Posted on by TracyC

Carmen Learns English

Carmen Learns English by Judy Cox, illustrated by Angela Dominguez, 2010.

Carmen is in kindergarten and has been learning English at school. Her little sister, Lupita, will start school next year, and Carmen thinks about how she wants Lupita to learn English before she starts school. The family is from Mexico, and the girls speak Spanish at home.

School hasn’t been easy for Carmen because the other kids don’t speak Spanish. They all speak English, and they speak fast, which makes it difficult for Carmen to follow their conversations. It helps that her teacher knows some Spanish. Her teacher’s Spanish isn’t very good, but in a way, Carmen finds that comforting because her teacher will understand if her English isn’t very good, either. People who are learning another language understand what it’s like when someone else is learning, too.

Carmen gradually learns new English words at school. When she gets home, she draws pictures of what she’s learned and teaches her mother and little sister the English words. At first, Carmen is too shy to say the words out loud at school because she isn’t confident about how she’s saying them, but she practices at home.

Sometimes, kids at school give Carmen a hard time. Some kids think that she talks funny. When she counts in Spanish instead of English, they think that she’s saying the numbers wrong. Her teacher helps by teaching all the class to count in both Spanish and English, so all the students will learn both languages. Carmen helps to teach the other students words in Spanish, and when she gets home, she teaches Lupita the English words that she has learned.

Because Carmen has been helping Lupita to learn English, Lupita will have an easier time at school than Carmen had when she started. Carmen realizes that she really likes teaching, and she thinks that she might like to be a teacher herself someday.

My Reaction

I thought this was a good story about a child starting school while having to learn a new language at the same time. My mother used to teach English language learners, and she liked the story, too. She said it reminded her of some of the students she used to teach.

I thought that the teacher’s approach, having Carmen teach the other kids some Spanish while she was learning English was a good idea. Some of the other students find Carmen a little strange and confusing at first because they don’t understand the way she speaks, but when they start trading words in different languages, they all start to understand each other better. The other students begin to understand the concept that people can speak in different languages and that there can be different words that mean the same thing, depending on the language they’re speaking. I think it also helps them start to identify with Carmen because, like her, they are also starting to learn an unfamiliar language. As I said, people who are learning a new language or who have studied another language before can understand the difficulties of now always knowing all the words they want to say or exactly who to say them and can sympathize with other people who are also learning new languages.

I also liked it that Carmen realizes that, if she helps her sister to learn some English before she starts school, her sister will have an easier time. She has compassion for her sister because of her own experiences and wants to make things easier for Lupita. By helping both her sister and her fellow students, she also learns that she likes sharing what she knows with other people. She discovers that she likes teaching and might want to be a teacher herself someday.

I read this book as an adult because it’s a relatively new book that didn’t exist when I was a kid, but it reminds me of another book that I did read as a kid, I Hate English, which is about a girl from China learning English. The Chinese girl has some similar troubles learning English and feeling uneasy around people who don’t understand her, although she also struggled with the fear that she would lose her native language or cultural/personal identity by learning a new one. Carmen doesn’t mention that in this story, but some of my mother’s old Spanish-speaking students had that worry when they were learning English, too. Perhaps part of the reason why Carmen doesn’t feel like that is because her teacher encourages her to teach the other students some Spanish, giving her the opportunity to keep speaking it from time to time and share the language with others. In a way, this story was closer to my experiences when I was younger because Carmen is like the kids my mother used to teach and because Spanish is what I studied in school myself.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Going to School in 1876

Going to School in 1876 by John J. Loeper, 1984.

Earlier, I covered Going to School in 1776 by the same author. The earlier book was written around the US Bicentennial, when many authors were revisiting patriotic themes. This follow-up book is set a century later than the first, the time of the US Centennial. The author’s earlier book, Going to School in 1776, explains what Colonial American schools were like, and this book explains what schools were like after the US had existed for 100 years, how they had changed in the 100 years since the Colonial era, and what society needed and wanted education to become.

The book starts off with some information about America in 1876. Ulysses S. Grant was President, there were 37 states in the United States, the country was recovering from the Civil War, and there was a huge exhibition in Philadelphia to celebrate the Centennial. The Centennial Exhibition included exhibits by American industries, showing off new inventions, such as steam engines and sewing machines, and there were exhibits contributed by other countries. Now that railroads and telephones were linking different parts of the country, the general outlook was one of optimism and a fascination with progress.

However, American society was still largely rural. Since newspapers only had limited ranges of circulation, there was no mass media that could reach everyone, the spread of information wasn’t entirely reliable, and news often depended on word of mouth. Education also varied widely throughout the country. The concept of public schools, with taxes paying for anyone who wanted to attend, was controversial. The book says that some people resented the idea of “paying for the schooling of rich and poor alike,” although it doesn’t go into detail about arguments surrounding the issue. Although, in the 21st century, there are public schools across the nation, and the idea of public education for children from elementary school to high school is pretty common, there are still people who quarrel with the concept, with assertions like “Why do I have to pay for people who could be paying for themselves?” and “I paid for myself and my children, so why should I have to pay for anyone else?” I think that studying the types of schools that the US had in the past partially answers these questions.

The beginning chapter of this book references the earlier book and types of Colonial schools, like blab schools and dame schools, which no longer existed by 1876. By 1876, it was more common for children to be educated in formal schools and trained teachers, although the quality of schools varied by region, and not all children attended. There were schoolhouses even in rural areas, but not all schools were well-equipped, and some wouldn’t accept all students. Many states were passing laws about educational requirements, but children were still heavily used in labor in mines and mills. To explain the nature of education in the late 19th century, the book explains that it will examine the daily lives of children in that period to show what their living circumstances and schooling were like.

(Note: After a fashion, something like dame schools reemerged during the Coronavirus Pandemic of the early 2020s, when public schools were closed or converted to online forms. During that time, many people turned to homeschooling in various styles, and there were some homeschooling groups with parents sharing teaching and supervising responsibilities for their children and a small group of other children in their homes, which is sort of what the earlier dame schools were like. However, this book was written written long before that happened, and the 21st century version was more an aberration, a departure from the norm for the time period, by people reacting to unusual circumstances.)

From that point onward, each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of children’s lives and education in 1876. To illustrate each of these concepts, rather than just stating the dry facts or statistics about 19th century children, the author tells short stories about individual children as examples. Below, I’ve explained what chapters and sections of the book are like and what information they cover, although I changed some of the heading names of the sections to highlight the educational topics covered rather than the stories about children that were given as examples. The titles of some of these sections in the book, which describe the stories rather than the information, wouldn’t make sense without retelling the story, but this book is available to read online for those who would like to explore this topic further and read the stories for themselves.

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

Chapters in the Book:

Being a Child in 1876

To give readers an idea about the varying circumstances of 19th century children, the author describes the daily lives of six children, who each live in a different part of the US or in a US territory. Each of these descriptions are told in the form of a short story. The author makes the point that the level of education children of this era receive is based not just on geographical location but also social class, and there were major gaps between the education of poor children and wealthy children. The stories he tells about different children around the country illustrate the point. I was pleased that he not only described the lives of children of various social classes and regions, but he also included a Native American girl in this chapter. The Native American girl example is one of the better and more hopeful examples of Native American education for the period, not one of the traumatic ones of the Native American boarding schools of the 1800s.

(Black people are covered in other chapters as the next-largest racial group next to white people at this time and because the Civil War drastically changed their educational prospects, but I have more to say about this later and in my reaction section at the end. Where race/ethnicity is not stated, assume that the people described are white because that’s the majority race/ethnicity and the assumed general default for this time and location. Asian people or Hispanic people are not mentioned at all in this book.)

Farm Child in Massachusetts

Jim Porter is a ten-year-old boy in a village in Massachusetts. His daily routine involves chores on his family’s farm and attending the local schoolhouse. There were laws in Massachusetts mandating that children attend school from the ages of 8 to 14 for at least 12 weeks a year (that’s about 3 months a year), but these laws were rarely enforced. If a child hated school or couldn’t get along with a teacher, the child might simply quit going to school, and very likely, nobody would do anything about it. Children who stayed in school did so either because they wanted to continue going or because their own parents insisted that they continue going because few other people would care if they did or not. Children’s parents would pay tuition fees to the local school committee, just a few cents a day for each day the child attended school (although even a penny went much farther in the 19th century).

Child Coal Miner

Ten-year-old Patrick Doherty lives in Pennsylvania and works in a coal mine. He works every day, except Sunday, and he is only paid a few cents a day for his work. There are some laws about child labor in his time, but not many, and even those that exist have many loopholes. Many parents of this time are poor and need their children to work and earn more money for the family. For them, it’s a necessity, not a preference. Employers liked child labor because they didn’t have to pay kids much. Some people even said they though it was better for children to work and called laws limiting child labor “soft” and “silly.” The book doesn’t shy away from describing Patrick’s harsh and unsafe working conditions, describing children’s “raw and bleeding” little hands and bodies covered in coal dust, the bad and dusty air in the mines, and cave-ins. The only school in Patrick’s town is the local Sunday school, which teaches a little reading and religious education. The town was built by the coal company. The coal company owns all the businesses and buildings in town, and the coal company says that the children don’t need a school because they’ll learn everything they need to know by working in the mines.

Farm Child in Iowa

Jim Wright is a twelve-year old boy in Iowa. His family used to live in Maryland, but his father moved the family west. They live in a cabin near a lake and grow wheat, oats, and barley on their farm. Jim works on his family’s farm, and he and his sister attend the local schoolhouse for a few weeks each winter, between the planting and harvesting seasons. Iowa has had tax-supported public schools since it became a state in 1846, so individual students do not need to pay when they attend. However, there are no laws requiring children to go to school, and families still prioritize the work that children do at home and on the farm. Jim’s father thinks that a few weeks of school a year are all his children need.

Immigrant Child in New York City

Eight-year-old Tony Wasic is from an immigrant family, and his family lives in a crowded tenement building in New York City. Tenements are a cheap form of apartment where many poor people and immigrants live, and they often have many people crowded into very few rooms, with poor conditions and few amenities. An entire building of people might have only one outdoor toilet and only one water tap outside the building, so they would have to haul buckets of water inside for cooking or baths in wooden tubs. Because of the crowded conditions and poor sanitation, they were often breeding grounds for disease, and they were also often fire risks. Tenement slums could be found in major cities, like New York City and Chicago. New York City established a public education system in 1867, so in spite of their poverty, Tony and his brothers can go to school without paying fees to attend. After school, he sells newspapers to help raise money for his family. His ambition in life is to own a grocery store.

Native American Child in Oklahoma

Anna Crowfoot is a 12-year-old Native American girl. She is part of the Cherokee tribe, and she lives in the part of Oklahoma known as Indian Territory. She knows that her people were forcibly moved from their ancestral lands into this territory by government troops during the 1830s. Not many people during this time are concerned about educating Native American children (the book uses the term “Indian” instead of Native American), at least not in any formal way, but the ones who do offer formal schools for Native Americans see education as a way to “civilize” them, Christianize them, and change their lifestyles from the “savage ways” of Native Americans to that of mainstream, predominantly white/European based US culture (the quotes around the words in this sentence also appeared around those words in the book – those ideas are ones expressed by people of the time and do not come from the author, and the author wants readers to know). In short, the people running schools for Native Americans have no interest in Native American culture and would rather see them give up their culture. Whatever the Native American children learn about their tribe’s culture and history comes from their families at home.

Anna attends a girls-only school, where the girls are taught skills that farm wives would find useful, such as how to cook, how to sew, and how to make medicines from herbs. (Herbal medicines are popularly thought to be more Native American than a white person’s thing, but in the days when most people lived on farms or in rural areas and weren’t very near doctors, everybody had to know how to make a few basic remedies for common ailments. White people did have a tradition of herbal medicines from Europe, but one of the issues with that was that white people were more familiar with plants from Europe than plants native to the Americas. The book doesn’t explain this, but European colonists brought some of the plants that they commonly relied on from Europe, and apart from that, they had to learn how Native Americans used the local plants.) The Native American boys learn how to be farmers at their school. (Exactly how this kind of education differed from their traditional Native American lifestyles depends somewhat on the tribe, but basically, one of the goals was to make Native American society into permanent agrarian settlements, specifically on land nobody else really wanted, rather than nomadic or semi-nomadic, which had been the previous way of life for some of them. They also learned to grow different types of plants than the ones that their society would have traditionally cultivated, more in line with the European-based crops favored by white people.)

Anna is described as enjoying her school and lessons in “some of the white man’s ways” (I added those quotes, just quoting from the book), but she also values the ways of her tribe. (This is one of the more benign descriptions I’ve heard of what “Indian schools” could be like. Real life stories could be much worse, and that’s part of the reason why Native Americans would try to avoid sending their children, if they could.) Her ambition in life is to become a teacher herself and to start a school for Cherokee children that will also teach Cherokee traditions.

Middle Class or Upper Class in Indiana

Nancy Feather is the most fortunate of the children described in this chapter. She is an eleven-year-old girl whose father owns a hardware store in Indiana. They are a “middle-class” family. There are other people who are more wealthy than they are, but the Feathers have a very comfortable lifestyle, with money for some luxury items, including some that modern middle class families would be unable to afford. The Feather family employs a cook and a gardener and even has a summer house at a lake. Mr. Feather is a respected businessman in his community, and like others of their social class, the family is concerned with maintaining a good social image. The Feathers make sure that their children are always clean and neatly dressed in public. The children also learn etiquette, so they make a good impression on people they meet. They value education and culture, and they can afford the best education their community can offer and lessons that are not solely focused on employment skills. Nancy attends Miss Dwight’s Academy, which emphasizes that they teach music, art, classical literature, and French.

How Children Dress in 1876

This chapter has short little stories about a different set of children from the ones described in the previous chapter. This set of stories focuses on what children wore in 1876. Social class and money are factors in the clothes they wore, but the author also brings in other issues, such as health theories and cultural habits. This chapter seems to further elaborate on the range of lifestyles and daily life activities of children and also helps readers to picture the people they’re reading about.

Boys in Wool Suits

Nine-year-old Fred Hart gets a new suit to wear to the Centennial parade on the Fourth of July in his town. Fred doesn’t want to wear the suit because it’s really too heavy for the summer weather, but his mother insists that he wear it because she doesn’t want him to “catch a chill.” The book explains that there were no vaccines to prevent disease at this time, so parents and doctors recommended other precautions, including wearing heavy clothing year-round to avoid “chills.” (This comes from the misconception that colds are caused by literally being cold instead of by viruses.) Dr. Gustav Jaeger, a German doctor, spread a popular theory that wool was the healthiest clothing, telling everyone that plant fibers like linen and cotton wouldn’t adequately block air from touching or moving across the skin. He also believed that clothes should fit tightly to be less breathable. Not everyone agreed with his advice or followed it, but it was a popular theory that governed the way some people dressed.

Poor Children in Flour Sack Clothes

On the other hand, Anna Jenkins is a poor child in a mill town, and her dress is made from an old flour sack because her family can’t afford anything better. They have to improvise clothing from whatever they can find or have available. She dreams of one day owning a pretty silk dress.

Sailor Suits

Ten-year-old William Smith wears a nice sailor suit to church. He wears a wooden whistle around his neck as an accessory, but his mother tells him that he shouldn’t be blowing it on Sunday.

Fancy Dresses and Accessories for Little Girls

Lucy Preston wears a pink dress decorated with rosettes and a blue ribbon sash with a bonnet and white gloves when she visits her grandmother. Her grandmother believes that proper young ladies should wear pretty and fashionable clothes and “behave in a proper manner.” Lucy’s outfit isn’t particularly comfortable, but her grandmother also believes that sacrifice is necessary for the sake of style. This section of the book notes that children’s fashions of the era are based on adult fashions rather than being designed specifically for children.

Different Outfits for Different Purposes of Young Ladies

Twelve-year-old Mary Trent gets her first corset and a dress with a bustle, fashionable touches that mark her as becoming a young lady rather than a mere girl. She writes a letter to a younger cousin about it. She is excited about her new clothes, although she admits that they are difficult to wear. She finds it harder to breathe in the corset, and she admits that her new button boots are difficult to put on, but she thinks that it’s important to wear the right kind of clothes, and she’s looking forward to wearing them when she visits her aunt.

Her father is irritated with her for being too obsessed with clothes, but Mary says that he doesn’t understand because he is a man. Men of their time wear suits for every occasion. A couple of suits for work and church are about all they need. On the other hand, fashionable women are expected to have different outfits for different purposes, including walking dresses, riding dresses, morning dresses (simpler, more informal garments to wear first thing in the morning for breakfast and other activities at home, before dressing to go out for the day – unlike other dresses of the era, they were more loose and could be worn without a corset – sort of like the 19th century version of feminine lounge wear, although the term “morning dress” later came to indicate a more formal type of outfit in the 20th century), and church dresses. Basically, each of these styles of dresses have features that make it easier to do certain activities, rather than the women having a single outfit that was comfortable and easy to wear for a variety of activities. (See the YouTube video Why Did Victorian Women Change Their Clothing 5 times a Day? for more detailed explanations and examples of different types of Victorian era women’s outfits.) With more variety in styles and additional requirements for different types of outfits, women have more decisions to make in the clothes they choose, so there’s more for them to consider.

The Schools of 1876

Unlike the previous two chapters, this chapter focuses on school systems, school districts, and individual schools rather than describing individual students who attend them. It isn’t clear whether the schools the book describes are/were real schools or if, like the children described earlier, they are intended as just general examples of types of schools and school conditions that existed in 1876. I tried looking them up, and I couldn’t find information about them, so they might be fictionalized examples, but they do work as examples to illustrate school types.

One-Room Country Schoolhouse

The Wexbury District School is a one-room schoolhouse one mile outside of town. The book explains that it was common in the 19th century for public schools to be called “district schools” because they served students in a particular area or district. The local school committee (sometimes called school directors or school board, depending on the area) governs the school, pays the teacher, and maintains the school building, using money collected from taxes. However, they don’t pay the teacher much, and the teacher is also responsible for cleaning the school. Public schools of this type could vary in size and the number of teachers, depending on the needs of the local district, but Wexbury District School is just a small, one-room schoolhouse, so it only has one teacher for all the students, regardless of age or grade level. There just aren’t enough students to separate them out into different rooms with different teachers. The Wexbury District School is a kind of dingy gray little building with a couple of outhouses behind it, and truancy is high because the area has weak laws about school attendance. Most days, less than half of the students in this district attend school. Part of that is due to the poor condition of the school. The book quotes an unnamed Connecticut official’s observation that schools are often less comfortable than prisons. One thing the Wexbury District School has that is considered a new innovation is a blackboard. The book says that blackboards were a new development for 19th century schools, and not everyone thought that they would be a lasting trend.

Small Local School Districts/District Schools

The book explains that school districts in southern and western states are named for the town or the area they serve, and some of them have really colorful names. The example of this is Fly Hollow School in West Virginia. Fly Hollow is a very rural area, and most people live on scattered farms, although many of the local families are related to each other. However, the schoolhouse in 1876 is new because West Virginia only established its public school system in 1872. It’s a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher and ten students, most of whom are the teacher’s younger cousins or nephews. The teacher decides when students are ready to pass to the next grade, and the teacher at this school refuses to pass students until they’re really ready, even though they are relatives of hers. Her standards are strict, and she holds to them.

Pioneer Sod Buildings

By contrast, the Logan County public school in Nebraska, is run out of the teacher’s house, which is only a small sod building. Sod houses, made of bricks of sod, are common for pioneers in Nebraska because wood is rare on the prairies. They only have dirt floors, and the conditions are rough and uncomfortable. However, charmingly, plants will grow in the sod bricks, so flowers will grow out of them and bloom in the spring. This particular school and teacher has only six students, and they are supported with state funds.

Small Private Schools

The Millville Academy is a private school for boys. When the schoolmaster opens the school, he advertises the opening in the newspaper, describing what subjects will be taught at the school and what the school fees are. The schoolmaster will be running the school out of his own home, and he will teach science and classical learning. As part of the school’s services, the students will also be provided with a midday meal. Private schools like this were often found in larger towns, and their students were from upper class families. Along with the academic subjects, they would teach etiquette and proper behavior. The midday meal this school provides is also a lesson in how to behave at a dinner table. The schoolmaster uses some harsh punishments on his students, including locking them in a closet. (Abusive by modern standards.) His lessons are rigorous because he wants to prepare the students to go on to college. The schoolmaster’s credentials for teaching are that he is a graduate of Yale.

