in this piece?" question)

    -What do you see that makes you say that? (Grounding their observations in evidence)

    -What more can you find? (Guiding them to use precise language about a piece)

The facilitator's job is to acknowledge every comment, help build a collective vocabulary around the art, restate the kids' observations, and summarize their thoughts. The purpose for this technique is not for the sake of understanding art necessarily, but for the sake of having students reach inside themselves, climb the ladder of Bloom's Taxonomy, and party on the roof with the heavy hitters: synthesis and analysis. (Sorry that I'm mixing metaphors like a Cuisinart.)  Looking, thinking, and talking about the art can lead to any number of writing exercises- poetry, narratives, critiques.  The idea is to use art as an approach to learning and writing, not as enrichment.

    Over the course of the week, we really got the inside scoop on all things Smithsonian.  We visited the SAAM archives and learned about using primary sources in lesson planning.  The SAAM archives contain more material than I can fathom, and all of their digitized material is in the public domain and is therefore useable to anyone.  Their website is full of treasure waiting to be unearthed: www.aaa.si.edu.  We also visited the Luce Center, which houses 3300 works of art not currently on display at the museum but acce

    I realized a few weeks ago that I am rather far behind in my book reviews!  I read much more quickly than I write, so I have a bunch of middle grade and YA novels to discuss today.  Usually I go into greater detail, but today, I'll just give you the basics: title, author, brief description and review, even a nifty emoticon rating! 

Let's begin:

The Gone Series by Michael Grant: So far, Grant has written three books for this series, though I'm sure there'll be at least one more, considering how the last one ended!

    Gone (Book One): One day, in a small beach town in California, everyone over the age of 14 suddenly disappears.  And the kids who remain have developed some very strange powers.  Gone focuses on Sam, Astrid, and a few other kids who emerge as leaders in this strange new society.  The book moves at a quick clip, and Sam is the perfect reluctant hero.  I enjoyed this book so much, I believe I inhaled it rather than read it!  My rating: :-) :-) :-) :-) (That's four out of four smileys!)

    Hunger (Book Two): The kids' stories continue from Gone, but things are looking a little desperate.  Food is running out, mutant worms roam the vegetable fields, and there's a really, really bad something in the old mine shaft.  This is the most sci-fi heavy of the three books, and the action pulls the reader along at breakneck speed.  You get to know the characters better in Hunger, and that's good because there are at least thirty of them!  My rating: :-) :-) :-) :-)

    Lies (Book Three): Grant went off the deep end with Lies.  The kids are still stuck in their beach town, but now there's no electricity or running water and the kids without powers want to kill all of the kids with powers.  By this point, kids are doing any drugs they find and drinking, many of them heavily.  The kids must smell to high heaven, and I shiver thinking about the living conditions Grant describes.  I thought the story became very convoluted in Lies- too many characters doing too many disparate things.  Grant just couldn't hold it all together.  And the last chapters were barely comprehensible: Good vs. evil but with heavy religious overtones, a living video game, and a helicopter ride thrown in. My rating: :-) :-)

On the Harper Teen website, Grant says Under the Dome by Stephen King is one of his favorite books.  Coincidence?  I think not.

The Compound by S.A. Bodeen: I've read some pretty positive reviews of this book, and that baffles me.  I thought