This
afternoon isolated to clean up my desk area. I don't actually have some office.
iWeb I moved into my house I intended to use one of the spare bedrooms, but my
desk didn't fit through the door. It's a lovely piece of,furniture, an old
fashioned roll top desk with a slide out shelf for placing papers. But the desk
is also monstrously large. So a corner
of the living room serves as my home office , and that space is almost always
cluttered with bad manuscripts of failed novels (my own. Sigh) writing magazines, books, journals, and
miscellaneous loose pages on which I have written stupendous ideas to use
later. I also keep a paper bag for recycled paper nearby. This week I am on
vacation so I am determined to clean this mess up.
I
recycled two pieces of junk mail, then came across a photocopied article one of
the Rock stars of Reference from our local,library gave me last week. I sat
down and read through it. (Did I go back to cleaning? No. I started writing
this blog post. I am hopeless.)
The
article, from Book List, is a Will Manley column about graphic novels and their
role in developing young readers.
Libraries are undergoing changes with lightning speed, and more of my school
library colleagues have fallen into black holes, leaving behind ghost towns
filled with lonely books and magazines. Some libraries have taken action to
attract clientele by promoting graphic novels for kids who claim to hate
reading in the hopes of leading them into more text based stories. Yet, as
pointed out in the Manley piece,
"that's like saying you can get meth addicts into a rehab center by
baiting them with [drugs] and expecting them to go clean."
If we
want to develop a culture of readers, we need to read. And not just in Language
Arts classes. The Common Core standards schools are adopting are not new. They
are just a new name for teaching all subjects through narrative. (A new fangled
name for ancient dialogues in Plato's time, and the Renaissance education.)
It's the way I was taught in the late 60s and 70s, learning of the relationship
of all things. As my former student Aaron miller once said during a eureka
moment, "everything's connected !"
I'm not
sure this post has anything to do with any of the Scintilla prompts, but since
everything's related, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Back to my stacks
of papers....
Happy Writing.
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