Upper-Class Academies and Seminaries

While upper class boys’ schools were called “academies”, schools for upper class girls were called “seminaries.” The headmistress of a female seminary was often an educated woman who was either the wife or daughter of a minister. Sometimes, they came from Europe to teach because upper class American families wanted their daughters to learn another language, such as French. Typical subjects at a female seminary might include spelling, writing, music, drawing, sewing, and embroidery.

Segregated Schools in the South

My summary of this part is going to be longer because I think this requires more explanation. Prior to the Civil War, there was no education for black people in the southern states because black people were slaves. (The book doesn’t explain this, but there were actually laws forbidding teaching black people to read. Occasionally, some sympathetic white person would do so anyway in defiance of the laws, or black people themselves would find a way to learn and teach others, but they were rare exceptions.) After the Civil War, the southern states developed a public education system that provided for the education of both black children and white children, but it was a dual system with separate schools for children of different races. Even with separation between the black and white people, the subject of educating black people at all was controversial in the south, with some people calling it a waste of money.

(Think of it this way: If some people generally didn’t like the relatively new idea of public education because it meant paying for other people’s children to attend school through their tax money, imagine how those people might react when they find out that this is going to include paying not just for the children of friends and neighbors they like or might potentially do business with to go to school but also a group of people they specifically hate and resent. I’m not saying that this is well-reasoned, ethically right, or a healthy mindset, just that this is the sort of thing that might be going through people’s minds at the time. The book doesn’t explicitly explain this, although it does indicate that this is how some people of the time feel without going into specifics. Educating people in general might not objectively be a “waste of money”, but what I’d like to point out is that these people are not being objective but very personal about it. They, personally, don’t want to spend their money, and they especially don’t want to spend it on people they personally don’t like or even want to associate with in their daily lives. We’re about to see what they and their children do in response because the book does explain that.)

The example the book describes of a school for black children in the South is Goose Creek School in South Carolina. It’s a small school with only two rooms, and there is only one teacher. The teacher is from the American Missionary Society, an abolitionist organization founded prior to the Civil War which had an interest in providing education for black people after slavery was abolished. The children at Goose Creek School learn basic subjects, such as reading and writing, mathematics, hygiene, and farm skills. A black boy named Jason attends this school, and he gets teasing and physical abuse from white children and even some other black children because of it. They accuse him of being “uppity” and thinking that he’s “somebody special” for going to school. However, he still wants to go to school, and his mother and teacher encourage him to continue his education because this is an opportunity that people like him never had before.

Because this book only focuses on conditions during one year, 1876, it doesn’t explain the futures of any of the children or schools described so far. However, readers with some historical background will know that this segregated system of education continues into the mid-20th century, until the Civil Rights Movement and school desegregation. Having seen footage of people reacting to school desegregation in the mid-20th century, the behavior of opponents to education for black people described in this 19th century is very similar.

A question readers might ask at this point is, was school segregation limited to only the South? Because of the history of slavery in the South and its previous laws against education for slaves, the idea of 19th century southerners being opposed to their children being educated alongside black people or even black people being educated at all makes logical sense just as a progression of events and in keeping with the long-term attitudes of the people involved in the public decision-making. What I’m saying is that educational segregation is not great but not surprising, given the context. People might expect that attitude in former slave states, and their official dual school systems and Jim Crow segregation laws made the South the focus of desegregation, the area of the country always most associated with the idea of segregation. It certainly isn’t an undeserved reputation.

However, others might point out that even northern states had some slavery, and they still had their share of racism, and that’s also a fair observation. So far, in this book, there has been no mention of racism with relation to any schools or school systems outside of the South, so readers might wonder what was happening in Northern schools with relation to race during the 19th century. I have things to say about that in my reaction section below because I think this is a good topic to cover that’s missing from this book.

Public School in a Large City

At this point in history, large cities already have established school systems, and public education is just accepted as a normal part of life. Because there are many schools in a large city, they are often given numbers instead of names, such as “P.S. 84.” The “P.S.” stands for “public school.” Class sizes are large, about 50 to 60 students in a class. One of the challenges they face is helping students from immigrant families, who are still learning English and adjusting to life in a new country. School superintendents are often political appointments, so there are some accusations that the schools are too political.

Church Schools

Some of the very first schools in the United States were church schools, and there have been church schools here ever since. They were very common during the 19th century. Religious groups of all types had schools of their own, and they taught religious classes alongside more basic subjects, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. Although church schools were familiar features of American education, some people criticized them for being too insular, preventing children from mixing with the broader population, keeping them from being exposed to people with different religions, and confining them to their own ethnic groups.

Kindergarten

There weren’t many kindergartens in the US in 1876. The very first public kindergarten in the US was founded in 1873 in St. Louis. Kindergartens were the concept of a German educator named Friedrich Froebel and were meant to help young children become prepared for regular school. At kindergartens, children would learn to play with other children and become adjusted to the concept of leaving their mothers and attending school. Some people at the time criticized the concept of kindergarten because they thought that it was silly and that young children weren’t developed enough to begin learning much.

The Teachers of 1876

Teacher Examinations

Job requirements for teachers in the 19th century were far less strict than in the 21st century. Not all teachers even had a high school education, and when they did, high school was often the highest level of education they had. They were typically graduates of whatever local school system they hoped to teach in. To gain teaching status, they had to pass whatever examination was established by the local school superintendent to establish that potential teachers had sufficient knowledge of the subjects they planned to teach.

Normal Schools

In 1834, American Charles Brooks had an interesting conversation about education with a German man while they were traveling together by ship. The German man described how, in Germany, teachers were given specialized training in order to become teachers. Brooks thought the concept was fascinating, and when he returned to the United States, he promoted the idea of specialized teaching colleges called “normal schools,” which would not only give potential teachers mastery of the subjects they would teach but also instruct them on the theories of education and teaching techniques. By 1876, normal schools were becoming common features of American education, and trained teachers became in demand for teaching jobs. (The book doesn’t mention this, but some state universities, including the one I attended, originally started as normal schools before gradually expanding as larger colleges, and eventually, universities.)

Godey’s Lady’s Book

Godey’s Lady’s Book was a popular magazine for American women in the 19th century, and it influenced American life by influencing American women and mothers. (I’ve mentioned it before as one of the magazines that promoted the concept of Halloween as a children’s holiday, around the same time as this book is set, with ideas for mothers to help set up children’s parties, offering suggestions for decorations, costumes, and games. This book doesn’t mention Halloween, but I like to tie into earlier subjects I’ve covered.) Godey’s Lady’s Book promoted the idea that there should be more female teachers in American schools. There were relatively few respectable professions for women during the 19th century, and teaching was one of the more genteel professions, making it an attractive job for unmarried women. The magazine pointed out that, since married women of the time were expected to give up whatever job they had to care for a household and raise children of her own, they wouldn’t need as large a salary as a man would, if he had a family to support. Because women would work for a cheaper salary and had a nurturing, motherly image, teaching gradually came to be thought of as primarily a women’s profession in the United States, although some people questioned whether female teachers had the same academic rigor of male teachers.

Teaching and Marriage

While teaching was becoming a popular profession for women, it was only for unmarried women. Few school systems would hire married teachers because they assumed married women wouldn’t have much time to teach with their own households and families to manage. Unmarried teachers often lived with their parents or other family members or boarded with other families who lived near their schools. There were opportunities for professional teachers to continue studying educational techniques and to form groups with fellow teachers to share information.

The Lessons of 1876

A Day in a Country School

This chapter covers what students often studied in American schools, and it starts with a section about a typical day in a country school. All of the students would typically walk to school, no matter what the weather was like, and many of them had to walk long distances. (This aspect of historical education in the US is what started the old joke about elderly people claiming that they had to “walk to school in the snow, uphill … both ways!”) Classrooms might have an American flag, but the students wouldn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance because it hadn’t been established yet, and they didn’t sing the national anthem because no song had been chosen as the national anthem yet in 1876. Instead, students would start the day with a reading lesson from McGuffey’s Ecletic Readers, a popular set of books with reading lessons and selections of stories and poems. McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers also helped to transmit important pieces of American history and culture in their readings.

The students would then study arithmetic, take a recess break, and then have a writing lesson. When it was time for lunch, the students would eat in the classroom. They would bring their own food or sometimes eat soup the teacher would make on the classroom stove. Then, they would study history and geography, and they might have a spelling bee.

Copybooks

Although many schools use slates for writing practice, students would write their best and most important pieces in copybooks.

Lessons in Discipline

As an example of a kind of inspirational lesson a teacher might use to correct a student’s discipline problems, the book tells the story of a student who is caught in a lie by his teacher. The teacher assigns him to read the story about George Washington and the cherry tree from A History of the Life of General George Washington by Mason Weems. The book notes that many of the incidents of George Washington’s life were fictitious, the book was very popular in the 19th century and used in many classrooms. Weems’s book was the origin of many popular myths about George Washington’s life, and although this book doesn’t mention it, even though Weem’s book was popular, it did receive criticism even during the 19th century for its inaccuracies and fantasies.

Arithmetic

In 1876, it was common for schools to teach students to do mental arithmetic instead of having them write everything down. Mathematics lessons covered the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, plus fractions, decimals, and units of measurement.

Report Cards

Report cards on students’ learning progress and behavior at school were very common and often required of teachers. Teachers might require parents to sign a child’s report card to prove they had seen it, and parents might punish children who misbehaved at school and didn’t do their schoolwork.

School Life in 1876

School Rules

Large schools might post a list of school rules in the hallway along with the punishments for breaking them. The book presents an example of what might happen to students who misbehave.

Immigrants in School

The book offers an example of what school was like for young immigrants. Schools helped immigrants to learn American history and heritage as well as English, helping them to assimilate to American culture.

School Discipline

The book has an account of how harsh and intimidating school punishments could be. It also describes how some misbehaving children escaped punishment by stirring up other students and watching as they got punished while they put on an innocent act. Sometimes, teachers seemed to take an almost sadistic pleasure in dealing out punishment.

Recess and Games

The book tells an anecdote about some boys who were so busy playing sports at recess that they came back to class very late. Their teacher banned the boys from going to recess for the next five days.

The Discipline of 1876

New Teacher

The book describes some boys talking about how they aren’t afraid of their new teacher, but 19th century teachers were tough, strict, and not afraid of administering even physical punishments. The next small section describes the punishment given to a pair of misbehaving boys.

Advice from a Magazine

A girl reads advice on the discipline of children from a magazine. It was becoming more common to allow children some degree of freedom, but obedience to parents was still expected.

Conditions of Poor Children

Life was hard for poor children, and they often faced cruelty and neglect, including harsh physical punishments from employers. Because conditions were getting so bad, citizens in New York formed the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Reform Schools

Children who actually committed crimes or were completely uncontrollable might be sent to reform schools, which were also called industrial schools. There were reform schools for girls as well as boys. The children would live at the school, and parents typically paid for the children to be there. Aside from school subjects, children in reform schools also had to perform long hours of work.

Orphans

“Orphans” not only included children whose parents were dead but also children whose parents were simply unable to care for them, perhaps because they were sick, in jail, had no money, or were divorced but neither parent was able to look after the children. Orphanages would care for children until they were old enough to work, and then, they were often hired out as domestic servants.

After School in 1876

Circuses

Traveling circuses were a major source of exciting entertainment, and their arrival in town was often like a holiday.

Children’s Books

Popular books for children in 1876 included the Rollo books by Jacob Abbott and Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge. Children also enjoyed books that we might think of as adult classics now, like The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. There were also magazines for children, such as St. Nicholas Magazine. Sometimes, children would also read sensationalist adventure stories in “dime novels,” although parents might consider this form of literature “trashy.” Parents and relatives might give children books or magazine subscriptions they approved of as presents for birthdays and Christmas.

Baseball

Baseball evolved from several older games involving balls and bats. By 1876, there were organized, professional teams and a national league.

Football and Lawn Games

Football wasn’t as popular in America as baseball in the 19th century. However, there were a few college teams that played against each other. Popular lawn games in the 19th century were croquet and lawn tennis.

Swimming

It was popular for children to swim in local ponds. Boys would often swim naked in ponds, although swimsuits were required for public beaches.

Playing in the City

Children living in big cities could play in parks, in vacant lots, or just out in the street. Girls often liked to play hopscotch, and boys would play tag. Poor children didn’t have much time to play because they often had to work. However, parks offered green spaces where children could explore among the trees, watch birds and squirrels, or play with toy sail boats on a lake.

My Reaction

I included some of my opinions and some additional historical information within the review itself, but there are a few more points I’d like to make. I looked up this book because I found the first one, Going to School in 1776, fascinating, and I wanted to see what this book would say about changing education in the US from the 18th century to the 19th century. What I appreciated about both books was that they connected the types of schools children attended and the types of education they received to the actual, daily lives of children at the time and the types of lives that they were likely to lead as adults. No matter the era, I think that the type of education a child receives reflects both the realities of their current life and the kind of life that adults caring for them think that they are likely to lead in the future. In the context of 19th century children’s lives, their levels of education and the attitudes of their families toward education make sense.

However, we know that not only did schools not stay the same between the 18th and 19th centuries, the conditions of education in the 20th and 21st centuries are different yet from either of those. Even my own childhood school experiences from the late 20th century aren’t quite like what kids have been experiencing in the early 21st century, and that’s just a difference of about 30 years. Part of that is due to changing technologies since my childhood, but also, it’s about changing expectations about the lives that children will eventually lead. Not only are there almost no jobs in 21st century America that will hire anybody who doesn’t have at least a high school education, there are relatively few jobs that pay a living wage that don’t require either a college education or some form of professional training or certification beyond high school. The schools children attend in the 21st century have that in mind.

One of the controversies about modern education is the way that schools address topics like racial issues. Some schools definitely handle topics like this more effectively than others, but ignoring the issues is not an option for 21st century schools because modern people mix more with people of different cultures and racial backgrounds. Kids have to grow up understanding more about other people’s backgrounds and how to interact with other people than, say, a kid who lived on a 19th century farm and spent most of his time with his own family and occasionally people from nearby farms or the nearest small town. If you rarely see other people in general and almost never interact with anyone whose background is different from yours, then learning to understand other groups of people and how to speak to and about them politely would not be a high priority. (I talked about this when I was reviewing Little House in the Big Woods.) However, that is not even remotely the type of life people in the 21st century have, unless they’re deliberately trying to isolate themselves. Anybody who is reading this review, no matter who they are or where they are, has Internet access and, by extension, the ability to speak to people from all over the world. People of the 19th century were pretty excited by the concept of communicating with people over distances by telephone, but the idea of communicating with large numbers of people around the world would have been incredible to them. The school systems of the 19th century would never be able to prepare students for the kinds of lives people live in the 21st century, which is why we have the school systems we have today instead of the ones we used to have.

School Segregation in the North

In the section about segregated schools in the southern states, I pointed out that the book doesn’t address whether or not schools were segregated in the northern states or anywhere else in the country. I’m going to discuss that here and also point out some of the reasons why segregation and discrimination in the South stood out more than other places.

There was also segregation in northern states, but just as schools and school systems varied, racial laws and conditions also varied by location. In the United States, schools have always been regionally governed, and there can be considerable variation on the way schools are run from region to region, depending on who lives there and what their priorities are. There were both official laws segregating races in various public settings in northern states and unofficial customs and economic factors that effectively created segregated circumstances that weren’t covered by laws. Because I think this is an important and complicated issue that the book doesn’t cover, I want to give a brief run-down of these factors.

As some people have observed, historians tend to focus more on the unofficial factors of racial segregation when it comes to the northern states instead of discussing the formal laws, and I think that’s partly because the southern states had a much more visible system of segregation. Given the South’s history of institutionalized slavery and their official “separate but equal” school systems prior to the Civil Rights Movement, everyone has watched the South’s racial issues much more closely since the Civil War than they have other parts of the country. The South’s stance on segregation was a very visible and deliberately enforced part of public policy during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course, none of that means that the North didn’t have its problems and its own bad behavior and segregation laws. It was more that what it looked like in the northern states was different from what it looked like in the South because of the South’s position in the Civil War and because racial demographics were different in the northern states, compared to the southern states.

Prior to the Civil War, even in northern areas where black people were allowed to attend schools, there was an official policy of segregation. Soon after the end of the Civil War, official legislation “outlawed school segregation in all northern states except Indiana.” However, just as formal school attendance laws were often ignored or rarely enforced when they didn’t suit the people involved, laws forbidding school segregation in the North were also ignored whenever it suited the white people involved. Schools were always managed at the local level, and if the local white people didn’t want black people attending their school, they would find ways to stop them, whether officially or unofficially. Black people had little legal recourse in places where they were outnumbered, wider public opinion was against them, and they couldn’t find or afford lawyers to help them argue their case.

Another factor to consider is that racism tended to be stronger in areas with higher populations of black people, and this applied to both the North and the South. The South had much higher numbers of black people than any area of the North during the 1870s, the focus period of this book, and within the northern states, some areas had higher populations of black people than others. In fact, some areas of the North had few or none. That makes a major difference in the priorities and concerns of the people who were living in these areas.

The 1870 United States Census is telling because it was the first U.S. census to gather detailed information about black people. You can read the full census online, and when you start examining the aggregate population information with race and study the numbers of total population, population of white people, and population of “colored” people, you realize that black people, while still a minority in 1870, were a very large minority in southern states. They were definitely a minority politically and socially, but in some areas of the South, their numbers actually rivaled those of white people. For example, black people made up 46% of the aggregate population in Georgia, and in Mississippi, they were actually the majority at 53% of the aggregate population. In South Carolina, black people were 58% of the aggregate population. By contrast, black people made up only about 1.8% of the aggregate population of Connecticut, 0.26% of the aggregate population of Maine, about 1.2% of the aggregate population of New York, and about 2.5% of the aggregate population of Ohio. The racial demographics were radically different between the different regions of the country, and that changed the ways the racial groups interacted and how the laws in different regions were made. Where there were more black people, there seemed to be more concern about white and black people mixing in public facilities and more rules to prevent it. It also changed how visible the treatment of people of different races could be. One of the lessons I take from this is that making laws that oppress a particular part of the population becomes much more obvious if the part of the population being targeted is about 40% or more of the total population than if it’s only about 2% or less. I think this is a major factor in how visible Southern segregation was and how Northern segregation was easier to overlook.

Because the South had a higher population of black people, they could justify having an official “dual system” of segregated schools. The northern states could not do this in the same way as the South, officially and on a large scale, regardless of whether or not anybody there wanted to, both because most northern states during the 1870s had official laws against segregated schools (whether or not they were being enforced) and also because many areas didn’t have large enough numbers of black people in general to populate a second school system. In rural areas especially, they barely had enough students to justify having even one school, with one room and one teacher. Many of the schools that we’ve seen described for this time period are rural schools and schools in small towns. Many of these small public schools were one-room schoolhouses, serving very small populations of students. Simply because of their overall low populations, not all small towns or rural areas in the northern states would even have black residents, and when that was the case, the issue of where to educate black people didn’t apply to them, and they likely didn’t have to give the matter much thought.

In cases where there were black families in a small town or rural area, there was just no other school or likely not even a second room at the local school to be used to segregate anybody. It was more a question of attending vs. not attending school. Most likely, under those conditions, any segregation would have been more unofficial, established and enforced directly by the attitudes and behavior of local people. Any black people in the area who didn’t feel welcome at the small local school or were actively discouraged from attending simply wouldn’t attend school at all, and because many areas either didn’t have attendance laws or rarely enforced the ones they had, probably no one would say or do anything about it. Their education and training for later life would come largely by engaging in manual labor of some kind and whatever else they could pick up along the way. (This is exactly the situation described for the titular black character in Stories of Rainbow and Lucky in the first installment of the series, written in 1859, on the eve of the Civil War. The white author was aware that things like this were happening in his time period.) The idea of non-attendance sounds bad and like it would set black people far behind white people in their area, and that’s true. However, even white kids during this time often skipped school or only attended sporadically if they were from farming families that needed them to help with farm chores or if they had to work to help support their families. The white kids would still have an advantage from the little schooling they had, but they were still likely to be farmers or doing manual labor, like their parents, rather than prioritizing education or looking to move up much in society or branch out into different types of work.

