Rules

Author:  Cynthia Lord
Published:   2006

I sat down to read this book from beginning to end.  I chose this book for two reasons:  it is a Newberry Honor book and it has also won the Schneider Family Book Award.  I was killing two birds with one stone.  I had seen this book before, but the cover did not draw me in.  Now that I know what the cover is, I love it.  I have to stop letting covers dictate what I read.

I asked my husband to look at the cover and to predict what the book was about.  I wanted to see if what he thought would be enough to make me want to read the book.  Ummm no.  He said, "It looks like a game at a carnival.  I bet you have to pick up the duck and check what's written on the bottom to see if you win the goldfish."  So I asked, "Why is the duck saying "RULES"?"  He responded, "Carnival games have rules!"  Okay, no wonder I didn't want to read the book before.  I'm glad I did though.

There is nothing about carnivals in this book.  This story is told by Catherine, a young girl who wants to enjoy her summer and meet a new friend, Kristi, who will swim with her and send Morse code messages back and forth with flashlights.  The only problem is that Catherine has a brother, David, and David has autism.  Catherine loves her brother and has come up with a list of rules for him.  At first you think she has rules so that he doesn't embarrass her, but really, Catherine does not want others to treat David differently. (Examples of rules are:  no toys in the aquarium (see the cover of the book) and don't take your pants off in front of others.) She wants everything and everyone to be "normal."  Interestingly, Catherine learns that normal is not what she thinks.  She befriends a boy, Jason, a paraplegic, at David's occupation therapy sessions.  I see Jason as Catherine's closest friend, but Catherine doesn't see it like that.  She wants to treat Jason like he is "normal," but really she does not and comes to realize that she is doing to him what she does not want others doing to her own brother.  Catherine tries to hide her brother's autism and Jason's handicap from Kristi, and ends up isolating her friends.  Catherine eventually learns to open up and speak up about her feelings to her parents, Kristi, and Jason.  She also realizes that accepting each others' differences is okay, and it is not her problem if others cannot accept the differences.

I read this book and thought of autistic students I have taught.  I want so badly to know what is in their heads. I want them to understand that I may not always understand them and may understand things the wrong way, but I really want to.  What I have always been amazed with is that my students have always been so understanding of my students with autism.  I'm amazed at how supportive they are of each other.  I hope it's like this everywhere.  I know it isn't.  A few years ago I was at a museum and I saw a child with a sticker on his shirt.  The sticker had written on it, "Be patient with me, I have autism."  I felt sorry for the parents and for the child.  I didn't feel like that parent had to explain anything to me, but they felt like they did, so the sticker. I felt sorry for the child, he had probably not always been given nice looks because of the way he behaved.  The only way he knew or was able to express himself.  Everyone needs to read this book and needs to learn compassion and understanding.  People need to learn that before coming to a conclusion they should think there might a reason for the way someone is behaving and it is not for us to judge.

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Learn about Cynthia Lord.

Inside Out & Back Again

Author:  Thanhha Lai
Published: 2011
Newbery Honor Book
National Book Award Winner
 

I'm not a big reader of poetry.  As a child I remember learning about poetry and I thought it was just a way for people to write without regard to the rules of writing.  I don't really understand poetry and why things are lined up like they are, why things are not capitalized, or why punctuation seems to be missing.  I understood poetry with rules, limericks, sonnets, and if they rhymed then even better, but that's about it.  I was always embarrassed when teachers had us write poetry and then I had to read it aloud.  I felt like a fraud. 

The book I picked to read related to poetry is Inside Out & Back Again.  This is free verse.  I had to look that up to understand what that meant.  I'm not sure if I could teach about free verse, but here are some sites that helped me learn about it:

http://www.poetry4kids.com/blog/news/how-to-write-a-free-verse-poem/

http://www.edu.pe.ca/stjean/playing%20with%20poetry/Hickey/Free%20Verse.htm

I liked the description I read on one site and it is what we say to our children all of the time as they write, "Show me, don't tell me!"  Since it's Poetry Month maybe I'll have to give it a try even though it scares me A LOT!  Here is an excerpt from the book that helped me see what Ha was experiencing when she boarded the ship to escape from Vietnam.  This is such a visual description of her experience. 

Everyone knows the ship
could sink,
unable to hold
the piles of bodies
that keep crawling on
like raging ants
from a disrupted nest.


I looked up information on the author, Thanhha Lai, because I wanted to understand why she wrote in free verse.  I found it interesting that one of her favorite books is Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night, one of the books we have to read for our class.  Was she inspired to write because of the poetry she had read?

