I interrupt my challenge posts to bring you this tidbit.

Several months ago, I filled out a form at UNC's School of Information and Library Science site to get the director of their school librarian program to contact me.  She finally got back to me recently, and I was pleased by her response, though it didn't exactly tell me anything new. (Emphasis Added)

Dear Ms. H,

You sent information to our school library interest database some months
ago but the database was in the process of being revised and I am only now
getting to the point of responding.  I apologize for the long delay.

You inquired about what you need to NC certification as a school media
coordinator (the official name for the school librarian) through our
program.

The state requires for this 076 certification a a valid NC teaching
certificate (which you have), a master's degree in library science with
specialized school library courses (which you don't have although you have
some children's literature courses), fieldwork (which might be waived for
experience) and a passing score of the PRAXIS specialty area exam.

The details of what is required are spelled out in more detail on the
following website:
<http://sils.unc.edu/programs/continuing_ed/slmc/licensure.html>

You meet the teaching certificate requirement.  Latin and mythology is a
good background especially for a high school teacher.  You would need to
enroll in a master's program in library science and take courses in the
school library specialty area to qualify for licensure as a school
librarian.

Let me know if you have further questions and again, apologies for the long
delay in responding.

Co-Director, School Library Media Program

Wildwood Dancing is a fairytale lover’s dream: familiar tales, retold and mixed with folklore, creating a new and entrancing story.  In this combination of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Frog Prince, and various eastern European folktales, 15 year old Jenica finds herself trying to manage her father’s estate as he goes to the shore to recover from grave illness.  Her cousin Cezar quickly appoints himself master of the estate, and sets about restricting the activities of Jena and her four sisters, as well as seeking his revenge on the folk of the wildwood, whom he blames for his brother’s death ten years ago.

The use of familiar stories in Wildwood Dancing is refreshing: Marillier takes care to make the stories recognizable but not predictable.  At several points I thought I saw where the story was going and every time I was a little right and a little wrong.  This is how a book should be: we get the thrill of having figured it out, without the boredom that comes with a more predictable story.  Wildwood Dancing is not only strong in its use of traditional tales, but also in its creation of characters.  The five sisters of Piscul Dracului are five different girls, each with her own whole personality.  At the same time, while Jena is “the sensible one” and Tati is “the pretty one” and Paula is “the smart one,” these girls are not pigeonholed by these roles.

Wildwood Dancing reminded me of Holly Black’s Tithe, which is odd because the moods of the two books have nothing in common.  I think it was just the notion of teenaged girls interacting with faeries that made the connection in my mind.  Still, there is a spiritual connection between them, somehow, and I feel that fans of one would certainly enjoy the other.

(Stats Below Are For the Whole Challenge, Not Just This Book)
Books Read: 3
Pages Read: 795
Time Spent Reading/Reviewing: 11 hrs

I found myself stuck at Barnes and Noble tonight while waiting to meet my family for dinner, so I sat down and read for a spell.  While The Coming Storm doesn’t meet MotherReader’s 200 page guideline, Amazon says it’s for ages 9 - 12, which is close enough to the 5th grade range that I’m going to go on and count it.

The Coming Storm is a quick read, and fun.  As a self-appointed Captain Jack Sparrow expert and enthusiast, I’m rather picky about folks getting him right.  Rob Kidd does an admirable job here, capturing Captain Jack’s voice and mannerisms so well that I actually pictured a 21 Jump Street-era Johnny Depp acting them out.  The book is very clearly part of a series, and while it could stand alone, there’s no reason you’d want it to.  It has its own arc and ties in with a larger storyline as well.  The book “sets up” familiar characters from the movies, including both Tia Dalma and Davy Jones.  Jack’s desire early on seems to be to rid the world of pirates, or so he tells his crew, and I’m interested to see if the other books explain his apparent distaste for his future profession.

(Stats Below Are For the Whole Challenge, Not Just This Book)
Books Read: 2
Pages Read: 388
Time Spent Reading/Reviewing: 4.5 hrs

Miracle got her name because, as her grandmother Gigi tells her, she was born from a dead woman.  Miracle’s father, Dane, was a prodigy and published his first novel at the age of 13.  Miracle likes to spend her days helping Gigi with her work as a medium, practicing dancing, and sitting in her father’s company.  One day, as Gigi is conducting a seance to contact Miracle’s dead mother, the Ouija board tells them that Dane is gone.  They rush to his room in the basement to find that he’s melted; all that’s left of him is a pile of clothes.

Dancing on the Edge explores how our family shapes who we are and what we believe.  Miracle strongly believes in the symbolism of colors and numbers, in auras, portents, and omens.  She starts to question her beliefs when she first meets her Granddaddy Opal and he tells her, “If your mama was dead when you were born, then you was never born."  I picked up this book because it was a readergirlz recommendation in May for Mental Health Month; throughout the course of the book Miracle loses and finds herself again.  By the end of it, I was sniffling and tearing up.  That is the mark of a good book.

Books Read: 1
Pages Read: 244
Time Spent Reading/Reviewing: 3.25 hrs

(You can expect longer reviews of most of my 48 Hr Book Challenge Books in the coming weeks.)

…

Interesting Tidbit: Two of the Challenge Participants were students in the split level 3/4 classes where I did my student teaching; they weren’t MY students as I taught level 4 and my mentor teacher taught level 3, but they are still in that “my former student” brainspace.  They happen to be on the list of top 10 coolest former students.  (I’ve only had about 200 students so far, being somewhat new to this whole teaching thing, but still.  Top 10 out of 200, not bad at all.)  I hope I can convince them to participate in the Pirate Challenge when it comes around.