In larger towns and cities, there was more school choice because the populations there could support both public schools and fee-based private schools for those with the money to pay. Some former slave families went to the bigger cities in the north to find new opportunities and to escape the downsides of the environment they came from. In the larger cities, black people technically could attend public schools by law, although not necessarily without social pressure to not attend public schools with white children, and probably very little or nothing would happen if they didn’t attend because white families didn’t make them welcome or discouraged them from coming because, even in areas with school attendance laws, the laws were only weakly enforced and had loopholes. Where there was a sufficiently large enough population of black people, there was also more opportunity for the local authorities to find ways to segregate them in their neighborhoods. There were even cases where local school systems created some schools specifically for black students, which was illegal under the laws forbidding segregation in education, but could be managed if there was a sufficient number of black people in a particular area to make it seem justified to build a specific school, just for them. As long as they were living in concentrated areas, separate from white people, the segregation could be portrayed as simply providing a school for their particular area but which was meant to make sure that black children wouldn’t join the public schools white children attended. There was also the option for white people who had enough money to send their children to more exclusive private schools that black people would be unlikely to afford. In those instances, neighborhoods segregated by both race and economic status and the unequal ability to pay for a more exclusive form of education could separate well-to-do white families from poorer black counterparts, a form of economic segregation that is still a matter of concern in the 21st century.

There was also the issue that many black people didn’t entirely trust white schools because, having experienced exclusion and abuse, they thought that black children would be better nurtured by black teachers. Why fight too hard to be included in a school system that didn’t want them anyway and where the people there couldn’t be trusted and might just take advantage of them? In those cases, their solution was to form their own private schools or form private schools in conjunction with more sympathetic white organizations who shared common views and goals. If white people could sometimes start private schools out of their own homes or associated with their own churches (as explained in other chapters of this book), black people could do the same. (See Addy Learns a Lesson for a fictional example of a school for black children in Philadelphia during the Civil War.) The downside of this type of solution was that, in the 1870s, so soon after the end of the Civil War, slavery, and the laws that prevented many black people from being formally educated, there were relatively fewer qualified black teachers. Because the families of the students were also poor and struggling, these schools didn’t have much money. There were advantages to forming schools with the help of larger church organizations that also included white people or at least getting support from a larger church to form an all-black school. During the 1870s, state governments also created local colleges to teach people who had been freed from slavery, so the foundations were being laid during this period for more black people to become educational leaders for future generations. Conditions would still be rough and equal for a long time after this, but this period is important for laying the foundations of what was to come.

What I’ve described is just to give you a rough idea of the circumstances of racial segregation in schools and school systems in the 1870s and up to the Civil Right Movement, both in northern and southern states. It’s a complicated issue with a lot of variables. There is quite a lot more to be said about this, and because schools were always governed at the local level, there were considerable variations and options from place to place during every time period. It would be difficult to thoroughly describe every one of them in detail. However, I wanted to explain at least some of the broad strokes and varying conditions and attitudes to the issue to offer a broader view of what this book explains and what it doesn’t about race and education.

Posted on by TracyC

A One-Room School

Historic Communities

A One-Room School by Bobbie Kalman, 1994.

The book begins by saying that there was a time when not all communities had schools at all. In areas where the population was low, children had lessons at home or from a neighbor, if they had lessons at all. Towns and villages needed enough children living there to support even a small school. (The book doesn’t describe exactly when or where they’re talking about, but it’s implied that this is the United States or the American frontier.) When there were enough settlers in an area for a school, they might make a small log cabin for the school. As populations grew and there were more students, they would build better schools.

Requirements for teachers were different back then than they were today. Most teachers were men because married women were not allowed to be teachers. Only single women could teach. Teachers were also often required to handle rough students as well as teach them, and all ages and grades of students would study together in one-room schools. The teacher would manage the different grade levels by having them dividing them into groups based on their levels and having the different groups take turns reading aloud to her while other students did quiet work, like practicing writing. The teacher would set some students quiet tasks to do while focusing on a different group, and then, they would switch. Teachers were also responsible for the cleaning and maintenance of their school, but they typically assigned students chores to help with that. Local families would provide room and board for the teacher of their community, and they would also contribute toward the teacher’s salary.

Lessons were basic and focused mostly on the “three Rs” – reading, writing, and arithmetic. (Those three subjects contain the letter ‘R’ near the beginning, even if they don’t all start with that letter.) There was often little time to teach anything else, and these were the subjects that were most important to people with the most common jobs, such as farmer, craftsperson, or storekeeper. In schools that taught a wider range of subjects, students would also learn history (mainly focused on the United States), world geography, and grammar.

Small schools often had few books or supplies. Because paper was often in short supply, children would memorize lessons and verbally recite them back to the teacher and would practice writing on slates (small blackboards). When students were able to buy paper, they bought a blank notebook they called a copybook. The paper in the copybook wasn’t lined, so if they wanted lined paper, they had to draw the lines themselves, using a ruler.

A small school might also only have two books for the students to study: a primer for beginning readers (which showed the alphabet, numbers, and some basic spelling words and poems) and a copy of the Bible. The most popular series of books for building reading skills in the 19th century was McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers. The series started with a primer and continued with six readers, each one at a higher reading level than the last one to build more advanced reading skills. In the small, one-room schools, students would work through these books at their own pace. (Since all ages and grade levels were together in one room, there was little concern about each student moving to the next grade at the exact same time as their peers since they were all still going to be in the same room with the same teacher anyway. As long as a student was continuing to come to school and make progress, it didn’t really matter how fast or slow the progress was.)

The book describes the daily routines of students at small, one-room schools, including how they would get to school each day and what they would do at lunchtime and recess. Most children simply walked to school, although they often had to walk long distances to get there. Sometimes, they might ride a horse to school or get a ride from an adult in a wagon or sleigh, if it was winter. Children brought their lunches from home, but some schools also maintained a school garden. Most of the children from these small schools would grow up to be farmers, so gardening was a valuable skill for them to practice, and the students would also eat what they grew in the school’s garden. During the winter, they could make a soup with vegetables they grew on the stove in the schoolhouse (which also kept the schoolhouse warm) that everyone would eat for lunch. The schoolhouse stove could also be used to heat up foods that the children brought from home. Besides their lunch break, the students would also have two short recess breaks during the day. During recess, they could walk around outside, talk to their friends, play games, or play with toys they brought from home, like marbles. Toys were often homemade or easily improvised, such as using string to play Cat’s Cradle.

Sometimes, students would play pranks on their teacher or fellow students, such as hiding bugs and spiders to scare someone, pouring water on their seat if they got up, or covering the schoolhouse chimney to fill the school with smoke and smoke everyone out of the school. The last prank was dangerous.

Punishments for pranks and misdeeds, such as being late or falling asleep in class, were at the teacher’s discretion. They could take whatever form the teacher thought was appropriate for the situation, and they could be as harsh and strict as the teacher thought was necessary. Sometimes, they could be a form of poetic justice, designed to fit the crime. We aren’t told why one misbehaving boy was told to put on a girl’s bonnet and sit with the girls in class, although it might have been a fitting punishment if his misdeed was teasing the girls. (That was just a guess of mine, that the teacher might have decided that, if he wanted to tease girls, he should try sitting in their place for awhile.) Some punishments were meant to teach lessons and reinforce the idea that children should not repeat certain behaviors, such as having the children repeatedly write lines, sentences that spelled out what they were supposed to do or not do. (For example, a student who was late to school could be assigned to write, “I will not be late to school” or “I will be on time to school from now on” a certain number of times.) Other punishments were purely for humiliation, like having a student wear a cap that labeled them as a “dunce”, in the hopes that the embarrassment would keep them from misbehaving again. (This could also be the goal of making a boy wear a bonnet and sit with the girls.) Punishments could even include physical punishments. Teachers were allowed to whip their students, if they though it was necessary, and some teachers even punished children who were physically fighting by making them take turns whipping or hitting each other with a stick. The book doesn’t explain the motive for doing this, but I think that they were probably emphasizing the idea that people who fight get hurt and that getting hurt is unpleasant to discourage them from fighting more in the future. I also suspect that the point of making them take turns hitting each other was to make it equal, so it wasn’t just one person beating up on the other, but that’s just a guess. When the students got home, and their parents found out about what they had done at school that day, they might even get a second punishment, on top of whatever punishment the teacher assigned them!

Sometimes, schools had special events for holidays or academic events that involved members of the wider community. For example, schools sometimes had spelling bees, including some where adult members of the community would watch or participate. Schools often had Christmas pageants, where children would sing songs or recite poems they had memorized or perform a play written by the students themselves. At the end of the school year, students would have oral exams in front of their parents and other community members, followed by a picnic with games.

The book ends with a section of games and activity suggestions designed to show modern kids what it might be like to be a student in an old-fashioned one-room school and compare their own schools to old-fashioned schools.

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

My Reaction

Books in the Historical Communities series focus mostly on the 1800s in the United States, but they don’t always mention exactly what time period they are describing. It’s often more implied than stated, and that’s true of this book, too. The book mentions the 19th century once or twice, but it doesn’t mention any specific date or date range.

The pictures in the book are a combination of drawings and photographs of real people in historical costumes, reenacting scenes at schoolhouses and the lives of the students. I liked the combination of real people and drawings to illustrate different concepts about life and education in old-fashioned, one-room schools.

There are some concepts of education in a one-room school that fit with the educational concepts of the modern Montessori system, such as having students of different levels being taught together and having students progress at their own rate in different subjects. In a way, I think that the Montessori system hearkins back to this one-room school style of education, and that’s examined in more detail in the classic children’s book Understood Betsy, which is by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was an early advocate of the Montessori method of education in the United States.

Posted on by TracyC

Witch Week

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones, 1982.

This is the third book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. However, there is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions and between worlds, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course.

This story takes place in a world where witches are being burned at the stake in the 1980s. At a boarding school for troubled children and orphans, everyone is aware of what an accusation of witchcraft can mean. One day, one of the teachers finds a note in a social studies book saying that one of the students in class 6B is a witch. It’s a serious accusation, but how seriously should anyone take it? This is, after all, a school for troubled children, and children in general play pranks. Mr. Crossly finds the note worrying. Some of the teachers are convinced that this is just a prank or someone playing up for attention. Miss Hodge says that there is a sick mind in class 6B. Mr. Wentworth, whose own son, Brian, is in that class, says that he’s sure that all of the kids in class 6B have sick minds, but that’s just typical. He thinks it’s best if the teachers take no notice of the note. But, the note is correct. There is a witch in class 6B.

Strange things start happening in class 6B and to the students in that class. A flock of assorted birds swarms into their music class. In gym class, Nan Pilgrim can’t manage to climb the rope, no matter how hard she tries. When she and two other students are called to have lunch with the headmistress, Nan finds herself making disgusting comments about the food without her even wanting to say anything, but for some reason, the headmistress can’t hear a thing she says, even though the other students can. Then, it is revealed that Nan’s real name is Dulcinea, which is the name of a famous witch. Could Nan secretly be the witch in class 6B?

Although she can’t openly admit it, Nan is descended from the famous witch Dulcinea, who tried to stop the persecution of witches, and she is also what is called a “witch orphan”, meaning that her parents were witches. However, Nan insists that she’s not a witch herself, and Nan isn’t the only suspicious student in the class. Everyone there is troubled in some way. Brian Wentworth is often picked on for being the son of a teacher. Simon Silverson, Dan Smith, and Theresa Mullet are bullies. They are all eager to point fingers at Nan for being a witch, but could that be to cover up for themselves?

Charles Morgan was sent to the boarding school because his parents think that he is troubled and disobedient and a bad influence on his younger brother. In a way, he is very troubled, but he can’t explain what is really troubling him. When he was younger, he witnessed a witch being burned, something that still traumatizes him. Then, he helped another witch who was being hunted to escape. He can’t admit to his parents that he helped this witch because it was illegal, but the witch promised him good luck for doing so. So far, he hasn’t noticed any good luck, and he feels terrible every time he hears about another witch being burned, thinking that it might be his witch. It all makes him angry and depressed, and he hates the boarding school and everyone there.

Miss Hodge tries to investigate the students by having them act out witchcraft inquisitions. Since most of the children don’t know what happens at an inquisition and aren’t very good actors, most of them are terrible at it. But, she comes to think maybe Charles is the witch because he gets angry at Nan over all the disgusting things she said at lunch and taunts her about them in a way that makes it sound like he’s saying some kind of spell.

When Miss Hodge tries to tell Mr. Wentworth about it, he shrugs it off because he also heard the things Nan said at lunch. Mr. Wentworth interviews Nan about why she said all those things at lunch, but she can’t explain herself. She doesn’t know what made her say those things. Sometimes, she just can’t seem to help herself, and she felt almost possessed. Mr. Wentworth knows about her family’s history and warns her to be careful.

Then, when Charles is trying to escape from some bullies, he somehow manages to turn himself invisible. He doesn’t understand it, but he tries to do something else magical as a test. Since Dan Smith hid his spiked shoes earlier, Charles tries making Dan’s spiked shoes disappear. To Charles’s horror and astonishment, he succeeds! Somehow, he has apparently been a witch the whole time without knowing it. Charles thinks maybe he did some of the other strange things without knowing it, too. He’s always heard that witches are evil, and he thinks maybe he has secretly been evil this whole time and had better confess. An accidental mix-up when he goes looking for the headmistress stops him from confessing immediately, but it leaves him unsure what to do.

Mr. Wentworth has a private conversation with Charles about Miss Hodge’s suspicions about him. He knows what Charles was really talking about when he was arguing with Nan, but he points out to Charles how bad it might sound to someone who didn’t know what he was talking about. Information about witches and the past witch uprisings is drastically censored. There is almost nothing about it in the school library, but Mr. Wentworth understands the situation and explains it to Charles in a no-nonsense way. Nan’s ancestress, Dulcinea Wilkes, had been an advocate for witch’s rights in the 18th century, particularly the right not to be murdered. She said that witches couldn’t help being witches because they were born that way, and it wasn’t fair for them to be murdered for something they just couldn’t help. She said that witches would only use their powers in good ways if people would stop hunting them and burning them, but the murders and burnings continued, and Dulcinea lost her temper. She retaliated with violent spells that frightened people so much that they also murdered Dulcinea by burning her. In remembrance of that, people still continue to burn effigies of her, like they do of Guy Fawkes. Mr. Wentworth says that he thinks what happened to Dulcinea was unfair, but he is worried about his students because there has never been so much stigma against witches at any earlier point in history. Although his students wouldn’t remember it, there was a major witch uprising around the time they were all born. The news of this uprising was largely hushed-up, but the witches attempted to take over the entire government. The revolutionaries were all civil servants, and they were all burned when the uprising was crushed, but the government has been paranoid about anyone with any sign of witchcraft since. When they learned that the leader of the uprisings started showing signs of witchcraft when he was about 11 years old, they even started allowing children to be arrested for witchcraft, even on slight suspicion. The inquisitors have powers that go largely unchecked. Mr. Wentworth knows that any of his students can be hauled away and executed with little recourse.

Even though Mr. Wentworth is concerned with protecting Charles, Charles gets angry with him for giving him a black mark as a reminder to control his behavior, and he glares at Mr. Wentworth. It’s a terrible mistake. It turns out that Charles has the evil eye, and it seems like he accidentally makes Mr. Wentworth disappear. Although Charles tries to pretend like everything is normal, he is desperate on the inside. Soon, someone will realize that Mr. Wentworth is missing and that Charles was the last person to see him. He even tries burning his own finger on a candle to remind himself that burning hurts, and he needs to control himself to avoid being burned to death. When he tries to fix what he’s done with magic, Mr. Wentworth does return, but everyone’s shoes mysteriously disappear.

To Charles’s surprise, the memories of the witch he saw burned and the witch he helped to escape stop bothering him so much after he knows and accepts that he is a witch himself. It’s like he’s always known, inside, that he would be a witch, and once he becomes reconciled to his true nature, he becomes calmer and more self-confident. He knows that he can’t stop being a witch. He can only try to avoid being caught. However, it turns out that he is not the only student who has witchcraft, and when the desperate students seek help or a method of escape from this prison-like school, they accidentally summon Chrestomanci to straighten everything out.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).

My Reaction and Spoilers

Alternate Worlds

Like all of the books in the Chrestomanci series, this book takes place in an alternate world or alternate reality. It explores not only the suspicion and paranoia that go with witch hunts but also the mechanism by which these alternate worlds or realities are created. When the students who have realized that they are witches try to escape, they are given a spell that calls Chrestomanci from his world to theirs. Chrestomanci is accustomed to being summoned to random places on short notice (it’s just one of the hassles that come with the job), but he finds this particular world puzzling. He knows from the similarities between this world and others in the series of worlds that contains his own that he must be in that particular series of worlds, but he recognizes immediately that there is something wrong with it. It has way too many similarities with the world that is “our” world in the series, but yet, there shouldn’t be any witch trials or burnings in the 1980s. He explains that alternate worlds are created when there is some major event that has only two outcomes with an equal chance of happening. Every time that happens, the world splits into two separate worlds where each of the possibilities happen. Because this world is so much like the world that is “ours”, he knows that whatever event caused the split happened fairly recently in history, but for some reason, the split wasn’t complete. There is no real magic in “our” world, but this odd, dysfunctional, split-off world is full of it.

By talking to the students about what they know about the history of their world, Chrestomanci is able to pinpoint the event that caused the problem. As with other Chrestomanci books, Chrestomanci doesn’t just magically solve the problem all by himself, but once he understands the situation, he shows the students at the school where the problem lies and what they need to do to fix it themselves, making use of their own powers, and even some of the mistakes they’ve made, to set their world right and re-integrate their world with “our” world. Once their world is repaired, it’s as if all the witch trials never happened. People who were burned are alive again, and people who were in prison are living perfectly normal lives. The children must sacrifice their magical abilities and all or most of their memories of their old lives to join with our world, which some of them are initially reluctant to do, but once they do it, all of their lives change for the better. Orphans have their parents back, the school is now a day school instead of a boarding school where the children were basically prisoners, and the children are all much friendlier toward each other now that they are no longer part of that toxic atmosphere, where suspicions always surrounded them and everyone is afraid of exposure.

Themes and Spoilers

Parts of the story were stressful because of the bullying among the students and the constant threat of imprisonment or death for any child who was proven to be a witch. Most of the adults are not that concerned with the welfare of the students because this entire society is engulfed with paranoia, and everyone is desperate to protect themselves at all cost. The adults are often so preoccupied with saving themselves that they would be willing to throw the children to the wolves rather than face imprisonment or death themselves. The major exception is Mr. Wentworth, who tries to warn children who show signs of witchcraft that they need to be careful. His efforts to protect the children are touching because he has more to lose than some of the other teachers who play along with the politics and paranoia of their society. (Spoiler!) Mr. Wentworth and his son Brian are both witches, and Mr. Wentworth is being blackmailed for most of his salary by the headmistress. Mr. Wentworth advocates self-control to the students as the best way to avoid being caught, but it soon becomes apparent that nobody with witchcraft abilities can fight using them forever. That’s why some of the children’s abilities come out unconsciously, without them even being fully aware of what they’re doing. That’s where the mystery of the story comes in.

Chrestomanci books always contain an element of mystery in some way or other, and from the beginning of the story, there are the questions of who wrote the note about there being a witch in class and who the witch is. We never learn who wrote the note (I don’t remember that being definitely revealed), and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. When Charles realizes that he is a witch, that seems like the answer. However, Charles is not the only witch in class. As one of the other students points out, all of the weird things that have been happening at the school are very different in character, so there is more than one person involved. By the end of the book, it is revealed that (spoiler) the vast majority of the students at the school are witches. Some have been doing magical things unconsciously as their powers have started asserting themselves, and some have done things on purpose because they know they can. Chrestomanci realizes that many more people in their society in general are witches than these paranoid people ever suspected, and witches are only regarded as a minority because of the atmosphere of fear they live in. Everyone has been trying so hard to conceal any sign of abnormality that they all have a warped view of who they all really are and what their society is actually like.