Vietnamese flag

I struck gold, I found a recording of Thanhha Lai explaining why she chose to write a poem.  It turns out that the Vietnamese language is based on Chinese and that the Chinese language is based on pictures.  Ms. Lai found the English language too long and complicated to express her own language.  Writing the story as a poem let her write the pictures.  Here is the clip where she explains all of this.  She also reads a poem from the book.  http://www.teachingbooks.net/book_reading.cgi?id=7256&a=1

This story is based on Thanhha Lai's life.  She bases the story on her own experiences. 


I have to tell you, this book helped me love poetry.  I liked that it was a story and taught me about history and that it was very easy to read. 

This is the story of Ha, a young girl born in Vietnam and living with her mother and three brothers.  Her father left for a job in the navy nine years earlier and never returned.  It is now 1975 and North Vietnam has conquered South Vietnam so it is now entirely communist.  The family decides that it is best to escape even if they are still waiting for father.  They will find a way to communicate with the family and reconnect if he is still alive.

The story is divided into four different parts.  The first part is Saigon.  In Saigon Ha is smart, has

friends, and enjoys growing plants.  She is especially fond of papaya.  Ha's mother finally decides to leave when President Thieu announces that he is retiring, but he will never leave his people or country.  Ha's mother knows that he is lying.  I found an article in The New York Times from the death of President Thieu in 2001.  Soon after leaving Vietnam, he moved to London and then Boston where he lived and eventually died.  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/01/us/nguyen-van-thieu-is-dead-at-76-last-president-of-south-vietnam.html

Part II Of the book is At Sea.  This is the voyage to escape Vietnam and when Ha says good-bye to Vietnam and her old life.  Her brother says good-bye to his baby chick, she says goody-bye to her old doll, and the yellow flag with red stripes is lowered.  Americans discover the ship with these families and they are then taken to Guam.  It is in Guam that they learn English and choose where they want to go from there.  Mother chooses America.  The family is transported to Florida until it is sponsored by a "cowboy" in Alabama. 

Part III of the book is Alabama.  In order to leave the camp in Florida, Vietnamese families had to be sponsored by an American.  The American who sponsors Ha's family takes her and her family to Alabama.  Life is difficult in Alabama because no one has seen anyone like this family before.  Also, Ha feels dumb because she is learning a new language and the teacher has the children clap for her whenever she does something correctly.  They don't know that she knows multiple digit multiplication and that she really is smart.  Eventually, she shows them and to make things better she makes friends.  Things start looking up. 

Part IV is From Now On.  It is a new year, Tet, and luck starts on the New Year.  The family has accepted that father is gone, Ha is doing well in school, and her brothers are going to school and getting jobs.  Everyone is hopeful.

After I finished reading this book I met a woman from Vietnam, Trini.  I told her about the book and then she told me her story.  Trini was born in 1975 and her mom tried to escape many times.  Once she was even able to board a helicopter to escape, but one of her siblings could not board, so they could not leave.  It was not until the 80s that Trini and her family were able to leave.  She said that they were lucky.  They lived in a small farming village between the north and the south and it was so poor that no one paid any attention to them.  Their village was left alone.  She didn't have electricity and she and her family grew their own food.  She was raised as a vegetarian so they ate a lot of rice mixed with fruits.  She was also raised Buddhist and respects all life and faiths. 

Her family finally escaped and went to the Philippines.  They had to wait for an American sponsor to leave and their sponsor eventually took them all to Texas.  Eventually, she left Texas, went to California, and is now here in Virginia.  She and her family are American citizens and she said to me, "We live in the best country." 

Trini's story helped validate the information I read in Inside Out & Back Again.  I am grateful that I was exposed to this story and was then able to share with Trini. 

Thanhha Lai blog entry
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mockingbird

Author:  Kathryn Erskine
Published: 2010
National Book Award Winner

This is the second book we decided to read in the book club.  Two different people shared the books we chose to read in our group and it is amazing how closely related the two books are to each other.  This book would also be a good book to compare with Rules by Cynthia Lord.  I would recommend this book to students as young as third and fourth grade.  Like Thirteen Reasons Why this book deals with empathy and how our actions impact those around us.

