Architectural Doghouses in the Library!

Every spring, each student in M & D's eight-&-nine year-old class chooses an architect to research. The final project includes a research notebook, a display board, and a doghouse designed in the style of the chosen artist. The best part is that the library gets to display the projects for several weeks!

This year the Paideia Library has the following architects "in the doghouse." Come see them all!


Mies van der Rohe
Julia Morgan
I.M. Pei
Philip Johnson
Kevin Roche
Richard Neutra
Antonio Gaudi
Arata Isozaki
Zaha Hadid
Aldo Rossi
Kenzo Tange
Leila Ross Wilburn
Christian de Port Zampare



Luis Barragan
Richard Meier
J. Neel Reid
Renzo Piano
Le Corbusier
Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron
Sir Norman Foster
Mario Botta
Frank Lloyd Wright

Hans Hollein
Santiago Calatrava

Python Picks Podcast #1:Servant of the Shard

Last school year, we tried to launch a series of podcast booktalks. I made a few, and managed to recruit one student (an actor, dancer, martial arts student and all-around brave soul) to create a few others. It was a fun learning experience, but hasn't quite taken flight. I hate for all that hard work to be forgotten, so I've figured out how to embed the files into this site for others to hear.

Click the "play" arrow on the controls above to listen to the premiere student-created Python Pick, Servant of the Shard, a fantasy epic by R. A. Salvatore. Comments and feedback would be fantastic!

Tutorial: How to Post a Book Review

This is my first attempt at creating a tutorial for the cool features on our Surpass WebSafari catalog. It's related to the Book A Month Challenge I'm featuring in the library this year (more on that later). The video's a bit rough, but it's a start. Play it and let me know how it works for you.

Non-Fiction Monday:Grief Girl: My True Story

Last night Dad told me they were crossing the road to go to a fruit stand when a speeding tow truck came out of nowhere and hit them.

Australian teen Erin Vincent was fourteen when she was half-orphaned on October 23, 1983. Only half on that day; her father survived the accident but suddenly died exactly one month later, never having left the hospital.

The three Vincent children, 18-year-old Tracy, 3-year-old Trent, and Erin, along with Tracy's boyfriend Chris, work to keep what remains of their family together. They are supported by a few neighborhood friends, but abandoned by many more. Tracy shoulders the parental role, Trent's the child, and Erin is somewhere in the middle. Tension and resentment builds between the sisters, their mother's parents (an altogether unpleasant couple) initiate a battle for custody of Trent, and their favorite uncle turns out be robbing the trust fund. As you can tell, Grief Girl is no rosy "how we bounced back" story. It's real.

Written in the present tense, there's a raw immediacy to the story that puts the reader inside Erin Vincent's life, and it's not a happy place to be. She's sure the accident is her fault, for thinking about it during angry times. There is virtually no emotional support for Erin, much of what is offered, she rejects as insincere, and what she finds, institutional powers try to forbid. For close to three years, Erin to bounces around inside her grief -- she's angry and sarcastic, she's disconnected, she pushes people away, and she's then alone, longing for connection. "I wish I could talk to someone who's been through it, someone who 'gets it.'" The writing is honest, she doesn't gloss over parental flaws -- her mom favored Tracy, and her dad sometimes had been physically abusive.

I'm not sure whether it's under-identification, or over-"getting it," but I finished the book feeling only so-so. This doesn't mean I don't recommend it. I do -- it's a real and powerful story, and everything that Erin went through speaks to the universal desire to connect, to be known and accepted. Erin's longing to find someone who "gets it" also expresses a need to find someone who "gets her." Everyone, in good times and bad, can identify with that.

Read
- the first chapter of Grief Girl at HarperCollins

Watch
- Erin talks about why she wrote Grief Girl & reads an excerpt
- biography, documentary, performance art, homage: a book trailer by Erin's husband Adam Knott

Grief Girl: My True Story was a 2008 Nominee for ALA's Best Books for Young Adults

Author Visit a Big Success!

Last Thursday, January 31, the Paideia Library brought Young Adult author Alan Gratz to school for a day of teaching and discussing his path to becoming a successful YA writer. He had a fully packed day, meeting with 4 high school and junior high classes, and again with aspiring high school writers during lunch.

The day started with an all-male high school literature class, where Alan discussed writing the father-son relationship, and the all-male world of Samurai Shortstop. The discussion was really rolling when the period ended; they could have gone on for much longer.