I couldn’t help but notice that, witch or not, absolutely nobody in this society can be called an innocent person. Everybody is doing something illegal, unethical, or simply deceptive. They all have secrets, and they all do things to cover up what they’re doing. Even non-witches are often doing horrible things that they have to cover up. The apparently sweet and proper headmistress is actually a cold-hearted blackmailer. Teachers are manipulative for personal and professional reasons. The so-called “normal” (or “real”, as Nan thinks of it) children are all either secret witches or just horrible bullies and rotten human beings. Like their elders, the “normal” children are sneakily manipulative and practice blackmail and brutality against the other students, knowing that’s the way to get to top of their social heap. As I said, the entire society is toxic, not just the school, and everything the children do is a reflection of their elders (and vice versa, when you think about it). Grown-up witch hunters are like overgrown child bullies, and people like the headmistress probably started their blackmail and manipulation at a young age, just like the students, as tools of survival and self-promotion in this cold, toxic, pitiless world.

The normalization of the toxic parts of this world is both stressful and worrying. People can adjust to many awful things if they are not given any alternative, and that’s what this dysfunctional world represents. There are moments of lightness, though, and some characters are more caring than others. The story is told from the point-of-view of different characters, and much of this book is a psychological study in the different ways people deal with bullying, suspicion, and paranoia. As I said, Mr. Wentworth risks himself sometimes to help students in danger and make them see the seriousness of their situation. Some of the students band together to try to help each other survive their mutual risk, while others are more self-centered, prepared to throw each other under the bus to save themselves. It’s a relief to see all of that end when the world is set right, but it occurs to me that the story has exposed all of the characters’ true characters, what each of them are capable of doing in extreme circumstances. The extreme circumstances brought out the worst in some characters, while others were more creative and caring in spite of everything.

Posted on by TracyC

Frindle

Frindle by Andrew Clements, 1996.

Nick is a creative boy in elementary school who is known for pulling elaborate stunts, like turning his classroom into a tropical paradise with fake trees and real sand. When he gets to fifth grade, he has Mrs. Granger as his language arts teacher. Mrs. Granger has a sense of humor about some things, but she also has some strict rules and is all business when it comes to her specialist subject. Her vocabulary lists for her students are extensive, and her favorite thing is the unabridged dictionary. Nick likes words and enjoys reading, but he finds the dictionary to be boring. When he sees a word he doesn’t know, he would rather ask someone else what it means than look it up in the dictionary.

In most classes, Nick is good at asking teachers questions to sidetrack them from assigning homework. The other kids know he does this, so they aren’t surprised when he asks Mrs. Granger about her big unabridged dictionary and where all the words in it come from. Unfortunately, for Nick, Mrs. Granger is also onto his trick, and rather than answering the question herself, she assigns Nick to look up the answer and tell the rest of the class what he’s learned the next day in addition to his usual homework assignment. Nick is upset because he usually doesn’t have much homework at all, and now, he has to do more.

When Nick gets home, he reads about dictionaries in his encyclopedia, but he’s not sure that he understand everything he’s read, and it all sounds terribly dull. Then, Nick gets one of his creative ideas that he thinks will make this boring assignment more fun. When it’s time for Nick to give his report, even he is surprised at how much he has to say about the dictionary. Mrs. Granger loves his report, although even she tries to cut Nick short when he goes on for too long. Although the other kids were initially bored, they begin to enjoy Nick’s report when they realize that he is actually using it to waste an entire class period. Eventually, Mrs. Granger tells Nick that he’s at a good stopping place in his report, and she praises him for all of his work. Nick, annoyed that she’s making him look like a teacher’s pet, decides to ask one more question. He says that he still doesn’t understands who decides what the meanings of words are, like who decided that the word “dog” refers to a dog. Mrs. Granger tells him that everyone who speaks English does. Words mean whatever the people who use them agree that they mean. People who speak other languages use different words to refer to the same animal, but those words are valid to them because they all agree on the meaning of the words.

Then, Mrs. Granger says something that really starts Nick thinking. She says that if everyone in their classroom decided that they wanted to call a dog by some other word, and they got other English-speaking people to agree on it, that word would come to mean “dog.” If enough people agreed to use their new word and agreed on its definition, the new word would be put into the dictionary. To answer Nick’s original question, people who speak a language determine the words of that language and whether they are included in the dictionary. Mrs. Granger adds that the dictionary is the work of many experts over many years, and there are good reasons why each of the words included in the dictionary are there. The dictionary contains the laws of the English language, and while those laws can change, it takes time.

Later, when Nick is walking home with his friend Janet, Janet finds a fancy pen. Nick thinks about what Mrs. Granger said about how people like him, who use a language everyday, decide what words mean. It reminds him how, when he was little, he used to use a baby word that his family understood meant “music.” He had to give up using that word when he went to preschool because nobody outside of his family understood that word, but Nick understands how the word had meaning in his family because they all understood what Nick meant when he used it. While he’s thinking about it, he bumps into Janet, who drops the pen. On impulse, when Nick gives the pen back to her, he decides to give the pen a new name. He calls it a “frindle.”

At first, Janet is confused about what Nick means by “frindle.” It’s the beginning of a new experiment for Nick. Out of curiosity, Nick tries to see if he can teach a saleslady at a local store that the word “frindle” means “pen.” He goes to the store and asks for a frindle, pointing to the pens. Then, he gets some of his friends to do the same thing. After several kids all ask the same lady for a “frindle”, she begins to respond to it by automatically reaching for a pen. Nick is excited because he has just created a new word. “Frindle” now means pen because he decided that it did, and he got other people to agree on the meaning. Nick is making language history!

To make sure his word becomes part of language, Nick gets his friends to use the word “frindle” instead of “pen” at school … in Mrs. Granger’s class. Mrs. Granger isn’t amused by the class’s excessive use of the word “frindle” for pen because she knows that this is another of Nick’s stunts, and it’s a distraction from school lessons. She tries to discourage Nick from promoting it at school, and Nick points out that he’s only doing what she said about how words are made. Mrs. Granger explains how words in language evolved from other words that also have meaning, but “frindle” doesn’t have that kind of evolution because Nick just made it up, based on nothing. Nick insists that “frindle” means something to him and his friends, and they’ve already sworn an oath to each other to keep using it.

To Nick’s surprise, Mrs. Granger responds by showing him a sealed envelope. She tells him that it’s a letter for him, but she doesn’t want him to read it now. The letter is for him after the question of “frindle” is resolved. For now, she just wants Nick to sign the envelope and date it so that he’ll know what she hasn’t switched envelopes or tampered with the letter in any way. Nick is confused, but he does sign the envelope, and Mrs. Granger mysteriously says, “And may the best word win.” It seems like Mrs. Granger is declaring a war of words, pen vs frindle, but are Nick and Mrs. Granger really on opposite sides?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is a fun and humorous story that does a great job of showing how languages evolve and the purpose and meaning of language. Nick and his friends unwittingly give themselves an education during the course of their stunt. The reason why Nick had to sign and date the envelope is that Mrs. Granger is also enjoying their experiment, and she has made a prediction about how it will all turn out. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a small child who has learned a bad word can guess what Mrs. Granger has realized and how her own actions are calculated to make sure she gets the result she really wants.

Something that not even Nick fully reckons with until his experiment is well underway is that, now that all of the kids at school know about “frindle”, he can’t stop them all from using the word, even if he wants to. Although Nick originally created the word, words in a language belong to everyone who uses them. This is both a thought-provoking book about the nature of words and language and a good story for stopping periodically and having kids make their own predictions about what will happen next.

Even kids have power because they are also language-users, and they have the ability to influence the language and understanding of everyone around them by the words they choose! Nick is very much an idea person, but after “frindle” starts getting so much national media attention, he starts to get intimidated by the level of power he has. He has become more conscious of the consequences of his ideas and how they can affect large numbers of people. For a time, he becomes more shy because of that realization, but Mrs. Granger gives him some encouragement. She tells him that he has many good ideas and that she’s sure he will go on to do great things with them. Nick regains his confidence and realizes that he can use his powers for good, supporting good causes.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall

Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall by Alice B. Emerson, 1913.

Since Ruth and her friends have helped her Uncle Jabez to recover his stolen cash box in the previous book, Uncle Jabez has decided to send Ruth to Briarwood Hall, the boarding school that her best friend, Helen Cameron will attend, so the two of them can stay together. Briarwood Hall is an exclusive school, where the primary entrance requirements are academic records and teacher recommendations. Ruth has already graduated from the local school in her uncle’s town although she is a little younger than Helen, and she is ready for the high school level. Helen’s twin brother, Tom, will be attending a military academy close to the girls’ boarding school.

The three of them travel alone to their schools, without adult chaperones. They amuse themselves by seeing if there are other students bound for their schools traveling on the same train and steamboat they take to their boarding schools, but they can’t find any. However, they do see an interesting older lady with a veiled hat who attracts their attention because she looks doll-like and speaks French. For some reason, this lady seems greatly upset by a strange man with a harp who is part of a musical group entertaining passengers on the steamboat.

The mysterious French woman turns out to be the girls’ new French teacher at Briarwood Hall. She seems very nice to the girls when they are introduced to her as they’re riding in a coach to the school after they get off the boat. Mary Cox, a fellow student who is older than Ruth and Helen, rides to the school with the girls and the French teacher. On the way to the school, Ruth notices that Mary seems to oddly ignore the French teacher, speaking only to her and Helen.

Mary is a Junior at the school, and tells the girls about the school clubs. The two main clubs at Briarwood are the “Upedes” and the “Fussy Curls.” I was glad that Ruth and Helen thought that these sounded by strange names for clubs, too. Mary explains that they’re just nicknames for the official club names. The Upedes are members of the Up and Doing Club, a group of girls who like lively activities. There are other groups at school, like the basketball players, but the Upedes and Fussy Curls have a particular rivalry for members. Mary is a member of the Upedes, although, in spite of the groups’ rivalry for gaining new members, Mary strangely doesn’t invite Ruth and Helen to join her group and doesn’t seem to want to explain what the rival group does.

When the girls leave the coach, Mary says that she doesn’t like the French teacher because she’s a poor foreigner, and Mary doesn’t know why she’s at the school. (Mary sounds like she’s rather a snob.) Mary says that she thinks it’s strange that the French teacher never wears any nice clothes and doesn’t seem to have any personal friends or relations. (Yeah, definitely a snob toward someone who just seems a bit unfortunate, like it’s some kind of moral failing, not having nice clothes or personal connections to show off.) Helen says that the French teacher does have personal acquaintances because she seemed to know the harp player on the boat, something that seems to interest Mary. Ruth has the uneasy feeling that they shouldn’t have mentioned it, not knowing exactly what the teacher’s connection to the harp player is. Helen likes Mary, but Ruth has reservations about her friendship.

Mary Cox shows the girls where their dorm room is. Helen and Ruth are sharing a room by themselves. Another girl, a senior named Madge Steel, comes by to talk to the girls and invites them to a meeting of the Forward Club (known as the “Fussy Curls” because of its initials) that evening. Ruth wants to go to that meeting because Madge seems very nice, and the Forward Club includes members of the school faculty. However, Helen says that she’d rather attend the meeting of the Upedes that evening that Mary told her about. Helen thinks that they owe Mary their loyalty because she was the first to meet them and was helpful in finding their room. Besides, the Upedes have no teachers in their club, and Helen thinks that it sounds more exciting and free from supervision than the Forward Club. Ruth thinks that she would prefer to get closer to her new teachers and some well-behaved girls instead, and it’s the first major disagreement that the friends have. Mary talks Ruth into going to the meeting of the Upedes that evening because that was the invitation that they received first, but Ruth says that she won’t join any club officially until she’s had a chance to see the other girls involved and learn what the clubs are really like. Ruth’s stance seems to be the wise one as the school’s headmistress tells the girls that joining clubs on campus are fun but that they should beware of getting involved too much with girls who don’t take their studies seriously and waste their time, and they learn that Mary Cox’s nickname at school is “the Fox”, suggesting that she’s as sly as Ruth has sensed. Although Mary didn’t mention it to the girls before, she’s actually the leader of the Upedes.

That evening, the girls are introduced to other students, and at the meeting of the Upedes, the school’s very own ghost story. Briarwood wasn’t always a school. It used to be a private mansion, and a wealthy man lived there with his beautiful daughter. The wealthy man was the one who commissioned the creation of the fountain with the marble statue that still stands on the school’s grounds. Although people on campus say that nobody really knows what the statue of the woman playing a harp in the fountain is supposed to represent, the ghost story claims that the figure was modeled after the beautiful daughter of the mansion’s former owner. However, according to the story, the girl fell in love with the man who sculpted the statue of her, and the two of them eloped, leaving her father alone and sad. Rumor had it, though, that the girl and her new husband must have died somewhere after they ran away because people started hearing mysterious harp music at night on the grounds of the mansion. Eventually, Briarwood was sold, and the school’s founders, the Tellinghams, bought it, and sometimes, people still hear harp music on the school grounds. Every time something strange or momentous happens at the school, people hear the twang of the harp.

That night, Ruth and Helen become the targets of a frightening hazing stunt by the Upedes that seems to bring the ghost story to life, but when something happens that frightens even the hazers, it brings into question how much of the ghost story is really true.

The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.

Spoilers and My Reaction:

I liked this story much better than the first book in the series because it is more directly a mystery story than the first book, and Ruth makes a deliberate effort to untangle some of the puzzling things happening at her new school.

It’s pretty obvious that there is a connection between the ghost story of the girl with the harp and the French teacher’s apparent discomfort at the suspicious harpist. Ruth finds out pretty quickly that the harpist from the boat is lurking around the school. That revelation explains the frightening happenings at the hazing incident, although it still leaves the question of the connection between the harpist and the French teacher. At first, I thought that it was going to turn out that there is some truth to the ghost story the Upedes told, but that actually has nothing to do with the real situation. In some ways, I felt like the real situation was a little to straight-forward and resolved a bit too quickly at the end, considering the build-up they’d had about it. It is interesting that, of the students at the school, only Ruth comes to learn the full truth of the French teacher’s secret. Even Helen doesn’t know what Ruth eventually discovers, partly to save the French teacher’s reputation and partly because Ruth and Helen’s friendship is suffering for part of the book.

Unlike newer series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, characters in the older Stratemeyer series, including the Ruth Fielding series, grow, age, and develop their lives and personalities. In this book, when the girls go away to boarding school, the differences in Helen and Ruth’s backgrounds and personalities become more obvious. It leads them to clash in some ways, and they both worry about endangering their friendship with each other, but by the end of the book, each of the girls develop a greater sense of who they are and what they really stand for.

Helen is more familiar and comfortable than Ruth is with the traditional rituals of boarding school, even taking some glee in the mean hazing ritual of the Upedes, and she badly wants to fit in with the cooler older girls at school, willing to put up with their mean bossing to take part in their schemes for the fun and excitement. However, Ruth, is naturally more serious and shy and less accustomed to having things her way or telling others what to do anywhere she’s lived than the wealthy Helen. Ruth overcomes some of her shyness and learns to be more assertive as she stands up for herself and the other new girls at school, called “Infants” by the older girls. Ruth decides to refuse to join either the Forward Club, which has a reputation of being made up of girls who toady up to the school faculty, or the Upedes (which was initially founded as a protest group to the Forward Club, which is why most of the activities of their club involve breaking various school rules and instigating pranks), after experiencing their mean pranks and bossiness. Instead, she takes a joke of Helen’s seriously and decides to form a secret society of her own. She talks to some of the other new girls at school, and they feel the same way they do, that they don’t want to choose between either the Upedes or the Fussy Curls and would rather have a club of their own, where they won’t be dominated or hazed by the older girls. Helen gets upset at Ruth starting this new group because she thinks that they won’t gain any new friends or have any real fun or really be a part of this school if they don’t join an already-established group. Helen thinks that a group of new girls would look ridiculous because they wouldn’t know what to do with their club and will look like a group of babies. However, Ruth realizes that this is nonsense. There are enough interested girls among the newcomers to give them a good group of friends and they can think of their own things to do where they can be the leaders. Ruth turns out to be more of a leader and Helen more of a follower, and Ruth is also more creative, thinking of new possibilities in life instead of stuck with someone else’s creation. I wish that the book had gone into more details about what Ruth’s club actually does. She and some of the other girls periodically go to meetings of their club, but they don’t say much about what they do at the meetings.

Helen and Ruth temporarily go separate ways at school. Helen joins the Upedes, and Ruth and some of the other new girls carry out the plan to form a new club that they call The Sweetbriars. The other girls who help form The Sweetbriars are as independently-minded and creative as Ruth and like the idea of forming their own school traditions. Helen criticizes Ruth for being a stickler from the rules because she doesn’t want to take part in school stunts that might get her in trouble, but although Helen is more inclined to break rules in the name of fun, she is still less independent in her mind than Ruth because her rule-breaking is done following the dictates of the Upedes and the traditional school stunts of having midnight feasts with other girls in their dorm rooms. They are not stunts of her own creation or particularly imaginative, and while she is brave about school demerits, she is not very brave about what other people think about her. After the Upedes have treated Ruth very badly and spread rumors about her, Ruth finds the courage to tell Helen how hurt she is that she continues to be friends with people who have treated her so badly when she wouldn’t have put up with people mistreating a friend of hers. She doesn’t ask for an apology and says that she’s not sure that one is even warranted, but she wants Helen to know how she feels. Helen has felt like hanging around Mary Cox has made her act like a meaner person, and she feels like she can’t help herself in Mary’s company. Understanding how Ruth really feels reminds Helen that she risks damaging her relationship with her best friend if she doesn’t do something about her behavior, and when Mary is ungrateful and lies to Helen after Ruth and Helen’s brother help save her life during a skating accident, Helen begins to see Mary for what she really is.

In the second half of the book, the Mercy Curtis from the first book in the series reappears. In the first book, she spent most of the time being bitter because she had a physical disability that prevented her from walking, and she was overly sensitive about how people looked her. However, at the end of the first book, Mercy received some treatment from a surgical specialist that has enabled her to regain her ability to walk. She still walks with crutches, but her spirits have improved now that she is able to move more easily on her own, without relying on her wheelchair. Because she had previously spent much of her time alone, studying, she qualifies for admittance to Briarwood and decides that she would like to join her friends, Ruth and Helen. When Mercy comes to the school, she is still sharp-tongued, although less bitter about herself. She rooms with Ruth and Helen and joins the Sweetbriars. She adds a nice balance to Ruth and Helen’s friendship. Ruth gets to spend some time with Mercy and the other Sweetbriars when Helen is with the Upedes, and Mercy is very serious about her studies, so she insists that her friends not neglect theirs, keeping then on task in the middle of their social dramas.

As a historical note, there is a place in the story in, Ch. 22, where the book describes Ruth as wearing a sweater, defining it as if readers might not know exactly what a sweater was, calling it “one of those stretching, clinging coats.” The reason for that is that sweaters were actually a relatively new fashion development for women in 1910s, although men had worn sweaters before. Women often wore shawls in cold weather before sweaters became popular, but sweaters left a woman’s arms more able to move freely than a shawl would allow, as this video about women’s clothing during World War I from CrowsEyeProductions explains.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Rover Boys at School

The Rover Boys

The Rover Boys at School by Arthur M. Winfield (aka Edward Stratemeyer), 1899.

The three Rover boys, Richard, Thomas, and Samuel (called Dick, Tom, and Sam), live with their aunt and uncle in the country, but they learn that they are going to be sent to boarding school. The boys have been restless on the farm because they used to live in the city.

The boys’ father, Anderson Rover, is a mineral expert and made his fortune in mining. The family had lived in New York, so the boys are accustomed to city life. The boys’ mother died of a fever when they were young. After his wife’s death, the boys’ father traveled restlessly because of his grief, leaving the boys at boarding school in New York. Then, he had the notion to go to Africa and left the boys with their Uncle Randolph. The boys and their uncle haven’t heard from him since, and they worry that something has happened to him.