Like Rules, this book deals with autism, but it is told from the point-of-view of an autistic child, Caitlin.  Caitlin is extremely close to her brother Devon who has recently been shot by another child at his middle school.  Two children and a teacher are killed in the massacre.  Devon was like Jimney Cricket to Caitlin.  He helped her understand the way other people saw her and how her actions might be interpreted by others.  Caitlin is a very gifted child and has an amazing ability to read and understand vocabulary, but really only literally.  She sees black and white and she misses many of the intricacies of the English language.  As she grows throughout the book, she helps her community in the healing process after the shooting, helps her father, her friend whose mother was killed, and teaches others and herself empathy.

Throughout the book Caitlin is in search of empathy and closure.  She wants to find closure like it is a tangible object to help her father and herself deal with Devon's death.  She searches the definition in the dictionary and is left confused, but when she finds the definition on the Internet, she finally "gets it."  The definition she finds is:  "-the act of bringing to an end; a conclusion - example:  They finally brought the project to closure."

From the beginning of the book Caitlin has commented about a wood chest that her brother and dad had been building for Eagle Scouts.  Caitlin takes the definition of closure to mean that she and her father have to finish the chest.  The chest is a symbol for Devon and his life and hope.  When I first read about the chest I actually thought that it was in reference to a chest on a body and in a way it really is that type of chest too.  Chapter 1 is titled:  Devon's Chest.  Here is how the chest, hidden under a sheet is described:  "It looks like a one-winged bird crouching in the corner of our living room.  Hurt.  Trying to fly every time the heat pump turns on with a click and a groan and blows cold air onto the sheet and lifts it up and it flutters for just a moment and then falls down again.  Still.  Dead."  In chapter 11, we find out that Devon had been shot in the chest and the doctors could not do anything to save him.  Caitlin is struggling to figure out what she can do and she gets into the wood chest.  She thinks of her limbs as the atria and ventricles in the body.  She starts rocking in the chest and beating it like a heart, chanting "Dev-on.  Dev-on.  Dev-on."  Caitlin's dad grabs her as she is trying harder and harder to beat for Devon, and she screams the reminder from the "green hospital people, I TRIED BUT THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO."

The project that finally helps bring closure is the completion of the chest.  Caitlin and her dad work on the chest together and finish it.  This is a great feat for Caitlin not just because she finished the chest and helped her father, but because it was her first group project, it was something she did to help someone else, and it was when she realized that she was capable of empathy.

In the author's note in the back of the book, Kathryn Erskine writes that the events from the shooting at Virginia Tech inspired her to write this book.  Her comments related directly to what I thought about Thirteen Reasons Why.  This book is about the suffering endured by a family and a community because of a school shooting, but also reminds us that "by getting inside someone's head, really understanding that person, so many misunderstanding and problems can be avoided - misunderstanding and problems that can lead to mounting frustration and, sometimes, even violence.  Caitlin, who is autistic and sees the world in black and white, worked diligently to discover what mattered to her dad, to her friend, and even to her enemy and helped her entire community.  I think this is something we can all do.

Kathryn Erskine's research on autism.
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The Giver (Conversations with my son)

Here are some questions from my son.  I could answer some and some I could not.

Questions I could not answer.  Can you?
1.  Why can some rules be broken (like riding a bike before you are supposed to)?  Isn't that choice?
2.  What really happened to Caleb?  How could he actually drown if Jonas is seen "hoarding" an apple, wouldn't someone notice Caleb going to the water?
3.  If Jonas's dad does not love Gabe, why does he save him from release at first?
3.  Who are the birthfathers?  Do you think The Giver is Jonas's real father?

Questions I think I could answer.  What do you think?
1.  What is the difference between being smart and having wisdom?
My answer:  smart is intelligence, wisdom is having the ability to analyze and apply experience
2.   Aren't lies and rudeness okay sometimes?  Like, when you made that tuna that was gross?
My answer:  yes  :-)

The Giver

*************Updated March 23, 2014*****************
Conversation with my son
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Lois Lowry
Movie Trailer

Questions I have after rereading the story:
1.  Why is the mom okay with the father breaking the rules?  She just smiles when she learns that he has figured out the baby's name, Gabriel. 

2.  If Sameness is the goal, then why is it that when twins are born one of them is released?

3.  On page 43 Fiona says, "He's cute.  But I don't like his name very much."  Then Jonas is thinking, "It wasn't a great name Jonas, thought, like - well, like Gabriel, for example  But it was okay."  Doesn't sameness apply to names?

