Letters from Lisa

I want to tell you about the year Val learned to talk.

When I first knew Val he was four years old. He had a shiny round face, sparkling eyes, skin the color of chocolate. Any object in his hand became a train. Pencils, forks, blocks, and yes, the occasional toy train — everything belonged to the transit system in Val’s mind. The school where I taught at the time was a block away from an elevated subway station, so about every five or six minutes Val would run excitedly to the window at the sound of a train passing by.

“Eh-neh-neh F TRAIN!!”

“F train” was one of Val’s good phrases. The others were “Hi, (person’s name)” “How are you?” “I’m fine”, and “More, please!”

He and his little friend Kenny would have heart-to-heart conversations over the lunch table:

Kenny: Hi, Val!
Val: Hi, Kenny!
Kenny: How are you?
Val: (jubilant) I’M FINE!

(after a very brief pause)

Val: Hi, Kenny!
Kenny: Hi, Val!
Val: How are you?
Kenny: I’m fine!

(after another pause…)

Kenny: Hi, Val!…

This would continue until they were interrupted by a teacher, or another train went by the window.

There were three other students in the class with Val and Kenny — pale blond David, who bashed me on the nose with a toy car (cackling with delight) on my first day of work; Terrence, who spoke every syllable with forceful precision (”What’s your name?” “Terr-RRENCE!”); and Alex, whose interests consisted of Barney songs and watching the tendons in his arm flex as he colored with a crayon. I had three assistants and two part-time interns, and each day the six of us would herd the five of them into their own individual cubby-spaces to do intensive behavioral instruction. The children practiced saying their names, responding to directions like “Touch your head” and “Find the red block”, and using picture symbols to communicate what they lacked the spoken words for. Val had begun on such a system when he arrived at the school as a tantrum-prone 3 year old, and within six months he had started using spoken words instead of the laminated paper squares. At the same time, his tantrums started to disappear. He didn’t need them to communicate anymore, now that he had words.

The world inside a classroom can seem small and contained, and with this, my very first class as a real teacher, I felt I knew every corner of that world. The children I worked with loved what they loved, feared what they feared, and knew what they knew. No less, no more. What surprised me, initially, was the total sameness with which they greeted me (or, more typically, didn’t) each day. The five of them had the most wondrous way of managing to look off in five totally separate directions whenever we sat together at the U-shaped table. Val and Kenny would giggle when I read them silly books and try to join in when we attempted that most ubiquitous ritual of preschools, circle time. My assistants sat behind the others and laboriously prompted them to look at me, move their hands with the songs, point to the animals in the book pictures. It felt rather like doing a radio show, with an imaginary audience listening somewhere far away.

One day in August, just before we adjourned for a brief summer break, we were out in the playground behind the school, directly underneath the subway tracks. A train rumbled overhead, and Val cried, “Lisa! Eh-neh-neh F TRAIN!!”

I squinted up at the tracks, then replied, “No, honey, that’s a G.”

He just looked at me.

“It’s a G train,” I tried again. “Sometimes it’s an F train. Sometimes it’s a G.” Then I shrugged and went back to pushing David on the swing, grabbing it and twisting it around unpredictably, trying to shake him out of his distant reality. It worked, momentarily — he began to shriek.

Another train rumbled overhead. Val said, “G train?”
And so Val was introduced to the New York subway system.

When Val and I came back in the fall, we were surrounded by all-new children and assistants and interns.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite books and what they have in common — on the surface, not much. “Lord of the Rings” is a fantasy story with mystical races of creatures and larger-than-life battles, while, say, “Holes” is about a young boy who is sent to a boot camp for a crime he didn’t commit. My taste in children’s books runs the gamut from stories about mundane stuff like family problems and school problems to stories about talking trees, castles, space aliens, and plucky orphans (a mainstay of children’s literature that will be addressed in another post). When I pick up a book, I generally decide very quickly whether I will connect with it (the Blink phenomenon — good intuition or an impatient frontal lobe?) so the question becomes: exactly WHAT are all we readers connecting with?

Common wisdom will tell you it’s having a “strong main character”, which is certainly part of it. What would Harry Potter be without, well, Harry Potter? Try to picture Star Wars without Luke Skywalker (and now you know why the newer movies are floundering!) or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without Charlie. Many books are carefully built around an absolutely fascinating person that we want to spend a lot of time with. But there’s more to it than that.