When the boys first arrived at the farm, they enjoyed the outdoor life of the country, but there isn’t much variety to the activities, and the boys start getting to trouble when they get bored. Their Uncle Randolph spends all of his time in studying scientific farming, and he can’t understand why the boys can’t take an interest in the subject or at least give him some peace and quiet for his work. The boys aren’t too impressed because, so far, their uncle doesn’t seem too successful at it. Richard (Dick) is the oldest of the three boys and is often quiet and studious, so he gets along better with Uncle Randolph than the others. He is 16 at the beginning of the series. Thomas (Tom) is fun-loving, likes to play pranks, and is 15 years old. His pranks are part of the reason why the boys are driving their uncle and aunt and their cook crazy. Samuel (Sam) is 14 years old and athletic.

Uncle Randolph doesn’t know much about kids or young people, so boarding school seems like the ideal solution. The boys’ aunt and uncle think that the boys need some discipline. They do, but the boys are also looking forward to seeing something of the world and having some adventures, so the prospect of going to boarding school sounds exciting to them. They’ve been to boarding school before, but they think it would be exciting to go to a military academy.

Before the boys leave the farm, Dick is attacked by a tramp, who steals his watch and pocketbook (wallet). The boys chase him and get the wallet back, but Tom almost drowns and Sam is almost swept over a waterfall while they try to pursue the tramp, who escapes in a boat with the watch. The boys are sad about the loss of the watch, which belonged to their father.

Tom gets a letter from his friend, Larry Colby, to say that he’s going to be attending the Putnam Hall Military Academy soon, and Larry’s father has recommended the school to the boys’ uncle. Uncle Randolph says that he’s decided to take the suggestion. The boys think it sounds exciting, and they’re glad that they’ll be going to school with someone they know. Uncle Randolph says that the headmaster of the school, Captain Victor Putnam, is a former military man who has a reputation for being kind to his students but strict on discipline, so it sounds like what the boys need.

Later in the story, they explain that Captain Putnam is a graduate of West Point and that he used to serve under Major General Custer, helping to put down Indian uprisings (Native American) until he was injured in a fall from his horse. For this book’s original audience of boys living in the late 19th century, this probably would have sounded exciting and noble, but not to people from the early 21st century. However Captain Putnam would have looked at it, quelling Native American uprisings would be essentially admitting to being part of their oppression because they weren’t uprising for nothing, and that fall from his horse is probably the only reason why he would even still be alive at the time of this story, given what eventually happened to Major General Custer. Because Custer had been a Civil War hero, people were shocked and saddened by his sudden and violent death. As with many people who die young, they romanticized his past and exaggerated his story, turning him into a legend for young people to live up to. Eventually, the romanticism wore off, and the reality stayed (he was the bottom of his class at West Point, not a student parents would really want their kids to emulate, and there were darker sides to his life and personality than most people in the 1800s would have known and which wouldn’t be appropriate talk for children), which is why his modern legacy isn’t as great as people a hundred years or more ago would have thought. Captain Putnam doesn’t look as exciting and heroic as advertised by association, but it’s enough to know that the Rover boys would have thought that it sounded impressive because of what their elders would have told them and so would their earliest readers, for similar reasons.

Before the boys leave for school on the train, Tom plays one last trick on the unpleasant station master by throwing a firecracker into some trash that the station master was burning, setting the mood for the boys’ eventual arrival at school.

After the train ride, the boy have to continue part way by boat. On the boat, they meet three pretty girls (how fortuitous) and a bully who also goes to their new school, Dan Baxter. The bully is harassing the girls by continuing to try to talk to them when they want him to leave them alone. Dan doesn’t say anything shocking to the girls, it’s more that he’s off-putting because he’s rather pushy and full of himself and can’t read a room to see that he’s making the girls uncomfortable because of the way he talks. It’s awkward. The Rover boys step in and try to get Dan to leave the girls alone, making an enemy of Dan. The girls (Dora Stanhope and her two cousins, Grace and Nellie Laning, who belong to prosperous farming families in the area) are grateful for the intervention and think that the Rover boys are better behaved than Dan is. The boys talk to the girls about their new school and learn that they don’t live far from the school, although they don’t mix with the students there much because the students at Putnam Hall don’t leave the campus very often. The boys hope that they’ll have the chance to see the girls again while they’re at Putnam Hall. (You know they will.)

Tom’s Putnam Hall experience starts off with a bang … literally. As the boys arrive at the school, Tom decides to give the other students a “salute” by scaring them with another of his firecrackers. That’s when Tom gets his first taste of military discipline from the Head Assistant Josiah Crabtree, the second in command at the school and the strictest disciplinarian in the place. Most of the school would have given the prank a pass, especially from a new boy, but Josiah Crabtree takes exception to Tom’s attitude and doesn’t accept his excuse that he doesn’t need to answer to Crabtree because he has only just arrived at the school, isn’t an official student yet, and shouldn’t be subject to the school’s rules. (Tom may have thought that military school would be exciting, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have the first clue what military discipline is about.) Crabtree marches Tom off and locks him in the guard room to wait for Captain Putnam to return to the school and administer his discipline. This is actually in Tom’s favor because Captain Putnam understands that his students are still boys, and therefore, he isn’t as strict with them as he would be full adult soldiers.

Josiah Crabtree’s ultra-strictness has caused him to be not well-liked by other students at the school. When he and Tom discuss Tom’s prank while waiting for Captain Putnam, Tom continues to argue the point that he is not yet a student at the school and that Crabtree has no right to lock him up like he has. Tom tells him that he wants to be released to stay at the hotel in town so he can contact his guardian because he may not wish to join this school after all, threatening to tell his uncle of his mistreatment. Crabtree is correct that setting off a fire cracker to scare people isn’t the best way to start off on the right foot with the faculty (I wouldn’t have liked it if someone did it to me, and this is a school where people learn to fire real guns, so you can’t have people who treat firearms and explosives like toys), but Tom’s point that immediate imprisonment before he’s even really joined the school and been notified of the school’s rules is a valid criticism, and he is not so committed to the school at this point that he can’t leave if he wants to. If Tom makes false imprisonment a public issue, it would damage the reputation of the school. That threat is worrying to Crabtree, who knows that he has already rubbed others the wrong way and made a few enemies of his own.

Tom runs away from Crabtree and hides in the forest outside the school. He plans to walk into town, but along the way, he spots a campfire. He listens in on the conversation of the men sitting by the campfire. He discovers that one of them is the tramp who stole their father’s watch before, and he listens to the men discussing some clandestine “mining deal.” When they catch Tom spying on them, Tom confronts the man called Buddy about stealing his father’s watch. Buddy and his friend deny it, and Tom fights with them before running away and getting help at the Laning farm, where he meets Grace and Nellie again and the family gives him a room for the night. When he explains his story to the family, he learns that Josiah Crabtree has been courting Dora Stanhope’s widowed mother because she owns a sizeable farm and has money from her first marriage.

In the morning, Tom returns to the school and makes his case to Captain Putnam, arguing as he did the night before that he had not yet officially joined the school before Josiah Crabtree imprisoned him and confiscated and searched his luggage. Captain Putnam makes it clear to Tom that certain things, like fire crackers, are forbidden at the school, and he will have to accept that if he’s serious about being a student there. Tom asks what the point is of him joining the school if he’s going to have marks against him before he’s even had a chance to properly start, and Captain Putnam says that if Tom still wants to join, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones and let him start school with a clean slate. Captain Putnam sees Tom as intelligent and spirited even though he’s undisciplined, and is willing to give him a chance. Tom accepts and joins the school, although Crabtree is still annoyed at Tom getting away with his prank and running away the previous night. When Tom rejoins his brothers, he tells them about seeing the thief who stole the watch, and they discuss how awful it would be for Dora if the martinet Crabtree became her stepfather.

Because The Rover Boys is an early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, there is more adventure and the general friendships and rivalries of life at a boarding school than there is mystery. The boys and their friends get used to the routines, rules, and drills of military school, getting into fights with the bullies, playing sports, and pulling stunts with their friends. However, there are villains in the story with secrets for the boys to learn. Josiah Crabtree hasn’t been honest with Dora Stanhope’s mother, trying to use pressure to get her to marry him so he can use her money and property for his purposes … including money and property entailed for Dora under her late father’s will. Crabtree claims to have money of his own, bur shows no evidence of it. Although, who has been giving the bully, Dan Baxter, large sums of money and for what purpose? What about the watch thief and his friend? Why do they keep hanging around?

By the end of the book … not too much is resolved, compelling readers to continue on to the next book in the series to find out what happens.

This book and others in the series are now public domain and are easily available online in various formats through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (including audiobook).

My Reaction

I never read any of this series of books when I was a kid, but having grown up with other Stratemeyer Syndicate books, like Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, I was curious about this first series produced by the Syndicate. I picked several of the books to get a feel for the series, and I had several reactions. First, the Rover Boys, like other early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, is almost but not quite a mystery series. It has some elements of suspense, but the little mysteries and secrets of the villains in the story come secondary to physical adventures and the drama of boarding school life for much of the book. In fact, the action kind of breaks for stories about football and baseball games the boys play at school, which don’t really have anything to do with the villains’ plots and are just part of school life. Although, the bully Dan Baxter loses favor with other boys at school when they discover that he actually placed a bet against the school’s own football team before a game, which seems pretty disloyal. I also suspected at first that at least some of the villains’ threads would be connected, but really, they have very little to do with each other, which was disappointing.

Stratemeyer Syndicate books have a pattern of ending chapters on cliffhangers in order to keep kids reading to find out what happens, which begins to show in this book, and often, the mystery/suspense elements in early stories help to set up these cliffhangers while the plot is more about the characters’ lives. Personally, I prefer stories that are more definitely mysteries, where the characters are making active efforts to solve problems and discover the villains’ secrets instead of just randomly stumbling on information. This particular story kind of annoyed me because the entire book ends on a cliffhanger. In fact, the only problem/mystery that gets resolved in the story is that Dick eventually gets his watch back. The other villains are still hanging around. At the end of the book, Crabtree is still hanging around, in spite of multiple interventions, trying to get Dora’ mother to marry him and turn over Dora’s inheritance from her father. The bully, Dan Baxter, left the school, but is apparently hanging around with Crabtree. It also turns out that Baxter’s father is secretly an old enemy of the Rover boys’ father and thinks that Anderson Rover cheated him out a mine years ago and still has the paperwork to prove it, possibly carrying it with him to Africa, for some reason. The Rover boys’ father is also still presumably lost somewhere in Africa, doing who-knows-what there. All of these problems are left hanging, apparently to be resolved in later books with other problems probably being added along the way. The only thing that I felt really certain about at the end of the book is that Dick is probably going to marry Dora in the future because he is already trying to be her protector, and his brothers will probably marry her convenient cousins, Grace and Nellie, in some order.

Second, I was bracing myself throughout the story to watch for its use of racial language. One thing to watch with old Stratemeyer Syndicate books is racist language and attitudes. In the 1950s and 1960s, with the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the Syndicate revised and updated its different series. They changed and removed outdated language, including racial terms, and also updated references to culture and technology. The version of this particular book that I used for my review is the old public domain version. I already talked about Captain Putnam’s service with Major General Custer and how people at the time would have felt about that compared to modern people, but there is also a black man called Alexander who works at Putnam Hall. He doesn’t have a very big role in the story, but I wanted to talk about him because of the way the book describes him. The book describes him using the words “colored” and “Negro”, which are outdated now although acceptable for the time period (that’s why they’re part of the names of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909, and the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944). However, during the Civil Rights Movement, people wanted to distance themselves from terms that were used during periods of high discrimination, so they began shifting to the use of “African American” as the specific term and “black” as the generic. This is the sort of language update that the Stratemeyer Syndicate books received in later reprintings.

Later in the book, one of the boys’ friends jokingly imitates a “Negro minstrel” in an old minstrel show (an entertainment people of this time would have been familiar with which included caricatured characters of black people), saying “That’s the conundrum, Brudder Bones. I’se gib it up, sah!” (“Brudder Bones” was a stock character in one of those shows, although I don’t know much about it because I’ve never seen a real minstrel show. I think there was a similar reference to the name “Bones” as a minstrel show character in the book Cheaper by the Dozen as well.) This is another cultural element that would be removed from later Stratemeyer Syndicate books and that also appeared in other older children’s books that were written prior to the Civil Rights Movement, including at least one of the Little House on the Prairie books. These references get a bad reaction in modern times because this type of caricature is a mean style of humor that probably wouldn’t have lasted very long against anybody who had the authority to complain about it at the height of its popularity. To put it another way, it’s the kind of humor where someone is definitely being laughed “at”, not “with,” and some even included songs with descriptions of horrifically violent things happening to black people masked as comedy. If you’ve never seen this kind of reference to minstrel shows before, you are not missing anything for having grown up without it. There’s nothing inherently funny in the friend’s little joke, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who didn’t know what the reference referred to. It seems to be one of those things that only becomes amusing when someone recognizes the source of the reference, and as I said, I’m not even sure exactly who “Bones” was supposed to be, other than some kind of stock character. I vaguely know what the reference is from, but not enough to connect with it in the way the original audience might have, and anyone younger than I am probably wouldn’t recognize even that much. I don’t want to put undue emphasis on this line in the book because it was only one line, and the Rover boys weren’t really into it either because they were worried about a problem they had at the time that wasn’t really funny, but I thought that I should explain the background of this comment and point it out as another reason why the Stratemeyer Syndicate books needed revising.

When referring to their father, who is still missing in Africa, the boys also worry that maybe he was killed or taken prisoner by “savage” tribes. “Tribes” in many children’s books of this period are described as “savage.” The exact location their father was trying to reach is not specified, just somewhere in Africa where there is a jungle, although a later book in the series has more about it.

Some general old slang in this book really dates it, like the use of the word “fellows” instead of “guys” and the word “peach” for “tattle” or “tell on” someone. Even later Stratemeyer Syndicate series, like the Hardy Boys, use language that would sound dated to modern people, like the word “chums” for “friends.” These old slang terms were also changed and removed from later reprintings.

There were also some features of this story that took me by surprise. Pranks and stunts are regular features of boarding school stories, but I was surprised at some of the roughness of the boys at the school as well as some of the punishments. At one point, the boys realize that Crabtree has pushed Dora’s mother to marry him, and they’re on their way to town to get married immediately. The Rover boys tell their friends and get them to swarm the carriage, pretending that it’s part of a game they’re playing, trying to delay or disrupt their trip to town and their wedding plans. The boys cause an accident with the carriage that causes Mrs. Stanhope to get a broken arm and a cracked rib. They’re lucky nobody broke their neck. It’s a pretty violent way to interfere, even though they’re trying to save Mrs. Stanhope and Dora from Crabtree’s machinations.

One thing I did enjoy was the description of the game of Hare and Hounds (also called Paper Chase) that came right before the carriage scene. I’d never heard of the game before, but apparently, it’s been a popular game in British schools for centuries. Probably, the reason I’ve never seen it played is because the playgrounds and yards of the schools I attended wouldn’t have been large enough to make a really good game. One person plays the role of the “hare” and is given a head start, leaving a trail of bits of paper behind him as he goes. The other players are the “hounds”, and they try to find the hare by following the trail of paper bits, like they were hounds following a scent. The object of the game is for them to catch the hare before he reaches a designated finishing point. At a school where you can see pretty much the entire playground and everyone on it at once, there wouldn’t be any point in following a trail or any real challenge to the game, but it sounds like an interesting game to play if you can find a large enough space for it.

Posted on by TracyC

Ramona the Brave

Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary, 1975.

Six-year-old Ramona Quimby thinks of herself as brave. Now that she’s going into the first grade, she’s no longer just a little kid. She even stood up to some boys on the playground who were making fun of her older sister, Beatrice, for being called “Beezus.”

However, Ramona soon discovers that not every sees her the way she sees herself. Beezus is embarrassed at the way her little sister told off those boys and is sure that they’re now going to make a much bigger deal of the incident at school because of it. Beezus says that she’s sick of her silly nickname, which rhymes with “Jesus” and just wants to be called “Beatrice.” Ramona agrees with her, both because she feels bad that she accidentally embarrassed her sister and because it’s her fault that Beezus got her nickname. When she was smaller, Ramona couldn’t pronounce the name “Beatrice” very well and ended up saying “Beezus” instead, and the mispronunciation stuck. Ramona is trying hard to be a big kid now, and she doesn’t like to remember that she used to not even be able to say her own sister’s name. Ramona agrees to call her sister Beatrice in public and to only use the Beezus nickname at home.

Ramona wants to be taken seriously, and she hates it when her mother is amused by some of the silly things she does. (I know the feeling, and so do many other people!) The last thing she wants is to just be a silly little kid that people laugh at, and nobody seems to understand how she feels. She especially hates it when her sister keeps calling her a pest.

Fortunately, their mother understands that part of the problem is that the girls are getting bigger, and they’re starting to feel cramped sharing a room with each other. Mr. and Mrs. Quimby have decided to add an extra room onto the house so the girls won’t have to share anymore, and Mrs. Quimby is going to take a part-time job to help pay for it. Before the girls can start arguing about who gets the new room, Mrs. Quimby tells them that it’s already decided that they will take turns, trading off rooms every six months and that Ramona will have the first turn in the new room.

Watching the workmen make a hole in the wall of their house and build the new room is fascinating, although Ramona doesn’t have the patience for planning, methodical work, and learning how different tools are supposed to be used, like her friend Howie. Ramona prefers playing their made-up game of Brick Factory, where she and Howie smash old, broken bricks with rocks. Ramona takes the opportunity to put her special initial, a Q with cat ears and whiskers, into the wet concrete for the floor of the room, and she can’t resist the opportunity to jump through the new hole in the wall of their house. The workmen cover the hole with a sheet of plastic when they go home for the day, but the girls think it’s kind of spooky having a hole in the wall of their house. They imagine that something horrible could sneak in through the hole, like a ghost, maybe one that looks like a gorilla. Ramona can’t wait to tell the other kids all about it when she starts first grade!

Unfortunately, the new school year doesn’t start out the way Ramona hopes. Instead of everyone being excited about her news and how she watched the workmen chop a hole in the side of her house, everyone laughs because the teacher had just made a joke about her being Ramona Kitty Cat because she drew the cat ears and whiskers onto the Q on her name tag the way she always does. Ramona hates being laughed at and made to feel like a fool. Worse still, her friend Howie doesn’t defend her because Ramona said that they “chopped” a hole instead of “prying” it open with crowbars. Because of Ramona’s technical inaccuracy, Howie makes her sound like she was lying about the whole thing!

Then, when the kids make paper bag owls for Parents’ Night, Susan copies Ramona’s design, and the teacher, Mrs. Griggs, praises Susan to the whole class for coming up with the idea of having the eyes looking to the side. She doesn’t even notice Ramona’s owl. Ramona, afraid that everyone else will think that she’s the copycat because of Mrs. Grigg’s public praise of Susan’s owl, just like they all thought she was a liar and laughed at her before because of what Mrs. Griggs and Howie said on the first day of school, crumples her owl up and throws it away before anyone can see it. But, that doesn’t help relieve Ramona’s feelings at the injustice of the situation. She’s owl-less because of Susan stealing her idea. In a fit of temper, she crumples up Susan’s owl, too, and runs away when Susan tells on her even though Mrs. Griggs repeatedly says that she doesn’t like tattletales. (Honestly, I’ve never understood why adults tell kids that. It just encourages kids to behave badly and label others as “tattletale” when they complain, even when the complaint is just. It just gives bullies more power to act with impunity. I also think kids should be encouraged to talk about things, especially some of the more difficult things to talk about, and the whole “I don’t want to hear from tattletales” shuts down conversations before they even start. I’ve guessed that it has something to do with not wanting to take the time to deal with a lot of petty complaints, but at least hear someone out before you decide what they’re going to tell you and how important it is!) Even when Ramona explains the situation to her mother, she can tell that her mother doesn’t fully understand how she feels, and she is forced to apologize to Susan. Mrs. Griggs makes it all the more embarrassing by forcing Ramona to apologize in front of the whole class. Ramona knows that Mrs. Griggs doesn’t understand her and is sure that Mrs. Griggs hates her.