4.  If the children have not been exposed to warfare, how do they know how to play the war game?


*************January 24, 2014************************

Author:  Lois Lowry
Illustrator:  Bagram Ibatoulline
Published:  1993
Newbery Medal Winner

The Giver by Lois Lowry is about a boy who lives in a world where everything is the same.  There is no color, no love, no music, and no memories of the distant past.  The children all "celebrate" their birthdays on the same day in December and are presented with something each year to help keep the community the same and safe.  The children look forward to the 12th year because that is when they become adults and are assigned their jobs.  Anything that does not fit with the Sameness is released.  You'll have to read to figure out what it means to be released!

At his 12th year ceremony, Jonas does not get a job like everyone else, but is selected to be the The Receiver.  As The Receiver he will be given all of the memories from the distant past.  The focus throughout the book seems to be memories, but I don't think that is really what is important.  Yes, memories of love and even memories of dreams that could lead to relationships are taken from the people, but the memory of the life they are now living is not taken from the people.  As a matter of fact, the people celebrate those memories at the end of their lives with a celebration for the old right before they are released.  The really important idea in the book is choice.  The ability to choose which toys to play with, which job you'll get, which person you will marry, or even what clothes you will wear is taken from the community for the sake of Sameness and for the sake of avoiding problems in the community.  

The only person really given some choice in the community is The Receiver.  He has choice only because he knows there are other options, unlike everyone else in the community.  He realizes that there is color, he feels love and wants to feel love from others, and he realizes that differences are good.  The problem is that he lives in a place where he is the only one to realize it.  

This book reminded me of the quote - and sorry if I do not have it correct - "those that do not know history are destined to repeat it."  Well, whether or not you know history, you will repeat mistakes from the past, but whether or not you make the same mistake should be up to you.  The Elders in The Giver do not allow the mistakes from history to be made because everything is so controlled and if there is something that comes up from the past, then The Receiver can look back on history and help avoid the same mistakes.

The book also reminded me of the books from The Divergent series.  Everyone is grouped by their sameness and life as we know it today is unknown or Elsewhere.  Unlike the Divergent series though, this book ended with the possibility of something better.  

I will have my middle school son read this book.  I'm looking forward to discussing it with him and learning what the book makes him think/wonder.

Looking for Alaska

Author:  John Green
Published:  2005
Michael L. Printz Award

UPDATED 3/16/2014
This book was awarded the Michael L. Printz award.  This award "annually honors the best book written for teens, based entirely on its literary merit." 

I read this book at the beginning of the semester, but I'm reviewing it again because we are discussing it in class this week.

Summary:
Miles, the main character, is about to enter the 11th grade, but decides to leave his school to attend the same boarding school that his father attended.  Miles is a tall and slender boy who loves to memorize the last words people say on their deathbed.

In boarding school, his roommate is "The Colonel" who gives Miles the nickname of Pudge.  Pudge also becomes friends with Alaska, an unstable, but beautiful girl, and Takumi.  They are good students, but are trying to out-prank the previous year's class, and break some rules at school without getting caught.

Alaska lost her mother as a child.  Her mother suffered an aneurysm, but Alaska did not call 911 because she didn't understand what was going on.  Each year, Alaska visits her mom's grave on the anniversary of her death.  This year, she forgets, but is reminded after a night of drinking with The Colonel and Pudge.  She drives off quickly in her inebriated state and is in a fatal accident.

The Colonel, Pudge, and Takumi are left with the guilt of having let Alaska drive in her condition.  Eventually, Pudge forgives Alaska and believes that Alaska forgives him for letting her go.

http://johngreenbooks.com/looking-for-alaska/
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Faq about Looking for Alaska

***************************************************************************** (January 2014)
I just finished Looking for Alaska.  This is another book on the class reading list.  I chose to read this one because a student and the professor specifically referred to this book on the first day of class.

This was an easy book to read and reminded me of my time in high school and my close relationships.  I was worried at the beginning of the book as to what the countdown on each chapter was about.  At first I thought it was a countdown to Pudge's first relationship with a girl, then I thought it was a countdown to a prank.  Luckily, it was neither.  Either one of those would have been disappointing.  The truth is sad.

This story made me think a lot about my own life.  I didn't like the idea of death being the actual death and also the loss of memories.  Pudge was haunted by his memories and they were slipping away, just as Alaska's memory of her mom slipped her mind.  The slipping away is unavoidable because of entropy.  "Entropy increases.  Things fall apart."

I want my son who is in high school to read this book.  I think I could have used this book in my youth. My favorite quote from this book was, "If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions.  But we can't know better until knowing better is useless."

I'm reminded of my grandfather who died last year, my friend who died right before Christmas, mistakes I've made, burdens I carry.

I need to think more on this.