My official start time for the 48 Hour Book Challenge is going to be 9:30 am.  I will go from 9:30 am today to 9:30 am Sunday.  There will be a few interruptions, mostly sleep I think.  And eating.  And probably a little house cleaning.  But not too many.

Have fun, all!

More pirate poetry for you today.  Today I have Sea Fever, by John Masefield.  I first encountered this poem on a gorgeous Captain Jack Sparrow wallpaper, and was not aware of its source.  I was delighted to find it today.

I MUST down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

You can read the whole poem at Bartleby.com.

The round-up is at HipWriterMama.

Pirates have been on my mind a lot lately, more even than usual, and I will be issuing a Pirate Challenge once the 48 Hour Reading Challenge is over.

 

I'll be participating in Mother Reader's 48 Hour Book Challenge starting tomorrow.  I'll begin at whatever time I happen to wake up or after I finish reading The Phoenix Dance, whichever comes first.  I'll probably take breaks for eating, making sure my boyfriend hasn't died of boredom while I've been reading, and this sort of thing, but I am hoping to spend most of tomorrow and Saturday reading.

Sound like fun?  To sign yourself up, go to the original post.

I don't have a booklist/pile set up, but here's what I expect I'll be reading tomorrow:

Dancing on the Edge, Han Nolan
Wildwood Dancing, Juliet Marillier
The Various, Steve Augarde

After that, it becomes a competition between Capt. Hook, my stack of borrowed books, and the books I bought at the library sale.

So come join us!

Now that I'm reading lots of kidlit blogs, I find myself needing to make lists, all the time.  

I find books that I need to read because they relate to the ancient Mediterranean, which is my area of expertise  (I so long to have a classroom so I can reward students for hard work by giving them time to read fiction from a library of class-related books that I keep on a shelf.  But instead, I have a cart, which does not have enough room for the books.)

I find books that are not out yet, which I want to give as gifts.

It's so exciting and a little overwhelming, too.

Do you find yourself needing to keep track of lots of lists of books?

I guess Good Reads is the place to do this, isn't it?

This week, I've been thinking a lot about gender and societal expectations.  It started with Vivian's post, "Girl Power, At What Price?" at HipWriterMama.  In that post, Vivian wonders how the pressure to have, do, and be everything is affecting girls today.  It continued as I tried to sum up the first several chapters of Celia Rees's Pirates! for my roommate, and I mused about how common it is to have a story where a wealthy girl loves a man below her station, but it rarely seems to go the other way.  It continued when I read Becky's review of At the Sign of the Star.  Meg Moore, the main character in the book, dreams of a life where she can do more than just wifely tasks like sewing and mending.

All of this came to a head in my mind this morning, when I started thinking about what it means to be a woman, and especially what it means to be a strong woman.  I know I'm saying nothing new here, but it saddens me to think that roles that have been traditionally assigned to women are often rejected as "not enough."  I don't mean to say that people should settle for something in life that doesn't satisfy them.  What I find disconcerting is that when women seek to take on traditionally male roles, they often explicitly devalue traditionally feminine roles in their speech and actions.  When some women suggest that managing households is an inferior task to being out in the world, I feel as though they aren't really helping "the cause."  I'm having trouble expressing myself well here.  I suppose what I'm getting at is that I feel women should choose the work that fulfills them most and that they find most valuable.

This brings me to this week's question:
In what ways do children's and young adult novels shape readers' notions of gender roles?  How can and do they present more options, especially to girl readers, for how to spend a life?

I'm looking here for titles, trends, and examples of literature where girls get to choose who they are going to be, or that explore when and why they don't get to choose who they are going to be.  We have resources like Jen Robinson's 200 Cool Girls of Children's Literature and readergirlz.  What else is out there?  What has shaped the women we are now, and what will shape the girls of the future?  What role does children's and young adult literature play in affecting boys' and men's views of women?  How can we show girls the myriad of possibilities open to them without coloring their view of which possibilities are best?

What do you think?

On Thursday, TadMack at Finding Wonderland issued a few Most Egregious Misuse awards.  She focused on punctuation errors.  I myself hate finding extra apostrophes places, and often find myself wanting to take a red pen to signs.

It’s not just punctuation that is the problem, however.  Misuse of words is rampant, as well.  I recall once in high school a classmate of mine called something a “gregarious error."  She was the subject of much mockery.  You see, it’s always better to use the word that best communicates your meaning.  Sometimes you want a less common word for this, because its meaning is more specific than that of other words.  (See how I avoided putting an extra apostrophe in “its”?  It would have been very embarrassing if I hadn’t.)

In some cases, however, I think people use odd words just to sound more educated, or because they are bored with their usual vocabulary.  This is not okay, if they don’t know the meaning of the words.

For example:
While catching up on my kidlit newsletters I came upon an article about a new line of children’s nonfiction books.  In this article, the publisher of these books was quoted as saying their illustrations “provide an infinitesimal range of perspectives."

Let’s take a look at “infinitesimal,” shall we?

From m-w.com:
 Main Entry: ²infinitesimal
Function: adjective
1 : taking on values arbitrarily close to but greater than zero
2 : immeasurably or incalculably small <an infinitesimal difference>

I don’t think one would want to publish non-fiction that provided only an infinitesimal range of perspectives.  It would be very limiting, wouldn’t it?