Ramona’s new room isn’t much of a comfort, either. She finds it a bit spooky, and when she’s alone in it, her imagination runs wild, like it did the night that she and her sister were imagining what kind of ghost could get in through the hole in the wall. Ramona certainly doesn’t feel very brave and grown-up about having a room to herself, but she refuses to admit it because she doesn’t want anyone to think that she’s a baby for being scared.

Things come to a head when Mrs. Griggs sends home a progress report that says that Ramona needs to use more self-control and keep her eyes on her own work. Ramona knows that it’s totally unfair because she’s been very self-controlled since the owl incident, in spite of Mrs. Griggs’s inconsiderate lack of understanding, and the only reason why she sometimes looks at the paper of the boy next to her is that he’s been seriously struggling with his work, and she’s been trying to help him. When Ramona is so fed up that she tells her family that she needs to say a bad word and the worst word she can think of to say is “guts”, everyone laughs at her, and Ramona bursts into tears, unable to take it anymore.

Tears and anger serve a purpose, though. Sometimes, an outburst is the only way to make someone understand, and understanding is what Ramona most needs. The family has an honest discussion about Ramona’s feelings, and Beezus tells her that she understands what it’s like to be little and laughed at for doing or saying something silly, reminding her mother about the times when she laughed about things she did, back when Ramona was too little to remember it. Beezus says that her mother’s laughter hurt her feelings when she was Ramona’s age, too, and Mrs. Quimby apologizes. Beezus also says that she never liked Mrs. Griggs very much when she was her teacher, either. Ramona asks if she could switch to the other first grade class at school, but her mother is reluctant to arrange it because her schoolwork has improved and because some of Mrs. Griggs’s criticism was correct and that Ramona does need to improve on her self-control. Mrs. Quimby also says that she wants Ramona to learn to understand and work with different types of people. Mrs. Griggs might not be her kind of person, and she might not always understand Ramona, but Ramona isn’t always easy to understand.

Personally, I didn’t think that last comment was a very good way to put it. One of the great things about the Ramona books is that Ramona’s feelings are easy to understand and identify with. Beezus certainly understood what Ramona meant about what it’s like to be laughed at for just being a kid. It’s something many of us experienced when we were kids, and we identify with how Ramona feels about it. (Didn’t Ramona’s mother ever go through this herself, or does she just not think about it? I kind of wondered when she didn’t seem to understand what her daughters were talking about at first.) I think it would have been better to put more of the emphasis on the idea that different types of people need to learn to respect each other and get along even when they don’t fully understand each other. Other people aren’t always easy to understand, but that’s not because Ramona herself is difficult to understand. Ramona’s feelings aren’t any less understandable than Mrs. Griggs’s, it’s more that not all people have the same capacity for understanding others because they don’t have as much empathy as others or the imagination to consider circumstances they haven’t personally been in themselves or are too focused on their own priorities and don’t have the time or patience for understanding. Adults often don’t consider things from a child’s point of view because their adult priorities in their busy adult lives take precedence, they discount the validity of what children think and feel because children are less experienced in life and sometimes express themselves clumsily, and they don’t slow down and take a step back or a second look or listen when they should. But, they could show a little more consideration for the child’s feelings even they don’t fully understand them. My own first grade experience wasn’t any better than Ramona’s, and I had my own “Mrs. Griggs.” Adults forget that kids can feel and experience things beyond their ability to fully explain them to others. One of the difficulties of being young, at least for me, was not having the vocabulary necessary to make myself understood or ask all the questions that I wanted to ask, and I often had to deal with adults who were short on patience. I can see that Ramona also struggles with finding the right words to express what she’s feeling or what’s really happening, like when she used the word “chopped” instead of “pried” to describe how the workmen opened a hole in the side of her house. I think that learning words and new ways to communicate with different people is an important part of the story.

Fortunately, Ramona’s father is right that the bad things will blow over, and Ramona’s situation improves. Some of the other kids in class become sympathetic to Ramona because they recognize that Mrs. Griggs shouldn’t have made her apology to Susan an embarrassing public apology. Ramona, although frequently bored in class, learns to read better, and she enjoys reading, finding that she can read more interesting stories when she knows more difficult words. She also meets her older sister’s teacher, and he calls her Ramona Q instead of Ramona Kitty Cat, like Mrs. Griggs did, making Ramona realize that there’s life beyond first grade and that better, more sympathetic teachers are waiting for her. She also becomes less afraid of her new room.

A scary encounter with a dog on the way to school that causes Ramona to lose one of her shoes also brings some unexpected sympathy and understanding from Mrs. Griggs. Ramona comes to understand that Mrs. Griggs is trying to be helpful when she offers her one of the old boots from the lost and found to replace the shoe she lost, that Mrs. Griggs simply doesn’t understand Ramona’s feelings about those old boots (they’re old, dirty, and kind of yucky), and that she isn’t likely to understand because she has her own priorities. Instead of getting mad at Mrs. Griggs for her lack of understanding, this realization causes Ramona to come up with her own creative solution to the problem. Ramona gains a better image of herself because of her creative problem solving and her bravery in a difficult situation. Mrs. Griggs also begins to show signs of understanding that Ramona is a creative person who needs a little room to demonstrate her creativity.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book

Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book by Betty Miles, 1980.

There’s a lot to discuss here, so I’m going to break up this whole entire review into themed sections and because this is going to be pretty long, I’m giving the link to the copies of the book on Internet Archive here.

Introducing Kate

Kate thinks of herself as a perfectly ordinary middle school girl. She’s certainly trying her hardest to be normal and cool and hang out with the “right” people. (In that compulsive way some people have when they’re just really trying way too hard because they feel like they’re supposed to. I’ll be honest, I found Kate to be a very trying character for about the first half of the book, and I have things to say about that in my reaction.) She’s very deliberately “normal” and her biggest worry is figuring out who the “right” people are to be friends with that it takes her completely by surprise that volunteering to take part in an English class project lands her right in the middle of a community scandal.

It’s Kate’s first year of middle school, and so far, Kate likes English class and her teacher, Ms. Plotkin. English was always her favorite subject, and Ms. Plotkin is one of those people who can make any subject or project sound exciting. Ms. Plotkin has a friend who is a first grade teacher at a local elementary school called Concord, and the two teachers think it would be a good interschool project to have middle school kids volunteer to read to the younger students to get them excited about reading and books. Kate volunteers right away because she loves reading and little kids. She’s been thinking that she’d like to earn some money by babysitting, so this reading project would be good experience that she might be able to use to get babysitting jobs.

Kate hopes that her best friends from elementary school, Jackie and Rosemary, will also volunteer for the project so they can do it together, but they don’t. The only other kid in class who volunteers is Maudie. Maudie has already been unofficially labeled as one of the uncool kids that all the cool kids avoid because they’re just not like the other, cool kids. There’s nothing seriously wrong with Maudie, but she’s a bit fat and Kate thinks of her as a kind of “dope” because she isn’t trying to act cool or normal like Kate and her friends do and generally isn’t trying to be like them. Kate even actively participates in all of the jokes and mean comments about Maudie that the other kids make behind her back because these shared “jokes” and slurs about Maudie are part of their bonding process with each other and define their in-group as being not-Maudie type people. (Oh, yes, I definitely have issues with Kate that I will rant about later.) That’s why Kate is horrified at first that she might have to actually work with and talk to Maudie if they’re the only ones doing this project together. Maudie is kind of fat, doesn’t quite dress like the other kids in small ways, and just kind of gives off an uncool vibe that’s sure to get Kate labeled as “uncool” if she has to hang out with her for this project. If that happens, she might become (gasp!) a not-popular person because the “right” people will avoid her. (Oh, noes! However will you manage?)

Being Nasty and Condescending to Maudie

Maudie tells Kate that she volunteered for the project partly because she really likes working with kids, like Kate does, and she was hoping that she and Kate might be friends since they like the same sort of things. Maudie comments that she doesn’t like the atmosphere of this middle school because of people’s attitudes and obsessions with hanging out with the “right” people and being part of cliques. These are mature, sincere comments that shows insight into someone else’s character, and Maudie is correct that Kate is part of an exclusionary clique with Jackie and Rosemary. Maudie’s comments are actually a rather unsubtle hint at Kate that she’s being a bit of a snob and that she could be a nicer person if she could think outside of her snobby clique. Maudie is fully aware of what Kate and her friends are saying about her, and this is an invitation to Kate to change and be a friend, but Kate doesn’t get it at first. She’s too worried about seeming too friendly with uncool Maudie and what other kids will think of it, particularly Jackie and Rosemary.

Kate even thinks that she feels sorry for Maudie, wondering what it’s like to be her and mistaking her sincere offer of friendship for a desperate need to make a friend. Maudie’s actually just being a normal level of friendly in this conversation, but Kate’s assumptions about uncool people have given her a false view of reality. When Kate tries to imagine what it’s like to be Maudie, she’s not actually imagining herself as the real Maudie because she doesn’t really know Maudie at all and wasn’t really listening to Maudie when she was talking because she spent that time thinking about how not to say too much to her or be too friendly. Even though Kate kind of acknowledges that there’s nothing really wrong with Maudie, she still thinks of Maudie as a problem because of the social implications of seeming to like a person the “right” people don’t like, not realizing that the meanness she’s helping to enable is the real problem. (There’s nothing really wrong with Maudie, and I see a lot wrong with Kate and her friends because of their attitudes and the way they think about things. I’d also like to point out that Kate is not filled with sympathy at this point; she’s been nothing but self-pitying because of what she thinks is going to happen to her popularity at school for being seen with the wrong person. She’s projecting that self-pity onto Maudie who is, by herself, just expressing honest sincerity.)

At first, Kate tries to think if there’s a way that she can back out of the project, but in the first glint of honesty about her, she admits that she actually wants to do the project for the sake of the project itself. I always like people who have a particular hobby, cause, or interest that they like for its own sake because that’s a sign of a real personality or character. Standing up for a special interest and doing it anyway, even if nobody else is, also shows a strength of that character that’s worthy of respect. This is the one trait that made me willing to stick out the book with Kate, even though I seriously didn’t like her, because it showed the promise of character development.

Kate also finds additional willingness to continue with the project when Jackie passes her a note telling her to get out of the project so she won’t be “stuck with fat Maudie.” Even though Kate realizes that she was thinking the exact same thing and might have even said so out loud among her friends, it actually looks really bad and mean written out on paper in black-and-white. Kate thinks that writing it down makes it worse, not realizing that there’s really no difference at all, and it’s the thinking behind it that needs to change. Also, she finds it irritating that Jackie seems to think that she can tell her what to do. (I think that’s a legitimate complaint.) After they get out of class, Jackie even snubs Kate to hang out with other kids, and Kate knows that she’s lying to her about the reasons why.

Kate’s mother is actually glad when she hears that Kate will be doing the project with Maudie. Kate’s mother says that she doesn’t like it that Kate is so clingy with her old elementary school friends and that she’d like to see her branch out and meet some new people. (She doesn’t say why she wants Kate to do that, but at this point in the story, I’d already figured out why.)

When it’s time for Kate and Maudie to go to their volunteer project, a girl in class whispers a mean joke about Maudie to Kate, and Kate giggles. Then, Kate sees Jackie whisper something to the other girl and the two of them giggle. Kate suddenly wonders if Jackie is making mean jokes about her, and suddenly, it doesn’t seem as funny anymore.

(Oh, good grief! Is this the first time in her life she ever thought of this? You know, people who gossip and make fun of others (surprise!) spend their time gossiping and making fun of others. It’s what they do, and yes, they do it to different people, depending on who they’re talking to at the moment and who isn’t around to know. If someone gossips meanly about someone else to you, then yes, you can be confident that they’re gossiping meanly about you and making fun of you with someone else when they think you’re not listening. It’s their mode of communication and how they bond with people, and they have no idea why you’d have a problem with them doing to you that because you laughed with them before about someone else, so you must be okay with it and have no reason to get mad. I get impatient with people who don’t think about these things, and if Kate had the imagination to really put herself in someone else real shoes before, she should have thought of this long ago. She should know the kind of person Jackie is from years of experience with her, and she should have figured out that she wouldn’t like other people to say things about her that she’s been saying about Maudie. I feel like Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, saying that if she had any real imagination, Kate could have put herself in someone else’s place and figured out what other people might be feeling, but she doesn’t do that because she’s too self-absorbed and doesn’t get it until someone does it directly to her within her hearing. Kate has plenty of self-pity but no sympathy, at least not at this point.)

The first chapters of this book were pretty painful for me because I had to put up with the kind of people I really hate, including the one telling the story, but fortunately, it does get more interesting from this point on. As they walk over to the elementary school, Kate and Maudie have a fun moment where they throw snowballs at a stop sign, and Kate forgets to be “cool” and snobby. At the elementary school, Kate has fun meeting the cute little first graders, and the first grade teacher reads Make Way for Ducklings to the class. Maudie also introduces Kate to the elementary school librarian because this is Maudie’s old elementary school, and she knows the faculty. The girls talk about Maudie’s time at Concord, and Maudie admits that she kind of misses it because it just seemed so much more friendly than Revere Middle School. Kate feels a little sorry for Maudie because she mentions that her best friend has moved away, and she asks if she’d like to go to the library together to pick out some books. Maudie accepts and says that she can hang out at her house afterward, if she wants, and Kate gets worried again that Maudie is starting to think that they’re actually friends or something. (Once again, oh, noes. However will you manage, Kate? You might accidentally give off vibes that you might be a likeable person or something, and how ever will you be popular if too many people in that vast sea of “wrong” people outside of your tiny clique like you?)

Kate and her friend Rosemary talk about the project a little, and Rosemary asks her what it’s like working with Maudie. Kate says that Maudie isn’t bad when you get to know her, and she is pretty good with the younger kids. Rosemary says that she’s been thinking that the comments people keep making about Maudie are really mean and she doesn’t deserve them because there’s nothing really wrong with her. Kate agrees.

Kate feels a bit bad about going to the library with Maudie because Jackie and the others are going skating, and Jackie is acting like she doesn’t even care that she isn’t going to be there. (It occurred to me that Jackie might actually care that Kate’s doing something with someone else and is trying to play it cool, but it’s dumb because that attitude just drives people away anyway. Either that, or she’s realized that Kate is somebody else to make fun of or gossip about with other girls, and that’s easier to do when she’s not there to defend herself.) Kate not only feels a little bad that she’s missing out on something with her friends, but she comes to realize that she’d rather go to Maudie’s house after the library after all because Maudie at least acts like she wants her around and Jackie doesn’t. Jackie seems to dodging her and trying to get rid of her to hang out with others. Also, it seems like all the other girls are obsessed with the new boy at school, Steve. Kate knows Steve slightly because his parents bought their house through her parents, who are realtors. (Ah, perhaps that’s why Jackie is acting weird! Instead of seeing Kate as her old friend, she’s starting to suspect her of being a rival for a cool guy at school.) However, Kate doesn’t really know Steve very well, and she finds the other girls’ fawning attitudes toward him embarrassing.

At the library, Kate and Maudie talk about their favorite kids’ books and try to pick out some books that will really please the first graders. Kate remembers that one of the first graders had told her that he was excited about getting a puppy, so she decides that she’d like to get a book about puppies. The librarian, who is actually a distant cousin of Kate’s, suggests a book called The Birthday Dog. It’s about a boy who wants a puppy for his birthday. The dog who lives next door is going to have puppies, but the puppies won’t be born in time for his birthday, and he’s disappointed at not getting a puppy for his birthday. Then, he gets a birthday card that says that he can have one of the dog’s puppies after they’re born. The boy and his father even get to see the first puppy being born and how the puppy grows until he’s big enough to leave his mother. The librarian says it’s a good book because the pictures are clear and realistic. The girls decide that they’ll use this book because of the puppy theme and because the boy in the story is about the same age as the first graders. This is where the censorship issue comes into the story. (More on this below, much more.)

Note: The Birthday Dog is not a real book, at least not as far as I can tell. Some of the children’s books mentioned in this book are real books, but some of them aren’t. I think it’s better for the purposes of the story if this picture book is not real because real books often have emotional baggage attached to them, possibly because of feelings of fond nostalgia because people liked them when they were young, resentment because of something the books said or the manner in which teachers or parents forced the books on them, or things people have heard other people say about books, even if the listeners haven’t actually seen the books themselves. For the purposes of this story, which is about examining people’s reactions to controversy, it’s better to approach this particular book with a clean slate, seeing it for what it’s described as being in the story and people’s reactions to it for what they are, removed from any personal emotional baggage. Assume from this point on that the book is exactly as the characters who read it describe it as being, nothing more and nothing less and that all reactions to the situation are exactly as described, nothing more and nothing less.

Kate does go to Maudie’s house, and she starts to learn that she and Maudie have some things in common and that even their mothers act very much the same way. Maudie’s mother has also been pressing her to make some new friends. Kate discovers that Maudie also enjoys old Marx Brothers movies and Maudie has a talent for impersonation. (Finally! A thing that you like, Kate! Early in the story, she was mainly about what she didn’t like and her preoccupation with being liked by the right people. Cool people in stories (and frequently in real life) never seem to genuinely, unironically like anything, especially things that are honest, goofy fun. It’s especially heartening to me that she likes something that not all of her friends like, so Kate is actually showing more signs of independent thoughts and feelings and interests beyond generic coolness and popularity-building. I’m emphasizing this because this was the point in the story to me that Kate started seeming like she might be a real person with an actual personality. Up to this point, she seemed like a two-dimensional wanna-be popular mean kid snob with no self-awareness.) By the end of the day, Kate actually begins looking at Maudie like a real friend and doesn’t seem to mind the idea. (Which means that Kate will finally stop getting on my nerves with her snobby, unaware mean girl act, and I can stop belaboring that point.)

A Delicate Discussion and an Indelicate Response

Note: This is the part of the story where we get into issues of censorship and controversy in children’s literature. I think the earlier social machinations, cliques, and using negativity and putting other people down for the sake of personal promotion also ties in with this theme, which is why I went into detail about that before getting into this part of the book, but I’m going to discuss why it’s important later. One thing to keep in mind is that it isn’t unpopular Maudie who selects and reads the controversial book; it’s Kate, the one who’s been trying desperately hard to fit in with the “right” people and be popular and “normal.” Kate is about to be the one who will be ferociously judged by both other kids and adults for doing something controversial. For now, let’s get into the book controversy.

The next time the girls go to the elementary school, they show their books to Ms. Plotkin before they leave, and she approves of their choices. (This is key for the censorship issue. Keep in mind that the girls didn’t choose their books by themselves. They had recommendations from a librarian and the approval of their teacher for their specific selections.) Maudie reads her book, Little Bear, to the class first, and then Kate reads The Birthday Dog. The part where the puppy is born describes the mother dog’s stomach rippling, how she pushed the puppy out, and how she bit at the thin sac that covered the puppy when it was first born. Kate is reassured that the kids seem to like the story, but then the first grade teacher allows the students to ask Kate questions about the book, and Kate isn’t prepared for what the kids ask.

When one of kids ask how the puppy got inside its mommy, Kate looks at Ms. Dwyer, the first grade teacher, and Ms. Dwyer just nods at Kate to answer, not giving her any help or advice about what to say to a first grader about this.

(I just have to step in again at this point and say, if it were me as the adult present for this scene, I’d have noticed Kate’s discomfort, recognized this as a sensitive topic, and stepped in and said, “I’ll take this one, Kate,” and then said something that answers the question in the simplest, most literal terms without getting too deep or detailed. In this case, I might have said something about how that’s simply the way that babies begin to grow. It’s normal for babies to grow inside their mothers before their born because they are very small and weak at first and need some time for their bodies to develop before they can do even simple things like move around, eat, and breathe air on their own. Some animals lay eggs, like chickens, and the babies grow inside them and hatch out of them when they’re ready, and some animals have the babies grow inside their own bodies, like dogs, until they’re ready to come out. The mother’s body helps to protect them and give them what they need so they can grow. People are like that, too, and that’s why pregnant women look big around the middle before their babies are born, because the baby is growing inside them. But, it’s not a good idea to make a big deal about the way people look because you don’t want to make them feel bad or too self-conscious about their appearance (and I hope you know that I mean you too, Kate). Just be extra nice to pregnant people because it’s hard work carrying a growing baby around. If you want extra details, I recommend that you ask your parents because they’ve had kids before, and I haven’t, so they could describe how that feels better than I could.)

