Posted on by TracyC

Thank You, Mr. Falker

Thank You, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco, 1998.

When little Trisha turns five years old, her grandfather introduces to her to reading in the same way he has done for other children in the family, with a taste of honey on a book, to remind her that knowledge is sweet. Trisha already loves books because her mother reads to her every night, and other members of the family also read to her. She’s looking forward to learning to read herself.

However, when she starts going to school, she finds that she has trouble learning to read. She likes drawing, and other kids at school admire her drawings, but for some reason, she struggles at deciphering the letters that other kids seem to learn so easily. When she looks at writing on a page, everything looks like wiggling shapes, and she has trouble figuring out what sounds they’re supposed to make. Other children move forward with their reading lessons, but Trisha struggles and starts to feel dumb.

Trisha asks her grandmother if she thinks she’s different from the other kids, and her grandmother says that everyone is different and that’s “the miracle of life.” Trisha asks if she thinks she’s smart, and her grandmother says she is. That makes her feel a little better, but why can’t she read like the other kids?

Trisha continues to struggle in school, even after the family moves from Michigan to California. She is in third grade at that point, and other children insult her and tease her when she struggles, and Trisha feels dumber than ever. She spends more time drawing and daydreaming, and she starts hating school, sometimes pretending that she’s sick so she won’t have to go.

Things only start to improve for her in fifth grade, when she gets a new teacher, Mr. Falker. Mr. Falker doesn’t cater to the teacher’s pets like other teachers do, and he notices Trisha’s artistic talent and praises her for it. He also stops the other kids from teasing Trisha in class when she struggles, although one boy, Eric, continues to bully Trisha terribly and get other kids to gang up on her when the teacher isn’t looking until Mr. Falker finally catches him.

Mr. Falker works with Trisha to improve her reading and reassures her that she is not stupid. He realizes that the reason she has struggled with reading is that Trisha doesn’t see letters the way other kids do, and he points out that she’s actually been clever in the way she’s managed to hide just how much she’s been struggling all this time.

Mr. Falker introduces Trisha to Miss Plessy, a reading teacher, and the two of them work with her to develop techniques that improve her reading skills. Gradually, Trisha begins to make real progress, and she begins to feel the sweetness of knowledge that her grandfather talked about.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

The end of the book explains that the story is autobiographical. Patricia Polacco was the Trisha in the story, and she did have trouble learning to read until the read Mr. Falker realized how she was struggling and helped her. At the end of the story, the author says that she met Mr. Falker again years later and thanked him, telling him that she can become a children’s author.

There is a difference between real life and the story, though. In the book, Trisha is in the fifth grade when she gets help with her reading, but in real life, Patricia Polacco was apparently 14 years old and in junior high school. The book doesn’t say exactly what the cause of Trisha’s learning difficulties is, but she is apparently dyslexic, based on the description and because Patricia Polacco was dyslexic in real life.

I enjoyed seeing this part of the author’s childhood, although I found the part with the school bullies stressful. I do think it was important to include that part, though, because that can be part of the experience of children who struggle in school. Although Eric is an obvious bully in the story, the other kids also make Trisha miserable with their teasing and insults. It occurred to me that they may not all think of themselves as bullies, but at the same time, a person doesn’t have to think of themselves a bully in order to be one. Bullying is a behavior, and it exists independently of self-identity. Part of me wondered, if the girl and the teacher in the story are both real, were the bullies also real, and if so, did any of them ever read this story and recognize themselves? Maybe some did, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe not all of them would even care, if they had.

Regardless, I do think stories like this can be useful as a preemptive measure against bullying by showing kids how their behavior can affect other people and what may be going on in the life of a person they’re teasing or bullying. While I’m sure that everyone thinks of themselves as being the heroes of their own story, I think people sometimes need a reminder that, at the very same time, they are also supporting characters in everyone else’s story, for good or bad. In a way, we’re all self-casting in every story we’re in by the ways we choose to act as we go through life’s story in general.

The bully antagonists aren’t really the main focus of the story, though. They act as further obstacles to the problem that Trisha is trying to solve, but ultimately, the story is really one of gratitude toward the teacher. Part of what the teacher does for Trisha is to shut down the bullies so Trisha can focus on what she needs to learn and he can focus on helping her. Even more importantly, Mr. Falker helps Trisha to see that she is smart and capable. It takes a little more work for her to make progress than others because she has a condition to overcome, but with a little help, she can do it. It really opens up a whole new world for her, and she finally gets to taste that sweetness that comes with knowledge.

