Dangerous Neighbors: The Teacher's Guide

It comes full circle, at one point—the reading and research one does, the teaching one loves, the books one writes.  Dangerous Neighbors may be my twelfth book, but it is the first book for which I've ever created a teacher's guide.  The behind-the-scenes history of the Centennial can be found in these pages.  So can the irreducible Mrs. Gillespie and perhaps my favorite Philadelphian of all, George Childs.  But mostly this teacher's guide offers a range of classroom exercises—from team projects to personal essays to broad discussions about community, innovation, media, even classified ads.  I hope that this guide opens doors for both teachers and students who recognize that the past—its lessons, its influences, its legacies—is alive in the right now.

The guide can be found here.

Thanks to Egmont USA's Elizabeth Law, Mary Albi, Katie Halata, Nico Medina, Greg Ferguson, and Rob Guzman, who cheered this guide on, and made it better.  Thank you to Stacey Swigart for paying close attention.  Thank you to the original William for teaching me a dash of In Design.  And thanks to Elizabeth Mosier, for saying, Why don't you....

Read more...

Dangerous Neighbors: Work commences on a teacher's guide, and gratitude for a beautiful review

In October of 2008, the Please Touch Museum, the first museum in the U.S. designed specifically for children aged seven and under, opened the doors to its new home in Philadelphia's Memorial Hall—an act of revitalization genius.  For it was there, in this gorgeous Beaux-Arts building, that the nearly 10 million visitors who came to Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition in 1876 took in the sculpture, paintings, and engravings of artists from 19 different countries.  In total, the 250 buildings that comprised the Centennial Exhibition covered nearly 285 West Philadelphia acres.  Today, nearly all of those buildings are gone; Memorial Hall, thanks to ardent preservationists, doesn't just remain.  It thrives.

It also explains.  For in the generous basement of the Please Touch Museum sits this 20' x 30' model of the fairgrounds.  Built in 1889 and transported from place to place until it was given this remarkable home, the model recreates the Exhibition at a 1 to 192 ratio.  The photograph above is of the Main Exhibition building, where much of the action in Dangerous Neighbors takes place. 

I was thinking about all of this today for two reasons.  First, because Serena Agusto-Cox has published today her very thoughtful description and analysis of Dangerous Neighbors on her popular blog, Savvy Verse & Wit, prompting, as she does, a conversation among her avid readers (thank you, Serena, and thank you, Serena's readers). 

Additionally, yesterday I was honored by an email from Elizabeth Mosier, who read the book at once (how she does this sort of thing, with her schedule, I'll never know) and wrote to me with a list of word-spreading ideas.  One of those involved the creation of a teacher's guide, an idea I've been playing with for some time.  I'm not sure I'd have jumped the fence, however, had Elizabeth not encouraged me in that direction.  And so today, at the foot of this desk, sit many of the books and newspaper/magazine articles that helped me find my way into the Centennial.  I'm going to take my time creating this guide, and I'll post about it when it is done.  But between now and then, picture me developing classroom prompts around topics ranging from progress to feminism to sibling love and rivalry. 

All ideas, as always, are welcome.

    

 

Read more...

Humpty Dumpty and the temper of verbs

When I was two years old, my mother sewed me a Humpty Dumpty doll (red-striped pants, black slippers, a pleasing egg face) and sat him upon my birthday cake, among the candles.  My mother's Humpty Dumpty remains with me today, atop a cabinet of curiosities, a little watermarked and a little saggy, loved by time. (The Humpty pictured here was photographed a few months ago at the Please Touch Museum.)

Lately I've been thinking about Humpty, particularly the Humpty we meet in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, who has special privileges, so it seems to him, to use words just precisely the way he wants to.  Listen in:

    “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
    “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
    Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

Maybe Humpty is a word smudger, an imperial word smudger at that, but he's most assuredly onto something when he says that verbs, some verbs, have a temper.  This fact I discover over and over each writing day, when an entire passage is destroyed by a flat or wrongly chosen verb.

What is wrong with this passage? I will ask myself.  Revisit your verbs, is most often the answer.

Read more...

Dangerous Neighbors: An Indiebound Children's Pick Fall 2010

Well, here is some fabulous news, just in, over the wire:  Dangerous Neighbors is an Indiebound Children's Pick for the Fall of 2010.

Is it possible to hug the independent booksellers of America over the internet?  Picture me trying!

Read more...

Dangerous Neighbors: The Book Trailer

Read more...

Carousel

If you were asked to teach a single story or essay over a ten-day period—had to narrow your choice to just one life-changing text, what would you do?  That's the question that faces me today.  I've narrowed my thinking to these options:

"Sonny's Blues," by James Baldwin
"I Stand Here Ironing," by Tillie Olsen
"Souvenir," by Jayne Anne Phillips
"Accident and its Scene," by Terrence des Pres
"Memory and Imagination," by Patricia Hampl

And you?

Read more...

Let the cards fall

For a few lovely hours this week, I let every worry go and toured the Please Touch Museum, now located in Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, on the former Philadelphia Centennial grounds.  Here I am, within Alice's Wonderland.  Untrammeled by self-doubt.  Unchased by corporate demands.  Unsure of why I've been so knotted up, to begin with.

We have to let some things go.  We have to let ourselves free. 

Read more...