Kate stumbles about a bit, searching for a way of describing it, saying something about the father dog, but stopping because she isn’t sure what she should say or if she’s saying too much. But, some of the first graders begin blurting out bits and pieces of what they know, and some of them know more than Kate expected. One of the kids says that the father dog puts a seed into the mom. Kate says that’s correct and that’s called “mating.” Soon, little first graders are using words like “vagina” and “penis.” It’s important that the first graders are the ones who introduce these words into the conversation themselves, not Kate or the teacher or the book. Little kids like to receive recognition for things they know or things they have, so some of the kids are more than happy to show off what they know and to publicly declare which of those two they have. The first grade teacher just says that what they’re saying about the mother and father dog mating are correct and that’s how puppies start. Kate has a moment of panic when she’s afraid that the kids will start thinking about human babies and how she doesn’t want to go into detail on this subject, and she’s relieved when the kids return to the subject of dogs and start talking about their pet dogs’ names. Again, kids like to receive recognition for things they have and to compare things they have with others. When it’s pet dogs, it’s not as embarrassing.

When it’s time for Kate and Maudie to leave, Ms. Dwyer says that Kate handled the situation well, saying, “Kids this age can be embarrassingly frank! But I don’t want them to think there’s anything wrong with their natural curiosity. I’m glad you could answer them so matter-of-factly.” The girls bond over this odd, embarrassing incident, and they think that Kate seems to have handled it okay. Kate even reads the book to her elderly Aunt Lucy at her nursing home and some of the other elderly people there, and they like it, too. Then, the girls and their teacher start getting parental complaints.

The complaining parents in the story don’t handle the situation with grace and understanding, and they make things worse. Rather than defusing the situation and diverting focus from an issue that they didn’t want to discuss in the first place, they blow it up to the point where nobody in the community can ignore it. They phone the principal of the elementary school and the principal of the middle school. They go down to the library and demand to see copies of The Birthday Dog. Soon, everybody in the area hears some version of what happened in the first grade classroom, and just like in a game of Telephone, the events become mangled and confused. This is what I mean about misconception and misrepresentation and how people use these to further an agenda. Be prepared for more of this.

When the girls return to school after the weekend, Ms. Plotkin tells the girls that they need to have a talk with their principal. In the principal’s office, they tell the girls that some parents have complained about The Birthday Dog and the discussion that took place afterward. Ms. Plotkin and Ms. Dwyer take responsibility for allowing Kate to read the book and discuss it with the younger kids, and Ms. Dwyer says that she thinks Kate handled the discussion well. The girls feel like this situation is unfair. They didn’t really do anything wrong, and there are other people involved who also didn’t really do anything wrong. They don’t want the principal to blame their teacher for what happened. Kate feels responsible for having chosen the book in the first place, and Maudie even defends her, saying it was a good book and Kate didn’t do or say anything wrong. Kate appreciates her support because nobody had a problem with the book that Maudie read, and she didn’t have to stick up for her. The librarian helped Kate to choose it. Kate picked it based on her recommendation, so she’s involved, too.

The principal tells Kate that he wants to see the book in question, and he asks Kate to recount the entire discussion in the first grade class. It’s an uncomfortable conversation because Kate is a young girl and the principal is a grown man who is not related to her in any way, and Kate doesn’t like the idea of being forced to discuss anything related to sex with him, even if it’s an innocent recounting of a mildly embarrassing conversation. (If some parents don’t like being put on the spot discussing the issue with their own children, just have a little imagination and understand that this is even more uncomfortable for Kate, who is not related to the principal or anyone else involved with the exception of the librarian, and she is also subject to their authority because she’s a student and a minor. This is what their reactionary complaints have led to, and there’s worse to come.) Kate is accurate in her description, and the principal warns Ms. Plotkin about the importance of choosing appropriate materials for students because of parental anxiety about sensitive issues. Even though the principal acknowledges that the book seems pretty innocent from their description, the anxious, complaining parents can cause a lot of trouble for the schools, so they’re going to suspend the interschool reading program for the present.

Misconception, Misrepresentation, and the Fallout

This is where Kate begins to experience the varying reactions that people have to the incident, and the ways in which people approach the situation and Kate herself say things about their characters and their relationship with Kate. Kate begins to discover who her real friends are and has to face the wrath of people who are more concerned with their own agendas than they are with her or even the little first graders.

Of course, word spreads around the middle school that Kate and Maudie were called to the principal’s office, and rumors spread about the reasons why. Some of the students have heard bits and pieces of the story, and they’ve become exaggerated, just like the mean girl comments that people were making about Maudie in the beginning. Josh, Kate’s older brother, seeks her out at lunch and demands to know what people are talking about when they say that she was reading a dirty book to first graders and got called to the principal’s office about it.

Kate defends herself, saying that the book wasn’t dirty. She hates it that people are calling the book dirty because they’re making her seem like she’s a dirty person for reading it. Kate is afraid that people are looking at her like she’s a monster, even though she didn’t do anything wrong, and that they’re all going to hate and avoid her now because people are saying things about her behind her back and everyone will think that there’s something wrong with her when there isn’t. (Oh, gee, why does that sound familiar? This is where the story about censorship starts to tie back into the social maneuvering and nasty gossip from before. Kate started out being one of the active participants in this type of behavior, along with what she considered the “right” people, and now, she’s seeing what it’s like being on the receiving end of that same behavior from the same “right” people.) After hearing Kate’s description of what happened, Josh advises Kate not to panic and not to let anybody get to her or to try to explain the situation to anyone because it’s nobody else’s business. Their parents will support Kate and defend her to the complaining parents.

Rosemary also gives Kate a kind response, asking if she’s okay and telling her that not to feel bad if people are trying to make her feel bad for no reason. Kate does confide in her about the situation, and Kate, Rosemary, and Maudie also share a laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation because it was kind of funny to see the little first graders saying all of that stuff, completely unaware that it was potentially embarrassing, and even the principal looked embarrassed when Kate honestly recounted what the first graders said. Rosemary invites Maudie to join her and Kate in having lunch with Jackie and Christine. Jackie pesters Kate for details about what happened, but Kate decides that she doesn’t want to discuss it with them, and Jackie acts jealous when Steve says hi to Kate. Jackie and Christine leave the other three girls, confirming that an imagined rivalry over Steve is part of the reason why they’re acting like jerks.

Kate even thinks, “I didn’t know why Maudie would want to sit with us, if Jackie and Chris were going to act so snotty. I suddenly wondered why I should always sit at the same table. At least every time. I realized that no one was making me. I could sit anywhere I wanted. Maudie and Rosemary would probably go with me.” This is exactly what I was thinking and glad that Kate had this realization. Rosemary is a real friend who is worth retaining, but Jackie is drifting away, and it’s just as well for the other girls to let her go and develop a budding friendship with Maudie.

Kate’s parents are supportive of her, but they also worry that a fight over censorship could tear their community apart. Kate’s mom said that the elementary school principal would be required to take any complaint by parents seriously, but Kate points out that, by choosing to take this complaint seriously to spare the feelings of the adults seems to legitimize the complaint, like a tacit acknowledgement that something inappropriate happened even when it didn’t and that Kate did something wrong, even when she didn’t. In trying to spare the feelings of the uninformed and panicky parents, Kate feels like the adults seem prepared to throw her under the bus and slander her all over town. The middle school principal’s obvious lack of support for Ms. Plotkin also seems to be throwing her under the bus. It’s also already too late to worry about a fight starting, because it’s already begun and battle lines are being drawn.

I’d also like to point out that, to an extent, the battle lines were already drawn before Kate ever joined the reading program and read the book. The way that people react to issues stems from the issues in their own lives, their emotional baggage (you can’t live to adulthood without having at least some because real life experiences do that), and the goals that people want to accomplish. Kate was just unaware that these adults cliques and issue-based factions already existed, which is why she didn’t see this situation coming and accidentally put herself into the middle of it as their latest, hot-button target issue. It seriously bothered me because some of the adults in the story are bonding with their respective factions over the negative things they’re saying about young Kate, not unlike how Kate and her friends were originally bonding over saying nasty and derogatory things about Maudie.

The Millers, a difficult family who have been routinely complaining to Kate’s parents about a house they bought from them, frequently demanding that they solve problems that the Millers caused themselves, phone yet again to complain to them about Kate because the child of a neighbor of theirs was in the class where Kate read the book. (Note: It was not their child in the class, it was a neighbor’s, and we are not told how the neighbor feels about it. The neighbor likely does not know that Mr. Miller is even making this telephone call.) Mr. Miller thinks that Kate’s dad owes him an explanation for something he didn’t witness and no member of his family was involved in and that he just kind of vaguely heard about. This issue has nothing to do with the Millers and is none of their business, but from the descriptions of their behavior, the Millers have personal issues and a desire to make others accountable for things while not being accountable for things they do themselves. This is part of how people’s personal issues dictate where they stand on public ones and how they demonstrate what they’re thinking and feeling. It wouldn’t matter to the Millers what Kate said or did because they’re just the type to want to stick something to someone, anyone, for any reason they can find. It doesn’t have to make sense because the Millers are unreasonable people, so they do unreasonable things. That’s what makes them unreasonable people. Maybe it does make a kind of sense when you think about it.

Right after that, a parent of one of the students in Ms. Dwyer’s class calls to express her support for Kate and offer her a babysitting job, like Kate originally she wanted. In every conflict, there are going to be supporters as well as haters, and it’s not all bad to be part of a controversy when you’ve got the right supporters. The same choice or set of circumstances will get different reactions from different people, and Kate is learning that there’s no such thing as being popular with everyone. No matter what she does in her life, she will draw some people to her who understand and accept her while others will be pushed away, and it’s just a question of who she wants to bond with and how. In this parent who understands the situation and approves of how Kate has been handling it, Kate has finally found a “right” person to be friendly with who is using helpfulness and positivity instead of meanness and negativity and someone to bond with over shared values.

Ms. Plotkin comes to Kate’s house after a meeting of the teachers and principals involved and the librarian, and she says that they’ve come up with some ideas for defusing community complaints. However, word of the controversy has already spread, and Kate’s entire family is feeling the impact. People are writing angry letters to the editor of the local paper, and one of those people happens to be the father of Josh’s girlfriend, Denise, prompting her to break up with Josh. Kate reads these letters and feels horrible. They imply that she’s immoral or that she’s a dope. Kate thinks, “I wished I could just laugh at them, but I couldn’t. Those dumb letters hurt my feelings. Whoever made up the poem about ‘sticks and stones’ was wrong. Words do hurt you.” I’m glad that she realizes that, but I still would have liked it better if she hadn’t been a snob at the beginning of the book and said the things she said about Maudie before she got to know her. Kate has improved as a character, but I have less sympathy for someone when they’re on the receiving end of something that they carelessly dished out to others.

Denise’s father’s letter actually isn’t too bad, but Kate feels bad that he points out that it’s not right for someone who doesn’t know a child personally to bring up the topic of reproduction before a child is ready to hear about it, and “it is impossible for even the most well-meaning teacher to know when the moment is right for every child in class.” Kate doesn’t want to think that she accidentally pushed a little kid into learning something difficult before they were really ready and shocked them. Still, Kate remembers that Denise’s father wasn’t there and didn’t see the book or hear the discussion and might not understand what really happened. Kate finds out that Denise actually isn’t upset with her family; she’s upset with her parents for being closed-minded and making a fuss. She didn’t break up with Josh because she’s upset with him or with Kate or the rest of their family. It was because she’s worried about what they all might be thinking of her because of her father’s public reaction and criticism of them. She’s embarrassed by the way her father wrote that letter and added to the controversy, although Kate appreciates it for being one of the more thoughtful and less hateful letters.

(It occurs to me at this point that Denise’s father himself might be one of those “well-meaning” adults who maybe don’t know “when the moment is right” to say something because they don’t fully understand the situation or how his decision to say something affects other people. After all, he has directly affected his own daughter, the kid he should know the best, because he hasn’t considered her feelings or her position or talked her about the situation before he made his public reaction. Maybe just being someone’s parent alone isn’t enough to fully understand the child or the child’s life without that necessary communication.)

Steve tells Kate that some parent told his mother that “young children had been exposed to explicit sex materials” and was up in arms about the general reading materials in schools. This woman and some other parents had a private meeting about campaigning for “decent books.” Steve’s mom wasn’t impressed by that because she’d read some of her kids’ books from school and thought they were fine. The woman, Mrs. Bergen, accused Steve and his sister of reading smut behind their mother’s back and said that their mother should make them show her the books they didn’t show her before. Steve says that, when he used to live in California, there was a big controversy because an eighth grade teacher wanted kids to read Anne Frank’s diary, and the parents said all of the same things about that. (In the unabridged diary, there are parts where Anne Frank reflects on the concept of sex, getting her period, and her body parts, which she looked at on herself using a mirror. If a kid makes it to eighth grade (about 13 or 14 years old) without knowing what these things are or being afraid of them, they’ve got bigger problems than their reading material. That’s my opinion. Kids normally talk among themselves about these things, and for a person not to know any this stuff, they would have to be restricted from forming close friendships with other teenagers, denied the opportunities to discuss it honestly with family, and in modern times, restricted internet access where various sexual references abound and information is a mere Google search away. None of that would be healthy for a person who is only 4 or 5 years away from legal adulthood in our society.)

Kate is actually glad that Steve understands the issue and has opinions about it. She thinks that she wouldn’t like a boy who had no opinions. That was actually a major part of my original complaint about Kate. In the beginning, she didn’t seem to have any kind of individual personality or opinions of her own beyond her desire to fit in with the popular mean kids. By this point in the story, I felt that Kate was becoming a much deeper, more thoughtful character than the shallow, thoughtless little snob she seemed to be at first, so I was happy to see her coming to this realization and to agree with her about something.

Conflict Resolution and the Issue of Control

Kate’s feelings finally overwhelm her in English class, after she’s been confronted by many people about the “dirty” book. Mrs. Bergen, a character who has not actually appeared anywhere in the story until this point, has been busily calling other parents and generally stirring things up with an exaggerated story that bears little resemblance to the real incident. Mrs. Bergen is clearly a woman with her own agenda and is taking advantage of the situation to manipulate others into doing what she wants. Kate goes on a rant in class about how unfair the situation is and how she doesn’t want everyone to look at her like she’s a monster or a sex maniac.

The class has a real discussion about the issues of censorship and freedom of speech and what teachers have to consider when they’re choosing “appropriate” material for the kids in their classes. Ms. Plotkin says that there are even some books that she’d rather her students not read until they’re older and have more life experience. (I have a story about that from when I was ten, when a friend “borrowed” a romance novel of her mother’s and told me the most shocking bits, much of which I didn’t really understand at the time. Oddly, that’s not what I ultimately took away from that incident, but since we’re on the topic, I will tell you what I took away from that below.) One boy in class talks about how his parents say that there are things that kids should only learn from their parents, and another boy says what if parents don’t tell the their kids things they really need to know because kids have to learn it somewhere. Jackie comments that she thinks some parents are just too embarrassed about things themselves and so they don’t want their kids to know about them, not because the kids can’t handle it but because the parents can’t. (I thought this was actually a surprisingly perceptive comment from her. Actually, I don’t think that Jackie isn’t perceptive. I just think that she doesn’t always use her social perceptions for good.) Mrs. Plotkin says that’s part of it, but also parents are genuinely concerned for their kids. They worry about a lot of terrible things that kids get exposed to through TV and life in general, and most of it is beyond their control, so they focus on the parts that they can control, like the kids’ reading material.

The kids in the English class say that this whole situation is unfair because none of the complainers were there during the original reading and discussion. Not all of these people even had kids who were involved, most of the complainers haven’t even seen the book in question, and a number of them have only gotten upset because they talked to someone like Mrs. Bergen, who wasn’t there and stirred them up with her exaggerated story. They’re reacting in some over-the-top ways when they don’t really know the real situation and don’t even stop to consider that they don’t know the real situation. Their reaction is having a negative effect on innocent people’s lives, by needlessly damaging innocent reputations, and that’s irresponsible. How people approach a situation and try to control their lives impacts others. While we’re discussing the issue of control, it’s also questionable how much some of these adults are controlling themselves, which is the one thing that everybody truly can control in life, even if they have no control over anything else. While these adults are yelling at people at the supermarket and writing angry letters to the editor, there’s something else that they’re not doing that’s even more important and would be much more responsible: sitting down with their kids to have an honest talk about life and their feelings and getting real feedback from their kids about it all to see how they’re really affected.

Mrs. Bergen finally makes an appearance when she confronts Kate’s mother at the supermarket, trying to get her to join her new group, Parents United for Decency. Kate’s mother tells her off before revealing that her daughter is the one who read the book at the school. Mrs. Bergen and her followers are shocked, and some of the mothers seem suddenly uncomfortable to have to deal with the people they’ve been maligning face-to-face, in a setting where they seem perfectly normal and can see that there is nothing really wrong with them. Mrs. Bergen calls Kate’s mother prejudiced because it’s her daughter who read the book, and Kate’s mother tells her that she’s the prejudiced one. She says that the librarian who recommended the book is her cousin and graduated at the top of her class, and she trusts her professional opinion of the book over their “misinformed ranting” when they haven’t even read it.

The local paper also prints some sympathetic letters about Kate and the book, including one written by her great aunt in the nursing home, saying that Kate read the book to her and her friends, and none of the senior citizens were shocked by it.

The issue ends up being discussed at a special public meeting of the school board, where the board votes about whether or not to allow the interschool reading project to continue. Kate feels awkward when her family sits with Denise’s family at the meeting, after the letter that Denise’s father wrote. However, Josh and Denise have made up, and their fathers are actually old friends who worked together, so the families don’t want to sacrifice that relationship for just this one issue. Personally, I agree with Kate’s awkwardness and feel like, if they were real friends, the two fathers could have just talked to each other privately and directly about what happened before Denise’s father sent one of the public letters that stirred the pot. Not only didn’t Denise’s father talk to his daughter, he didn’t even talk to his old friend about the issue before writing an impersonal public letter, read by the whole community! I don’t know why people don’t think of these things. Kate thinks that people around them at the meeting are looking oddly pleasant and civilized, considering how angry and ranting they were in the letters they wrote and realizes that you can’t always tell who’s a mean person because people don’t always look mean when they act it. “It would be more convenient if mean people looked mean so you could tell.”

When the middle school principal gets up to speak, he describes the reading project in a way that makes it sound dull but harmless. When Mrs. Bergen gets up to speak, she spins a story about how the whole thing was a dastardly, premeditated plot on the part of the teachers, who were scheming to tell impressionable children about sex and undermine their morals. (This book was published in 1980, 40 years ago and two years before I was born, so here, I paused for a moment to consider what Mrs. Bergen would have thought about things that “impressionable” children routinely type into Google, completely unprompted. When inquiring minds want to know something, they seek out sources of information, and kids today know way more about some of that stuff than I had the opportunity to learn, not counting that incident when I was ten. Actually, kids write things on the internet that aren’t exactly clean, either. Who needs books and teachers to corrupt innocent children when they can innocently corrupt each other and themselves? I’ve read fan fiction online.)

Mrs. Bergen’s speech doesn’t go over well, to Kate’s relief, and several other people talk. Then, one of the parents of a girl who was actually in the first grade class gets up and is dreadfully upset that they actually named male and female bodily organs in the class. The woman can’t even bring herself to say these words in mixed company because it’s so embarrassing, something that some of the other adults laugh at in the meeting. Kate senses that her mother is about to get up and speak, but she decides that she’d rather speak for herself. Kate says that she’s not embarrassed or ashamed by these words or by the book she read and that the words in question weren’t even in the book at all, the little kids supplied them themselves in a completely innocent way. Also, Kate thinks that it’s good for kids to learn the real, proper names of their body parts and not get embarrassed or ashamed like some adults, and if anyone wants to criticize the book, they really should read it all the way through, not just the one page with the birth. Kate’s impromptu speech is well-received and even Denise’s parents congratulate her.