I’ve heard of the tradition of giving children a taste of honey before they begin their lessons. When I was a student, I thought I remembered a teacher mentioning this tradition to us as a Greek tradition. It might be, although when I tried to look it up, I couldn’t find anything about Greece. I found references to it as a Jewish tradition, which would make sense for Patricia Polacco’s family.

Patricia Polacco’s real-life grandmother also appears in the story, the same grandmother who appears in another of Polacco’s books, Thunder Cake. Her grandfather wasn’t present in that story, but he is in this one. Both of the grandparents are mentioned as dying before the story ends.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Aunt Morbelia and the Screaming Skulls

Aunt Morbelia and the Screaming Skulls by Joan Carris, 1990.

Todd Fearing is worried because his Great-Aunt Morbelia is coming to live with his family.  He has never met her before, but he has heard that she is rather strange, and he knows that his life will never be the same again.  Aunt Morbelia is very superstitious, and she sees bad omens everywhere.  When she first arrives at Todd’s house and sees that the family owns both a black dog and a black cat, she takes it as a sign that she should leave right away.  It takes a lot persuading to get her to stay on a trial basis.  By Joan Carris.

Having Aunt Morbelia at his house is sort of a mixed blessing.  On one hand, Aunt Morbelia likes baking good things for him to eat and helps him with his homework.  Todd is dyslexic and has extra assignments to help him improve his reading.  Aunt Morbelia used to be a teacher, and Todd really appreciates the help she gives him. On the other hand, Todd doesn’t like scary stories, and Aunt Morbelia’s talk of ghosts and bad omens gives him nightmares.  His friends like to hear her stories, particularly Rocky, a girl who typically doesn’t like feminine things.  Rocky, whose real name is RosaLynn, constantly pesters him about when Aunt Morbelia will tell more stories. 

Eventually, Todd gets tired of Rocky’s obsession with ghost stories and the way she encourages Aunt Morbelia to keep telling them, and he and his best friend, Jeff, decide to play a trick on her to cure her appetite for scary stuff.  However, their trick backfires, and in their attempt to make it up to everyone, especially Aunt Morbelia, they end up making things worse. 

Todd and Jeff succeed in scaring Rocky by dressing up as ghosts and showing up at her house in the middle of the night. They have so much fun with their trick that they decide to go to their friend Alan’s house to try it on him. Alan lives in the house right behind Todd’s, and that’s where they run into trouble. When they start their ghost act, they can’t get Alan to wake up and come to the window to see them. Jeff decides to throw a rock at Alan’s window to wake him up, but the rock breaks the window. To make matters worse, they startle Todd’s black cat, causing the cat to yowl. The boys run back to Jeff’s house, but Jeff’s father catches them. Todd has to go home and apologize to Aunt Morbelia, who was frightened very badly when the cat started howling.

The boys decide to take Aunt Morbelia on a tour of the historic places in town to make up for scaring her. Unfortunately, Jeff includes the funeral home that his father runs on the tour because it is in one of the oldest buildings in town. Although Todd tells her that she doesn’t have to go in if she doesn’t want to, Aunt Morbelia thinks that it would be rude to refuse. Unfortunately, Jeff’s father arrives with a dead body before their tour ends, and Aunt Morbelia faints when she sees it. Aunt Morbelia tells the boys that it isn’t their fault, but she says that she’s not sure she really belongs in their town. Even with all of Aunt Morbelia’s superstition craziness and spooky stories, Todd still doesn’t want her to leave.  Is there still something he can do to convince her to stay?

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive. There is also a sequel to this book, Beware the Ravens, Aunt Morbelia!