In two junior high lit classes, Alan’s “author talk” discussed his life as a writer, including two rejected early novels, a stint as a scriptwriter for a true-crime TV series, and how he developed from a guy who hated research into one who has written meticulously researched, outlined and revised historical fiction. Alan showed a photograph of a man in traditional kimono and sandals, throwing out the first pitch in the 1915 Japanese high school baseball championships. It captured his imagination, and Samurai Shortstop became the story of the people in the photo.

In another JH class, Alan led a writing workshop in which students created the story of a photograph -- who's in the picture? where are they? why are they there? -- an idea that the teachers have turned into an autobiography writing exercise, using students’ own family pictures.

This was the first time I’ve planned and coordinated an author visit, and it was as stress-free as an author visit could possibly be. I hope they’ll all be as successful -- for the students, teachers, author and your friendly librarian.

Reading Across Borders #6/Non-Fiction Monday:After the Wall

After The Wall is a quick-reading trip into the mysterious territory of communist East Germany, in the years just before and after the end of the Berlin Wall. Your tour guide is a young German woman - who until 1989 was a typical young East German teen. When Jana Hensel was 13 years and 3 months old, her childhood ended. The Wall fell, her country was no more, and an entire nation's identity as "East Germans" disappeared overnight.

First published in Germany in 2002, Zonenkinder was a smash best-seller, on the best-seller charts first in hardback, then in paperback, for over two years. The dislocation/disorientation she describes makes me think of someone born on February 29 - the birthday was real, the child is real, but the date vanishes. Unlike Leap Day birthdays, though, the GDR won't be back.

Feeling insecure and ill-at-ease compared to their better-dressed and worldlier fellow (former West German) Germans, Hensel and her peers tried hard to pass as "regular" Germans. The ease with with other Europeans moved through the Western world made them see what had been normal and everyday in the Eastern Bloc had been, in fact, very different from the world outside.

At the ripe old age of 25, Jana Hensel writes:

Now, when I look back on those years before the Wall fell and the whole world changed around us, it seems like a far-away, fairy-tale time. . . It's not easy for people my age -- the last generation of GDR kids -- to remember the old days, because back then we wanted nothing more for them to hurry up and end . . . Nothing remains of our childhood country -- which is of course exactly what everyone wanted -- and now that we're grown up and it's almost too late, I suddenly miss all the lost memories.

In many ways, Hensel's no different from most young adults, questioning identity and allegiance, and feeling nostalgic for the pre-responsibility life. Who am I? Where did I come from? Can I go back? For years they had wanted to be just German, and the wish was granted. For everyone who was once "East German," there is nowhere back to go.

Author Alan Gratz Coming to Paideia

The 2007-2008 school year is the first that the library has brought in authors at the junior high and high school levels. The first was Frank Beddor, author of The Looking Glass Wars, in September, sponsored by Little Shop of Stories in Decatur. Our second visiting author will be here next Thursday (January 31) and is Alan Gratz, former middle school teacher and Avondale Estates resident, now a full-time author living in Western North Carolina.

Alan's first novel is Samurai Shortstop, "the story of a boy in 1890s Tokyo who combines baseball and bushido, the samurai way of the warrior, to prove that his father's samurai traditions have a place in the new Japan." I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, an excellent work of historical fiction for teens that will appeal to baseball and samurai fans, devotees of Japanese history, and all readers who want an engrossing story of culture change, right and wrong, and fathers and sons. As Alan discusses in an author's afterword, who would have thought 19th century Japan played baseball??

The most recent novel is Something Rotten, which recasts Shakespeare's Hamlet as a contemporary murder mystery with an environmental twist. Wise-cracking teenager Horatio Wilkes noses around a rich family's skeletons and odiferous empire to discover who killed Hamilton Prince's father in Denmark, Tennessee. I was born in Athens, Tennessee while my dad was a forester for the Bowater Paper company (and I went to graduate school in Knoxville), so in addition to enjoying the story and placing the twists of character & plot, I could easily conjure up the setting and trademark smell that identifies the "something rotten in Denmark."

Alan is putting in a full day of teaching and talking -- in 3 of the junior high homebases, one high school lit class, and with members of the Literary Magazine and Forum staffs. His books are available to buy at Little Shop of Stories in Decatur (an awesome bookstore, mostly for kids but with something for everyone!).

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More about Alan Gratz:
at The Edge of the Forest (newsletter interview, January 2007)
at Interactive Reader (blog interview, November 2007)
and . . . a Wikipedia page!