Amy Loves Books

For the teachers of English (or science), I made a webquest

I rarely read articles online, but this one, about the man that spent eleven years trying to invent disappearing colored bubbles, was fascinating.

If you are a girl, here's a fun quiz.

You have the Goya girl look. A Goya girl had an air
of extreme elegance and sophistication. They
liked richness of every kind. The artists
excelled in painting brocades and tapestry,
cloth of gold and silver, gauzy fabrics and
black lace. You could have modeled for the
great Spanish painters, such as Valasquez and
Goya. Both were painters to the royal court of
Spain.


'Pretty As A Picture' - Which Artist Would Paint You?
brought to you by Quizilla

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My daughter is of the age to do slappy hand rhymes. Last year, when she attended the charter school in the inner city, she learned this rhyme:

Shame, shame, shame
I don't wanna be ashamed
I don't wanna kiss my momma at the door, door, door
There's a big fat policeman at the door, door, door
He
Grabbed me by the collar
Made me pay a dollar
I don't wanna go to Mexico no more, more, more

This year, her charter school was closed down. She is attending a more suburban, middle-class school. They have taught her a different version:

Shame, shame, shame
I don't wanna be ashamed
I don't wanna kiss my momma at the door, door, door
There are three cute boys at the door, door, door
They
Grabbed me by the hips
Kissed me on the lips
I don't wanna go to Mexico no more, more, more

I find it very difficult not to deconstruct the difference between the slappy hand rhymes.

I believe I prefer the first version.

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Every day. in my classes, I give a word from the SAT vocabulary list as a part of the warm-up. My kids call them sat words. If I hear someone incorporate a vocabulary word into their conversation, I'll tell them to wrote "plus 5" at the top of whatever they are working on. Bonus points.

It has been a system that has worked well - until this week. Monday's sat word was disingenuous. I casually mentioned that I thought this was a word that they might actually enjoy using. I had no idea.

Disingenuous is the new buzz word in my classes. I've had to stop the bonus points. It was getting redundant.

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A parent's review of Zathura.

Although I am a fan of Van Allsburg, I have never been fond of the movies based on his books. Still, Arden wanted to see Zathura. He's been counting down the days until Zathura comes out, because he loves space. Some boys are fascinated by sports, or dinosaurs, or trucks. For my son, it has always been outer space.

When I saw that a sneak preview was showing in the city, I decided to take both kids. Chip was out of town all weekend, and it seemed like a fun way to spend the night out.

The good news is that Zathura is one of the better live action kids movies that I have ever seen. It was extremely enjoyable to watch. The bad news is that it scared the crap out of Lily. It is a very, very intense movie - which is something I was not expecting (remember, the film is based on a children's picture book). In terms of the scare factor, I think it compares with the original Jurassic Park.

Lily is seven and she spent the entire half of the movie sitting in my lap. I had to keep promising that nobody was going to die. Now that a few days have passed, she has started to say that she liked the movie. Still, in retrospect, I wish I had taken Arden to see the film by himself. The theater was packed with families with young children, and there were a whole lot of crying, seriously freaked out kids during some of the more intense scenes.

The movie opens this weekend. If you have older kids, it's one of the few films I've seen that is totally appropriate for older elementary-middle school kids. There are no adult or off-color jokes, and there is none of the potty humor that seem to be a staple of live action kid movies. It's just classic aliens-and-bad-robots-suspense. For an old-fashioned space adventure, it is at the top of its genre. Adults will enjoy it as much as the kids.

BUT, if you have younger elementary kids or preschoolers, you probably want to sit this one out.

Kinda like the book, except TOTALLY SCARY

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It has never been Autumn for me. It's been fall. Always fall. Autumn was a word that picture books used: a strange word uttered by children that owned sleds and mittens, children for whom Santa arrived in the snow. Autumn was a word about butternut squash and cider and scarves. Autumn was a word I never said. It was mysterious and lovely, with its silent "n" at the end hiding a secret that I instinctively knew was beyond my reach. Instead of the sad poetic loveliness of autumn, I lived in a place that spoke only of fall. We had fall. Only fall. There was nothing autumnal about it. No fireplaces, hot cocoa or knitted hats. There was only a darkness that crept in after dinner and lingered. Leaves simply dried up and curled like brown fists on the ground. Fall, we called it, and the name fit.

For as long as I can remember, I have not wanted to be from the south. My intention was always to get as far away as I could as soon as possible, to seek out Autumn and fire and trees that burst into color. In college, I dated some boys solely based on geography, on how far trips home to visit a hypothetical family might take me. My first college boyfriend was from Maine. He sat behind me in consumer science class; I did not pay attention to him until he spoke out loud in class. I turned and smiled at the sound of his words.

One thing I have always been proud of is my lack of a southern accent. Strangers ask me where I am from, because they can't quite place it. It must be somewhere up north. I shrug and admit that the farthest north I've been is Ohio. Then I must have parents from someplace else, they insist. I take these comments as flattery, as proof that I have transcended.