What separates a just-good book from a “Wow!” book is the presence of a Bigger Picture.

Good stories are “about” something. Yes, they’re about having adventures and solving mysteries and figuring out human relationships, but they’re also about a Bigger Picture. The Bigger Picture is why we bother to care. Sometimes we’re given a beautiful world (or family, or the human psyche — all worlds unto themselves) that is threatened with destructive change and must be preserved. Other times the world has been long destitute and threatened, and it must be saved. Many, if not most, excellent stories start years or even centuries before Page 1, with the advent of a problem or injustice that has carried on and threatens to reach a climax if our character doesn’t bring about the change that’s needed.

Take The Prisoner of Azkaban, in my opinion the best of the Harry Potter series. We’re introduced to Sirius Black, who was in prison for committing a mass murder. We also find out that he betrayed Harry’s parents. When Sirius escapes, Harry is thrown into the midst of this problem on an immediate personal level — he could be in danger — but he’s also faced with the responsibility of righting this wrong that has been done to his family. There’s no question that he must act, both to protect himself and to correct the injustice of the past (which is part of a larger Bigger Picture, that of Harry/Good vs. Voldemort/Evil). When Harry eventually learns that Sirius is innocent, it’s a sort of liberation for both of them — which is why S. can fly off satisfied that Harry knows the truth, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

Another example is the Tale of Despereaux, which I’m currently reading with my reading group — I constantly hear “Can we read just one more chapter?” because they just love it. I remember asking them to make some predictions about what the book would be about, and one child immediately answered, “I think he’s going to have to go on a quest, like there’s something important he’s supposed to do.” And in fact, what he’s supposed to do is correct a situation that began long before he was born, one that no one else is even aware of but is threatening to destroy the little princess that he loves. So he is sent into the dungeon and he discovers the secrets there. In some ways it’s the classic journey of Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces”.

Further example: “Holes”. What an incredible story. Hapless Stanley Yelnats is fighting for survival in a barren wasteland, but through his actions to save a friend, he ends up atoning for the sins of his ancestor. There’s also the companion story of how Green Lake became the barren wasteland in the first place, due to the prejudice and hate of the townspeople. The story is about how Stanley’s actions are able to reverse the cascade of misfortune that has been brought down upon his family, and more broadly, upon everyone involved with Green Lake. If the story were just about a kid digging holes in the ground and eventually escaping and having adventures, that’d be OK — just not a book I’d bother to pick up more than once.

And don’t get me started on the Freudian implications of “Where the Wild Things Are”. I’m sure it’s been said better by others. Just pointing out that even a simple picture book can have a Bigger Picture — that of a hero’s journey into his inner world.

Not every book starts out with its mission to tell a Big Story, and that’s fine. Some books are memorable for other reasons — depicting a slice of life, playing with words and images, etc. But I think any work of fiction, in which there is a problem and a solution, is made infinitely richer and deeper by the addition of a Bigger Picture.

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Ain’t technology grand?

As a teacher, I’m constantly surrounded by, and immersed in, children’s books. My first teaching experiences were with very young children, many of whom had developmental disabilities, and so what I read to them were joyous, simple texts accompanied by bright, captivating illustrations. Each class I worked with had its personal favorite — my first class of autistic children had a great fondness for “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” by Eric Carle, while a later group of mostly foster children preferred “Are You My Mother?” by P.D. Eastman. (It was a question that, unfortunately, was much on their minds.)

There are some books that I believe every child should read at some point, and of course my list is constantly expanding. I would like to say that my own writing is influenced by my choices as a reader, both for myself and for the children I work with — I suppose my own readers will have to judge whether that’s the case.

Here are some of my current very-favorites:

Books for very young-slightly older children:
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle (there are several sequels as well)
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss — I had a class that was obsessed with this one year!
Ramona Quimby series by Beverly Cleary
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Books for older children/young adults:
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (I first read the French version in high school!)
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
Holes by Louis Sachar
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

I love to recommend books! This is a very short list that I will be augmenting to absurd lengths in the near future.

A warm welcome to you, oh visitor to ye humble abode!

Greetings and salutations!

This will be the mouthpiece of the People’s Front of Fishface um, the the Popular Fishface Front I meant to say the United Fishface Union craziest children’s book writer and elementary school teacher around (just ask my students!)

I am sure you cannot wait to be entertained by my sparkling wit and erudite name-dropping.

For now, I shake you warmly by the hand!