Alien Pedagogy

I’ve begun to count my books based on school years. These books may not have been published in 2008 / 2009, but they were read during that time. I recommend them all.

• Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council — The Bas Lag trilogy by China Mieville. Mieville seems to be changing the rules of fantasy / sci fi. While his prose and diction sometimes disappoint, he dares to do what no one else appears to be doing now in speculative fiction.
• Breath by Tim Winton. A very literate approach to surfing and why we drive ourselves to extreme limits.
• The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien. I read these for the staff book club and my AP training. O’Brien is a fantastic writer. His voice carries a direct authenticity that few writers seem capable of.
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland — Though written in 1993, Coupland’s depiction of software culture continues to be relevant.
• Whites by Norman Rush — I’m not a big fan of short story collections, but Rush does well in this short set. His novel Mating — which is also set in Botswana — is also highly recommended.

In all, I finished about sixty works. Many were good, but these were the best.

Shusterson’s Unwind is a young adult novel about a society that allows children to be “retroactively aborted” between the age of 13 and 18. These children are not killed, but unwound — a process in which every part of the child’s body is transferred to another person. Not dead — simply alive in a new form.

Unwind was lent to me by one of my former students and I’ve told all of my classes about this book. So far the enthusiasm has been pretty incredible. I’ll have to get funds to buy it for my library now.

Since my last expansion of the classroom library, I’ve had about 30 – 40 books signed out regularly and a higher turnover than usual.

Even better, I’ve had two reluctant readers come to me this week speaking about how greatly they’re enjoying their books.

Top of the pops:

• Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
• Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.
• Of course the Twilight series.

I always work hard to “sell” a book to the class. Here are some strategies that I used this week:

Thriller Sales Pitch

“I was looking at this copy of Jurassic Park last night and I almost started to read it. But then I thought ‘Be careful! If you start it, you won’t go to sleep tonight!’ Thrillers are really dangerous, but if you’re willing to risk it, a lot of people enjoy them.”

Inspirational Sales Pitch

I read the back cover of The Last Lecture to the class and then introduced three other books that also bring us hope in the face of adversity.

“Mature” Reading

Some books I marketed as being written for adults instead of teenagers (Procession of the Dead, by D.B. Shan is a more mature version of his teenager stories, though we have those as well). I also marketed Tom Clancy as a more mature version of Horowitz’s books.

Children’s Books

I picked up The Tale of Desperaux and Tales of Beedle Bard, but sold them as books that one reads for the fun of it. In fact, I’d already read Beedle Bard by the time I got the book to the school.

The English Department gave me funds to buy books this week. Of 19 new books, 18 have been signed out.

Reflections:

• Three students brought in books to donate to the classroom library.
• Books that weren’t new were also signed out.
• Many students simply do not understand the diversity of books. They don’t want to read because they haven’t been convinced that there are books that they will enjoy. Spending twenty minutes introducing the plot of a dozen books is very useful.