When I was six years old, I started watching Masterpiece Theater on PBS. My parents would have a group of college students over, and everyone would sit on the floor and watch. With a child's uncanny knack for mimicry, I began to recite lines from the episodes in a flawless British accent. This trick delighted the adults in the room. They gave me new phrases to say, and I repeated them. I began to slip in and out of my new accent like dress-up clothes, using it when I played alone or waited for the school bus. It felt right. I liked being questioned about it, the assumption that I was from someplace else. I came up with vague half answers for people. For example, I would explain politely that my cousins were from New Zealand.

My freshman year of college, I took a class on the modern British novel, which I loved, and a class on the literature of the American south, which I usually skipped. At the end of the semester, I did not even keep the books. In graduate school, I had an assignment to write a paragraph in vernacular English. We were given a set of grammatical rules that the vernacular follows, and we simply had to write following the rules. I couldn't do it. Couldn't code switch at all. The words felt alien and forced. Stupid. Had been asked to imitate Australian, or New York, or British speech - places I've never been - I could have done it effortlessly. It was the speech of my own childhood, the words that surround me wherever I go, that eluded me.

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Canongate has launched an ambitious literary project called The Myths, which features an impressive list of authors (Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Chinua Achebe, Victor Pelevin, Jeanette Winterson - to name a few) each retelling and/or reinventing a traditional myth. (I've heard that Donna Tartt will be writing on the myth of Cupid and Psyche)

I read the first book in the series, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, this weekend. It tells the story of Penelope and the twelve maids that Odysseus hung.

It was wonderful.

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Since I've had children, I've never stayed at home on Halloween because I didn't want to miss seeing them Trick or Treat.

For the past eight years, I've stood at the end of driveways and reminded them to say Thank You. I've always taken them to my parent's neighborhood, so that they could go door to door in the suburban safety of cul-de-sacs and luminary lit walkways. Trustworthy candy. Neighbors that bought the good stuff: miniature Snickers and Reeses and Three Musketeers. None of that cheap black and orange wrapped taffy crap.

We Trick or Treated among other watchful parents on streets crowded with little kids in superhero capes and princess dresses. Tinkerbells and Spidermen. We started at dusk and finished by eight.

This year, I told my husband that I needed to stay at home and hand out candy while he went elsewhere with the kids. The fact that I live across the street from my high school is a widely known fact. I wanted to be there if (when) high school kids came by. Partially because I knew they would expect me to be there, but also because I had a sense that my husband would not be as protected from pranks as I would be. I had purchased a special box of full-size candy in case any of my students or former students showed up. I sat in the reading room and graded papers in between knocks at the door.

A few things surprised me about Halloween in my neighborhood. First, most kids did not have costumes. A few of them wore only a funny hat, or red lipstick smeared around their eyes. They showed up in street clothes, with empty plastic grocery bags to hold candy. The first family arrived at 4:00 in the afternoon. The family consisted of a very disheveled single mother with four kids that looked like they ranged in age from eight to two. I sensed that something was a little off with mother - drugs or perhaps mental illness. I gave the kids candy and then the mother held out her thin plastic garbage bag for her own candy. Fifteen minutes after they left, they knocked on the door again. Trick or Treat.

When it started to get dark, I sent my husband and kids off to Trick or Treat in a different neighborhood, where I knew they houses would have porch lights lit and bowls of candy ready. He hesitated before he left. I'll be fine, I told him.

The second thing that surprised me about Halloween was that almost none of the Trick or Treaters were children. They were teenagers and adults. There is something distinctly unnerving about hearing a knock on the door and seeing a tall, young man standing outside in the dark. Instinct kicks in and you remember all the warnings about not opening doors to strangers. Never tell a phone caller that you are home alone. Many of the older boys wore only street clothes and a plastic mask. Scream and Jason and Michael Meyers. I pictured the headline in the next days paper:Local School Teacher Shot and Killed When She Opened Her Door to Trick or Treaters.

Again and again, I opened the door and handed out treats. Ring pops and candy necklaces. I had purchased around seventy pieces of candy, and by the time my husband and kids came home, I had run out of the rings and necklaces and had resorted to giving away some of the candy my own kids had accumulated. Many of the houses around me did not hand out candy at all, and I understand why. There is an unspoken understanding among adults that Trick or Treating should end at a certain age. Young adults, especially young men are frightening when they knock on the door in the dark. It is hard to trust that they really only want candy. Candy seems so small and silly. What would a seventeen year old boy want with a candy necklace or ring-shaped lollipop?

At eight o clock, my husband suggested that we turn out the lights. Keep them on a little longer, I said. Just in case.

The next morning at school, I was walking to my classroom and I passed one of my ninth graders. She had been one of the few students that had come to my door. When she saw me, she held up the bag of Reeses Pieces I had given her. She had eaten about half, and wound the wrapper together to save the rest. She didn't say anything; she just pointed to the candy and smiled.

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