My Reaction and Spoilers

When I first read this book, I was expecting a spooky mystery, but it’s really more about a boy adjusting to a relative coming to live with his family and dealing with his dyslexia. Although Todd initially has some reservations about Aunt Morbelia living with him and his parents and her spooky stories scare him, Todd and Aunt Morbelia gradually come to understand each other better, and Todd genuinely wants her to stay. To help Aunt Morbelia change her mind about leaving, Todd has all the people who have met Aunt Morbelia since she arrived come by the house and tell her how much they all want her to stay.  After everyone has visited her, Todd himself tells her that he doesn’t want her to go.  They talk about the scary stories and how Todd feels about them, and Aunt Morbelia tells Todd that if he doesn’t want to hear a scary story, he can be honest with her and tell her so.  Now that the two of them understand each other better, Aunt Morbelia agrees to stay, and she accepts the invitation that one of Todd’s teachers makes to help tutor children at the learning center.

I didn’t like the part where the boys played the trick on Rocky and how awkward things were with her afterward. Jeff’s father says that part of that, with Rocky drifting away from her friendship with the boys, is because the kids are growing up. He says that, as they grow up, girls start changing before boys do and have different interests from boys and different ways of looking at things, including more tomboy girls, like Rocky. Toward the end of the story, Rocky does appear to need more friendships with other girls, and Todd decides that Jeff’s dad is probably right, that Rocky thinks and acts differently from his guy friends because she’s a girl, even if she’s usually not a particularly “girly” girl. Part of that may be true, but the boys’ trick was pretty mean. I think that the real issue is that real friends shouldn’t do that to each other, and Rocky might really be questioning what she’s looking for in a real friend. Although, to hear some of my male friends talk about their youths, boys (at least certain ones) might be more accepting and forgiving of that kind of rough humor from friends than girls would be, so perhaps boys vs. girls issues are partly at the heart of it.

I thought that the parts where Aunt Morbelia was helping Todd with his dyslexia were interesting. I don’t really have any experience with the condition myself, and I’m not quite sure what techniques teachers really use to help dyslexics. One of the tricks that Aunt Morbelia uses is to break down tasks into smaller pieces to make them more manageable. For example, Todd feels badly that he can’t keep the orders of months straight. When he tries to recite the months of the year in order, he mixes them up, which makes him feel bad because most kids his age should be able to do this easily. When I first read this, I wasn’t sure if this is a common issue among dyslexics, although I thought that I remembered reading something about dyslexics having trouble remembering the orders of certain things, like lists of instructions. I looked it up, and apparently, it is a common issue, along with memorizing things like days of the week. There are different techniques for handling it, some of which involve associating the things to be remembered with something else that sticks in the mind more easily, such as a rhyme or song. Aunt Morbelia does some association with Todd but she also breaks the months down into groups of three, representing the four seasons of the year, and giving him small bits of information to memorize. She calls the spring months, “the flower months” and the fall months “the leaf months” and so on. Todd finds that technique helpful, and Aunt Morbelia says that once Todd has mastered the seasons of the year, they will put the season of the year together so that he can recite the entire year. Todd also describes other ways that he is affected by his dyslexia and techniques that his teacher uses to help him.

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The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room

The Kids of the Polk Street School

BeastMsRooney#1 The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1984.

It’s the start of a new school year, and Richard Best (nicknamed “Beast”) is embarrassed to find himself in Ms. Rooney’s room once again because he was held back a year for his poor reading skills.  Everyone he knows has moved on to the third grade, and he’s still in a second grade class with kids who were first grade babies last year.  He feels awkward, being the tallest, oldest person in class, and kids in his old class tease him and refuse to let him play baseball on the playground with them because he’s a pathetic “left-back.”

At first, Beast tries to pretend that it was all a horrible mistake that will be straightened out soon, but that just makes him feel bad for lying.  The kids who are now in the same class he is, who he still thinks of as “babies,” try to make friends with him, but he doesn’t accept them at first because of his embarrassment at being older and still not as good at reading as some of them are.

BeastMsRooneyPic1However, even though he’s embarrassed at having to attend special reading classes with Mrs. Paris while most of the rest of his class has normal reading, these special classes really help him, not just to improve his reading skills, but to connect with other kids in his new class who have the same reading difficulties he does and who understand how he feels.

Beast discovers that it’s no shame to not know something or to have trouble doing something because everyone has different skills and it can take some people longer to learn certain things than others.  Emily Arrow, the girl who now sits next to him in class is a whiz at math but has as much trouble reading as he does.  Beast learns some new skills from his new, younger classmates and realizes that they’re not really babies.  They also really appreciate him and help him see some of the good things about himself.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.