Snakes, Authors, Reading, and Books

Thank you all for your birthday wishes to Al yesterday! We are pleased to announce that in honor of his birthday, we are adding to our reptile collection. This is Aornis, a female black pastel ball python who was hatched in February. She will be shipped to us this coming Thursday from VPI, a breeder out of Texas.

We are both very excited to have this cute little girl join Acheron! If anyone is curious about the name, we named Acheron after Acheron Hades, a villian in the Thursday Next series of books. In the books, the evil Hades family is made up of siblings named after the rivers of the Underworld. Aornis isn't actually a river, Jasper Fforde made it up and pretended it was one, counting on the average person's knowledge of the underworld rivers being limited to Acheron and Styx...

So she's named after another Thursday Next villian. Dad has also said that he'd like to learn how to handle a snake! Stay tuned for pictures. We'll be sure to document the occasion. He should have an easy time with our snakes. Acheron is very laid back.

In other news, for the past three days, I have had the opportunity to learn under Will Hobbs, a young adult author of 17 novels and 2 picture books. I haven't read any of his books, but I do plan to. He primarily writes western adventure novels, but has expanded to historical and realistic fiction and sci/fi comedy. The cool thing about his writing is that he's a real outdoorsman. All of his settings are real places, so when he talks about a mountain, a dirt road, or a bend in a river, he's actually been there.

He was at our district in connection with the young writers conference. Remember that school-wide writing contest I was in charge of? That was a part of this conference. On Tuesday, he came to Northridge, where I teach, to do presentations for students. It was kind of a stroke of luck that he came to my school, and on a B-day, so I was able to take my creative writing class to his presentation. I was a bit surprised that I was the ONLY Northridge teacher to take students, though, seeing as though the presentation was on campus. The rest of the district sure took advantage; his morning session was 1,200 kids, and the afternoon session 500.

On Wednesday, he did a writing workshop for the winners of the school contests. I went down to be with our students. Then, Thursday, he spoke to teachers. Since he's a former teacher, he came at it from a writing teacher's perspective, which was nice. He also did some pretty hard sells of his books, but I guess that is to be expected. I bought a couple and got them signed. I was pretty impressed that after three days of being on display in the Davis District that he was still so friendly. Even on the last day, he was acting as if he'd just arrived! In truth, his personality reminded me a little of Dad. He was just very at-ease with people.

I do want to clarify that even though I've never read his books, it isn't because they aren't good. In fact, they've won many awards for young adult literature and span young readers from upper-elementary school to high school. Typically, my reading does not take me on Western adventures down the Colorado River, so I just haven't been exposed to him just yet. I am very excited to read Crossing the Wire, about a 15-year-old Mexican boy who immigrates illegally to the U.S. in order to support his family. Hobbs put a great deal of research into it and every review I've seen says that it is very even-handed, exposing the goods and evils of both sides of this issue, while putting a human face on something that usually only gets a label.

If you want to know more about his books, his website is website is: http://www.willhobbsauthor.com/ I've spent some time looking it over and it is a very cool site. Every book has tons of information about it, including an interview with him about the different events and places.

And speaking of reading, on Tuesday night, I had my last writing class, which was also my last class for my reading endorsement! Once my credit posts on the State Education Office database, I apply and pay an application fee, and then I am highly qualified to teach reading. This is technically different from teaching literature (but in a perfect world, they would be the same thing). In a reading class, we discuss reading strategies and help students who struggle with reading come to understand what good readers do, then purposefully and consciously use those same strategies when they're reading.

The extra credit hours of work will also go into a lane change application, which will result in a raise for me, too!

This is my level I endorsement. I could go for my level II, which is a few more classes and an internship. As a level II endorsed person, I could apply for district level jobs, like a literacy specialist or a teacher of the level I classes. The district started a group through that process this year. It will probably be another year or two before they offer the opportunity again. I'm really thinking seriously of doing it.

I'm glad to have this out of the way. I should have actually finished it last summer, but Al's vacation was the same week as the writing class was offered, so I wasn't able to enroll. It feels good to have this done, now, though. I've been working on it since September of 2006!

And finally, a couple of book recommendations from my recent reading experiences. The first is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. This is the first in a series of books. Written for young adults, the premise is that in the future, the U.S. has a big war, leaving behind a capital city and 13 districts. The capital city is oppressive, and when District 13 rebels, it is completely destroyed. Now to keep the rest of the districts in check, every year, each district has to hold a lottery in which one boy and one girl ages 12-18 is chosen to participate in the Hunger Games. They are sent off to the capital, thrown into an "arena," which is a large expanse of wilderness, and left to fight to the last man/woman standing, while cameras catch all the action and turn the event into reality TV. The book follows the experiences of a sixteen-year-old girl who ends up in the arena.

Yeah, it sounds horrifying. It's not about blood and guts, though. There are not elaborate descriptions of people's deaths. It's more about strategizing and issues of trust, humanity, and whether or not it's ok to sacrifice another to save yourself. It also asks how far we will go for entertainment. Once upon a time, it was considered great fun to tie up a bear so it couldn't defend itself and watch the dogs kill it. Then there is the coloseum in Rome...arena...fighting to the death...sound familiar? Reality TV is turning into the capitalization of suffering; audiences eat it up. How far away are we from this, really?

So I highly recommend The Hunger Games. It's an engaging and fast read that can really get a good discussion going. And yes, Jill, I think Kenzie would love it. The Pirates of the Carribean movies were far more violent than this book.

Then there's The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. I read this because it was the selection for high schools in our Davis Reads program. (For those of you who don't know, Davis is my school district.) I picked it up in September or so and flew through it. It really pulled a lot of writing out of me, as well. I was very excited when Jeffrey Zaslow visited our district (another author presentation that I took my creative writers to) and I got my copy signed!

If you haven't read this book, get it now. Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, which has a tradition of asking retiring professors to give a last lecture in which they talk about what they've learned in life. Paush found out that he had advanced pancreatic cancer and only a few months of good health left. He saw the lecture as an opportunity for his young children to have fatherly advice after he had passed away. Zaslow, a columnist for Wall Street Journal attended the lecture and wrote a column about it. The lecture became a huge hit on YouTube (it's still there). The book idea wasn't appealing to Randy at first because he wanted to spend the last months with his family, not writing a book. But the revenue from book sales would be a way to provide for them. So he got a cell phone with a head set and every day he would bike for an hour around his house (to keep his health up) and dictate to Zaslow, who put the book together.

Seriously, this is one of the best books I've read in a while. I found myself saying "AMEN!" to a lot of what he had to say. It's just so common sense, but now someone who is actually being listened to is saying it! Plus, Randy is an amazing person. You'll find yourself truly inspired by what he managed to accomplish in his life, his positive attitude, and the way he really puts things in perspective. The book isn't terribly long, so you'll find that the actual reading is quick. You'll probably spend three times the amount of time thinking about what he has to say.

A couple of quotations to get you acquainted:

• Experience is what you get when you don't get what you wanted.
• Brick walls are there for a reason. They keep the other people out. (He's talking about perseverence.)

Well, I hope you enjoyed my random list of stuff today. To sum up the rest of life, I'm busy, the weather stinks, and I'm really excited for Spring Break next week!