"Keeping the Beat" and What It Means to Grow Up

Keeping the Beat (ISBN 9781771387309) by Marie Powell and Jeff Norton follows a group of seventeen year old English school girls as they form a band, enter a reality TV contest, win and travel to L.A. and eventually go to the international finals in Las Vegas.  What starts as an entertainingly engaging television-like story of sex, drugs and rock and roll (tempered with teenage romance and dreams of stardom, peppered with issues such as body image, date rape and drunk driving) evolves into an insightful examination of human relationships, coping with loss, and learning what it means to grow up.  A good read for its 13-18 year old target audience.

Oracle and FaceSpace as Teaching Tools

Teacher-librarians are in a privileged position when it comes to teaching students about technology.  They have books to back them up.  As useful as they can be, it is neither technical manuals nor Dummies Guides to …  to which I am referring. I am talking about fiction that can safely transport students into worlds where they can see their peers interacting with technology to find solutions to their problems.  They can also see the pitfalls of using technology and draw their own conclusions about technology and, equally importantly, the varied motivations of people behind the technology.

Amongst my favorite books for inspiring students to ask questions about the uses and dangers of technology are Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008) and For the Win (2010).  These are great works of social criticism as well as young adult adventure stories revealing how technology can serve both forces of oppression and liberation.  Even reluctant readers will often find these stories so engaging that they will be reluctant to put them down.

However, some students may be intimidated by the length of these books.  For those students whose first criteria is the (small) number of pages in the book, Orca has two short novels that will give middle school students the opportunity to reflect on why they need to ask questions about the motivations of others when they use social media.  Similarly, they will realize the importance of giving careful consideration to the consequences of the careless use of computers. 

The first of the titles is Oracle (2012) by former middle school teacher Alex Van Tol.  In this novel a student creates an anonymous advice blog to manipulate a popular girl into paying attention to him.  His dishonesty backfires, but not in a way that reads as a condemnation of the use of social media.  The novel explores social relationships that most students in middle school and junior high will recognize; it then reveals the benefits of responsible behaviour, both on and off-line, without seeming like a sermon.

The second novel is FaceSpace (2013) by Victoria Times Colonist arts and entertainment columnist Adrian Chamberlain. In this novel, the protagonist has to navigate his way through the complications that enter his life when he invents a cool friend to impress others and gain followers on social media.  Although the title suggests that this is a novel about technology, the story demonstrates that it is human nature that makes technology interesting.

What I like about these novels as teaching tools is the fact that they provide a human context and place the use of technology in familiar surroundings.  In our school library learning commons we can supplement the information that our students can derive from our newspapers and magazines, databases and technical manuals with works of fiction that set information in a more approachable human context.  And then we can invite our students to use their critical thinking skills to compare the world portrayed by the author with their own world.  Isn’t it wonderful to hear when they think!  

War Dance Documentary Celebrates the Resilience of the Human Spirit

If you are looking for a documentary video to compliment a novel study set in conflict zones in East Africa such as War Brothers by Sharon McKay (Uganda) or Lost Girl Found by Leah Bassoff and Laura DeLuca (South Sudan), consider War Dance.  The film is about students from a school in a refugee camp in Northern Uganda who struggle to prepare to compete for the National Music Competition in Kampala.  The stories of students whose lives have been torn apart by war are interwoven with their preparation for and participation in the competition.  This beautiful documentary is an interesting subject for deconstruction in terms of structure and the use of visuals and sound but, even more importantly, it demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit. 

        

Some Beautiful Blank Greeting Cards

This is a bit of a change from the normal content of this blog but, if you are looking for some beautiful blank greeting cards, visit photographiechatella.ca :

For visitors who are not looking for greeting cards, there are many beautiful images by Lucie Gagnon to be enjoyed.

The Inuit and the Residential School System

The Legacy of Hope Foundation has released an overview report on The Inuit and the Residential School System (http://www.legacyofhope.ca/downloads/inuit-and-the-rss.pdf).

This provides useful background information for units on this subject built around books such as Christy Fenton-Jordan's Fatty Legs and A Stranger at Home.

    
Although it might not address the issue of residential schools directly, Susan Aglukark's song "Arctic Rose" demonstrates the use of metaphor to evoke the alienation of youth in the North who find themselves exiled from their communities.

Homeland

In the interview Cory Doctorow did for the Winter 2011 issue of School Libraries in Canada, his concern for social justice, his dedication to intellectual freedom and his passion for books are all apparent. His most recent YA novel, a sequel to Little Brother, brings his concerns and passions into focus for a generation that is confronted with the economic, social, political and technological complexities of our digital age. He depicts a world where student debt and unemployment have become middle class problems and where money seems to grant impunity of action. Without being pedantic, Homeland explores issues of privacy and the distribution of wealth and power, while showing how technology can be a tool for oppression or for liberation. It depends on who is using it and how it is being used.


This novel could be a great tool for making students aware of issues surrounding privacy and for encouraging them to be proactive in participating in building the society in which they will want to live. Although the free version of the novel is frequently interrupted with plugs for a range of book stores where readers can purchase either the book or DRM-free e-books, this does not significantly detract from a highly-engaging, action-packed read. The free-download is posted at http://craphound.com/homeland/download/ on Doctorow's Craphound web site.

A Glimpse of Somalia

When Waubgeshig Rice was discussing Human Rights and Canada's First Nations peoples at Lisgar Library on Monday, he made reference to the fact that many Canadian First Nations communities have struggled with the transition to a sedentary existence from the traditional nomadic hunting and gathering way of life that is still a part of their recent history.  Coincidentally, my bus commute reading this week has been Nuruddin Farah's novel From a Crooked Rib (1970) in which he tells the story of an illiterate young woman from a pastoral encampment in the Somalian countryside who flees from an arranged marriage to an old man to a town and then to a city in search of some sort of freedom and choice.  The story is set at the time of Somalian independence from Italy and Britain and it portrays the parallel existences and the interchanges between the traditional and modern worlds. It puts a human face on the struggle for women's rights and reveals the strength and determination that is necessary to bridge the gap between the old and new worlds.  It is interesting to compare Farah's portrayal of Somalia as it moves towards independence with that provided by Margaret Laurence in The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963).

Last month I read one of Farah's more recent novels, Links (2003), which tells the story of a Somalian expat, a former political prisoner, who returns to Mogadishu under the control of warlords.  He paints a vivid picture of the struggle for survival in that "Twilight Zone" kind of world.

Farah is one of the  politicians, academics, journalists and aid workers to whom Hassan Ghedi Santur speaks in the CBC Ideas program Things We Lost in the War about what has happened in Somalia.