The school board votes to allow the interschool project to continue with only one dissenting vote. It’s a victory for Kate, but there is something still bothering her. She knows that, while the dissenters are in the minority, her haters still hate her and are against her, and they’re still around, unpersuaded. They might be back to make trouble later, if they find the opportunity. Also, Kate has developed more of an ability to really see things from other people’s point of view with real depth (something she was unable to do even with Maudie at first). Now, she can think about how it would feel to be on the losing side of this conflict, and even to have a little empathy for Mrs. Bergen. She knows that she wouldn’t like to be in her position. Kate even starts to realize that there are limits to things like a person’s individual rights because, sometimes, those rights can encroach on another person’s rights. Where is the dividing line between having the freedom to say something and the freedom not to hear something? (Where is the dividing line to say what you want about another person and the freedom not to be bullied or have your name slandered? Where is the dividing line between freedom of association and the freedom to walk away from harmful relationships? What do you have a right to control or not control?) There is depth to these issues, and because Kate has matured through her experiences, there is depth to Kate’s thoughts about it. The world and other people are more complex than Kate has ever realized before.

Kate’s father says that all of these issues are complex, and there isn’t always a perfect solution. People just have to do the best they can to work things out as they go. Democracy is just like that.

My Reaction

I edited my review of this book from the way I originally wrote it because I wrote the first review more as stream-of-consciousness, and I decided that it was too awkward and difficult to follow. I left some of my reactions in the middle of the story summary because there were things that made more sense to discuss in the moment rather than trying to do a call-back to them later, but I decided to explain more of my reactions at the end of the summary.

I remember censorship and book banning were topics in children’s literature and tv shows when I was a kid. Generally, the opinion of those books and shows was that too much censorship was a problem, and there was a recurring theme in such stories that the people who were most vehement about banning books were the ones who had never read them and didn’t know much about what the books were really about. This particular book also has that element, but it goes deeper into the various motivations of people who are concerned about the content of children’s books and the varying degrees of concern they have. I thought that it also had some thoughtful insights into social maneuvering and the nature and behavior of cliques (much of which irritated me, even though I think it’s largely accurate, because cliques always irritate me), and some of it also ties into the nature of the public controversy about the book in the story.

Social Maneuvering and the “Right People”

Right up front, I have to explain that this book is about two major issues, but there’s a connection between them. The major issue of the story is censorship, particularly about sensitive topics presented to children. It’s an issue that still resonates today. In the early 21st century, there has been a revival of concern about certain issues in children’s literature, with an intensity and both legal and social consequences for people who tread too close to the edge that have children’s educators and librarians genuinely concerned for both their livelihoods, their own physical safety, and even that they may be sent to prison. However, this story closely examines the social consequences of being a controversial person or one who has been labeled as as someone outside the “right” kind of people. Beginning with the behavior of the girls in the story toward each other, the story examines how groups of people use their reactions to other people to bond with each other or solidify their own public image and promote themselves. What bothers me is that we see that type of social maneuvering echoed in the way the adults behave when the controversy over the book Kate read in class begins. It’s not just kid stuff; it’s people stuff, regardless of age.

This type of using other people for social maneuvering is a big pet peeve of mine. I’m very much against one-upmanship in all of its forms (and I complain about it constantly), so the way the girls in the story were trying to increase their own social cred and bonding with each other by putting down Maudie got on my nerves immediately and stayed on my nerves through the entire story. I personally consider it immature, but as someone who now qualifies as being considered middle-aged, I’m well aware that some adults don’t behave that much different from the way they did when they were young teens. Bowling for Soup made fun of that phenomenon in their song High School Never Ends (song and lyrics on YouTube – it also mentions sex – some adults are still as obsessed with finding out who’s having it with whom and what other people are saying about it as teenagers are):

“And you still don’t have the right look
And you don’t have the right friends
Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends
High school never ends”

I talked about my annoyance with that throughout the story summary as incidents happened. I didn’t like Kate as a character from the beginning because she was an active participant in this without any self-awareness. Kate does improve as a character throughout the story, but it’s only after she’s on the receiving end of something similar to what she and her clique were dishing out. I was glad for the improvement, but it was hard to feel too much sympathy for someone who had previously been on the bandwagon with that.

The major issue hinted at in the title of the book is censorship, but that doesn’t actually come into the story until several chapters in (although the chapters aren’t very long). Before that, from the very beginning of the book, there is another issue about popularity and being part of the in-crowd, particularly that catty form of bullying so often found in schools and all too often afterward in workplaces because some people just never mature emotionally and socially. In particular, I noticed the misconceptions that develop around people because of this type of behavior. The concept of being friends with the “right people” especially bothers me. “Right” for what, specifically? In the beginning, Kate is worried about being popular, but she hasn’t stopped to think about popular with whom. As I pointed out in some of my reactions to the story during the summary, nobody on Earth is popular with absolutely everyone. Life is about making choices, and being in agreement or popular with some people very often means passing up connections with others at the same time.

Kate understands from the beginning that any friendship with Maudie means compromising friendship with her existing friends, who are against Maudie, particularly Jackie. What it takes her a long time to understand is that the same is true of being friends with Jackie. Jackie is mean, manipulative, and controlling, and being friends with her means shutting herself off from relationships with anyone who can’t stand the way that Jackie behaves and the way that Kate behaves in Jackie’s presence. Maudie indicates that’s the case when she has that honest conversation with Kate about how unfriendly people seem at their school, although Kate doesn’t get it at first.

Admittedly, I would never have had this conversation with Kate as a kid in middle school because I was the quiet, introverted type who more often watched others rather than speaking up, and I frequently made decisions without consulting other people about them, especially people I didn’t like. Maudie was trying to talk to Kate to give her a chance to be friends, but in all honesty, I would not have wanted to give Kate a chance as a kid. I wouldn’t have liked what I saw of Kate and her friends, and I would have seen that Kate’s behavior is completely intentional, so I would never have talked to her about anything if I could avoid it. It would have taken a great deal of effort to get along with people like that and, in real life, where there are no guarantees of a redemption arc, like in books and movies, the odds of all that effort paying off would be extremely low. People like that are the way they are because they like being that way, and more importantly, they get some kind of social payoff for it, so I wouldn’t expect them to change that and sacrifice whatever payoff they’re getting or think they’re getting just because someone who wasn’t part of the already-established “right” crowd was nice to them or honest with them. I would have completely written Kate off, and she would probably be too busy snubbing me to even notice that I was avoiding her, so it would probably never matter. She would think that she won by driving uncool me away, and I would be rid of her, so I’d win in the long run. Unless she changed and started being different, but I’d still rather skip associating with her until after that change happened because otherwise, I’d just burn out on her in a hurry.

In dealing with such a person in real life, I know that my existence wasn’t be the reason why she started acting the way she did in the first place, so having her in my life could never be the reason why she’d ever stop being like that, in the absence of another, more negative influence. In a way, the story illustrates my logic in this type of situation. Although she does change during the course of this book, it’s not really because of Maudie’s friendliness by itself. Maudie does present her with an alternate friend and a more positive influence, but what really turns Kate’s character is being treated in the way she has treated Maudie and seeing how awful it is, being gossiped about and treated as abnormal and “wrong” when she didn’t really deserve it. Kate just doesn’t get it in the beginning because nobody has ever treated her like she’s treated Maudie before and doesn’t have the imagination or empathy to figure it out without experience that type of hurt directly herself. What I’m saying is that, in a way, a person like her has to be hurt in that way to understand how it feels because they lack the ability to figure it out all by themselves. Maudie was offering friendship and positivity, but it wasn’t until she started experiencing the pain of the same type of negativity that she was dishing out herself that Kate had the incentive to accept those offers of friendship and more positive influences. If she hadn’t had that type of negative experience, I think it would have taken Kate much longer to make that type of change, or it might never have happened for her at all.

Really, when you begin to think about it, much of this story is about control, both the social aspects and the censorship ones. Kate comes to realize that she has the ability to choose her friends, that she has control over who she spends time with, and that she really would prefer to be with people who are kinder and less controlling of her than Jackie is. It’s Jackie’s attempts to control what Kate does and who Kate sees that begin to turn her away from Jackie, and as I said, I think that’s a valid complaint. The “right” people that Kate wants to be popular with in the beginning seem to be the ones who are in control of who is “in” and who is “out” and who associates with who, until she realizes that she doesn’t like that kind of manipulation and control, and she starts to see that there are other options outside of that negative, manipulative, and controlling group.

This talk about control and manipulation seems a bit dark, darker than the book actually reads, but there are some threads that run all the way through life, and the issues of the classroom do carry on to adulthood and into adult behavior. What kids learn in and out of the classroom shapes what they do and the kind of people they become because kids are all about learning how the world works and how to behave in the world to get what they want. The back of the book specifically talks about popularity and how the main character, for whom popularity is extremely important, has to learn to stand up for what she really believes in even if it’s not popular with everyone. Kate has to accept that she can’t always control how other people see her and how they talk about her, but she still has to learn to control what she stands for, how she expresses herself, what she is willing to do for the sake climbing the social ladder, and where her limits are.

Censorship and Control Issues

The censorship issues in the book are also about control. Some of it is about social control, from the way the adults start forming little groups and cliques around the issue of the controversial book, using their badmouthing of Kate and “dirty” books as a bonding issue among themselves, not unlike the way Kate and her friends initially used their badmouthing of Maudie for bonding purposes among themselves. Some adults appear to be using the issue as a way of controlling others and promoting themselves for attention. However, as the teacher and Jackie point out during the discussion in English class, some parents who are worried about the “dirty” book are coming from a place of fear, and it’s specifically a fear regarding their lack of control. The teacher points out that parents try to control their children’s reading material and media consumption because they’re trying to protect them from serious issues and the related consequences, while Jackie’s emphasis is on parents protecting themselves from uncomfortable thoughts and topics by trying to avoid confronting them with their children. I think all of these aspects of control are present in the situation in the book and in real life, to varying degrees in different people, but I also think that both real people and the characters are trying to control things that they don’t actually have the power to control, at least not completely. I think a better response than trying to control the uncontrollable is to develop an attitude of confidence in handling the unexpected and imperfect. Readers can disagree with this interpretation, if they wish, but that’s the way I read this situation.

There are many things in life that are beyond people’s control, from scary world events discussed on the news to unexpected health problems to the awkward things that six-year-olds blurt out in public about their body parts. Human beings do like to have a measure of control because that’s what helps them minimize disaster in their lives, from minor embarrassments to actual harm. I understand the desire for control and certainty. However, I also believe in limits.

I believe that there are limits on what people can control in their lives, whether it’s controlling circumstances or other people, and I think there should be limits on what people can do to assert control over their lives by controlling other people. Human beings are naturally limited creatures. We never have full knowledge of anything, and there some things in life that you just can’t change, like the fact that human beings have certain body parts, and some girls do look at their private parts with a mirror like Anne Frank did because they’re curious about what’s part of their own bodies, and it’s really the only way to do that. Hey, they’re stuck with those parts, and people with female body parts get periods, whether they like it or not. Simply having a physical human body with all the related bodily functions is just one of the many things that nobody can control. Nobody asks anybody ahead of time if they want their bodies to be the way they are. They just are, and as people grow up, they have to learn about what things are and how to deal with them because that’s how the world is. Their bodies will still have the same parts that work the same way, whether they know the names of them or understand their function or not, and everyone reaches a point where they simply can’t avoid knowing.

Denise’s father said that “it is impossible for even the most well-meaning teacher to know when the moment is right for every child in class,” but his assertion, although “well-meaning” itself, also contains a couple of assumptions that may or may not be true. First, is there really such a thing as one, single “right” moment to confront some of life’s realities? Maybe there’s a “right” time for that, and maybe there isn’t. Maybe there isn’t any such thing as a perfect moment, and maybe life is more of a series of moments and gradual learning opportunities. Some realizations don’t come all at once but in stages and steps, some planned and some not. The discussion in that took place in the class of first grade students could be considered one such step in the lives of the students, although the way it reads sounds like it was more of a revealing of the level of understanding that some of the young students currently had rather than a presentation of new information because much of the talk was volunteered by the students themselves.

Second, Denise’s father seems to be assuming that parents are able to tell when when the “right” moment arrives for their children and will act accordingly when it does, and as an adult with over 40 years of life experience, I know that isn’t true. I’ve known and known of girls who were surprised and terrified by their first period because their parents didn’t think that the “right” moment had arrived until after their little girl started bleeding and absolutely had to be told that they weren’t dying and didn’t need to go to the hospital. (See some of the recountings of first periods on the CVS website for examples. I know a couple of others from friends.) It’s hardly a magical, heart-warming “right” moment when it plays out like that. Not everything has to be done immediately, today, but that doesn’t mean that parents always make things better by waiting as long as they want to talk to kids about situations that are simply going to arise at some point, without prior warning. Time waits for no one. Maybe when the “right” time comes in children’s life, the adults around them will recognize it and act accordingly, with the right amount of preparation, and maybe they won’t recognize it or have difficulty accepting that the time has come, so they’ll lose the moment and the kid will panic or turn to someone else for the answers they need instead. That type of situation is what some of the kids in Kate’s English class discuss. They seem to be aware that they need to have some understanding of certain things eventually, even if their parents never reach the point of being emotionally comfortable with the concept of them having that knowledge or sharing that knowledge with them. What I’m suggesting is that we can’t always choose the “right” moment to deal with uncomfortable or difficult things. Sometimes, moments just come, and we just have to react as gracefully as we can, prepared or not. The reading of the puppy book and the kids’ questions about it are just those kinds of circumstances.

Even if the puppy book hadn’t sparked this particularly discussion among the first graders, it could have arisen just from seeing a pregnant woman somewhere or one of the kids talking about a pregnant relative or pet in class. Not everything in life can be controlled, and I had the feeling like some of the adults were trying too hard to control the uncontrollable. Adults talk about controlling the books kids read because books are relatively easy to try to control because they’re physical objects, neatly contained between two covers and can remain closed and unread, but the life moments that books portray are nowhere near that controllable. Seeing pregnant people or animals, getting a period earlier in life than expected, or hearing someone talk about something are just things that can happen with no prior warning, regardless of what anybody is reading at the time. In a way, I think that having a brief introduction to certain concepts from a book might take some of the shock value out of something that the kids later see, hear, or experience than if those same circumstances arise when they are completely unprepared.

I don’t think that facing the unexpected is the end of the world. Life happens, and when it does, it might not matter precisely how it happened or whether the timing was inconvenient as long as adults are willing to deal with whatever happens when it does, even if it’s awkward and uncomfortable and comes sooner than we think it should. Kate’s father says that all of these issues are complex, and there isn’t always a perfect solution. People just have to do the best they can to work things out as they go. Democracy is just like that, and so is just plain life. Life can be complex and unpredictable, but we still have to live it as best we can as we go.

Although I strongly believe that life isn’t something easily controlled and that the ability to respond gracefully to the unexpected is important, I do also agree that there are some limits on what children should be shown intentionally and that adults should give it some thought ahead of time. I don’t think it’s entirely a matter of maintaining full control over what children see or making it everyone’s responsibility to just accept whatever people give them and just deal with it, but rather a combination of both. It’s a delicate balance, and it’s rarely perfect, but I maintain that it doesn’t necessarily need to be perfect because dealing with imperfection is a valuable life lesson by itself. Rather than worry about those imperfections and being fully prepared for them, I think it’s more positive and productive to show children that the unexpected, awkward, and uncomfortable are manageable. Things can take us by surprise, and we don’t always get to pick our ideal moments, but we can still manage things, even if it’s a bit awkward, so there’s no need to worry about exactly how life is going to go.

My Racy Romance Book Story

Earlier, I mentioned that, when I was 10 years old, a friend took a racy romance book that belonged to her mother, read it, and told me all the most shocking parts. At the time, I knew what sex was, and I understood the nature of what my friend described, although I’ll admit that I didn’t actually know all the words used in the descriptions. That is, I had some knowledge, but the book was definitely not suitable for girls our age or at my level of understanding.

So, what was the effect on me from this incident? Probably not the one that most people would expected. I knew my friend was intentionally trying to be shocking and scandalous, so I said “Ew!” at all the expected places for what she was describing, but the issue that ultimately stuck with me from this experience was more about relationships rather than sex.

It’s a little hard to describe without telling you what the book was about. Let’s just say that the woman wasn’t satisfied with her husband because she was craving something more dangerous. (This is putting it mildly, but that’s the general gist of it. I can’t remember what the title of this book was, so I can’t tell you now or even look it up myself.) So, after being delightfully shocked and scandalized by this forbidden book, I started feeling sorry for the husband in the story.

From the pieces of the story my friend told me, he actually seemed like he was a pretty nice guy, and he was trying to do things he though would please his wife. He didn’t know how she really felt or what she actually wanted, and that struck me as unfair. Although the book was from the point of view of the woman, I found myself, even at age ten, really not liking her because I thought she was self-absorbed and unappreciative of the relationship she had. She seemed to be all about what she wanted and didn’t think she was getting, and I didn’t think she was looking at her husband as a person who also had feelings and was trying to make her happy. After the initial thrill of the shocking bits wore off, my impression of the characters and their relationship stayed with me. They didn’t have a good relationship.

It’s true that you don’t always know how things will affect other people, especially young children, and for that reason, I do think information should be presented gradually and with some caution. The reason why I’m telling this story is to point out that unexpected reactions aren’t always negative ones. My experience with this book was similar to the one I had with the book on witchcraft that I saw when I was around the same age. I learned about something I didn’t want (even though the characters in the book were married and having sex, their relationship didn’t look good, and I thought the woman’s priorities were messed up), and I learned that I can reject ideas that are unhealthy. A person who already does consider other people’s feelings and puts high priority on people’s welfare will continue to have those concerns. If you already have certain priorities or behavioral standards that fit with your personality, they don’t just disappear. Even if something new and shocking temporarily shakes them, they’ll come back. I’ve realized before that I have the ability to reject things I see that I don’t like, whether it’s a book or a relationship with another person that just wouldn’t be healthy.

My friend really shouldn’t have taken that book of her mother’s without permission. Maybe my friend’s mother shouldn’t have been reading that kind of stuff, or maybe the book has a better ending that redeems the characters. (My friend never told me how it ended. She just wanted to shock me with the scandalous parts.) Over 30 years later, I still have reservations about those characters and their relationship.

I wouldn’t recommend kids read books like this. Not all of them are going to have the revelations I had when I considered the characters’ relationship. However, I do think that a couple of positive ways to prime kids for moments like this, when something is unexpected sprung on them (no matter why or by whom) are to make sure that they prioritize people’s welfare and consider the feelings of everyone involved (including but not limited to their own) and that they understand that not everything people tell them is going to be a good idea and that they have the right to reject things that wouldn’t be healthy or helpful for themselves. If you understand that you have both the right and the ability to walk away from anything, you needn’t fear much about what others might unexpectedly offer. I’d also still recommend that parents make it a point to talk to kids about what’s going on in their lives and how they feel about things, so if anything unexpected arises, you can respond to it quickly. I do also highly recommend that parents read some of the books their children are reading and/or ask them about what they’re reading and how they feel about it. If you regularly discuss what the people in your life are doing and how they’re feeling, you don’t have to wonder and worry about it.

I think a dose of honesty is also a good idea. I don’t see anything wrong with parents admitting to their kids that something has come up unexpectedly and that they’re not sure that they’re explaining things in a way the kids will understand, but that they’re making an effort to help them understand what just happened or what people are talking about. (“This isn’t quite the way I was hoping you would start learning about these things, and I’m not sure if you’ll completely understand what I’m about to say, but since the subject has come up, there are a couple of things that I think are important for you to know about this … Now, I’d like you to think a little about what we’ve just talked about, and we’ll talk a little more about it later, after you’ve had time to consider what I’ve just said, and I’ve had time to consider what else I should tell you about that.”) There are some things you can do to prepare for life’s difficult issues and conversations ahead of time, and that helps, but I think it’s also important to acknowledge that no one is every 100% prepared for everything. That might feel a little scary at times, but at the same time, nobody has to be completely prepared for everything for everything in life. We can still manage if we’re willing to be open and honest and accept life as it comes, dealing with things in the moment as best we know how. Knowing that it’s possible to do that makes it a little less scary.

Posted on by TracyC

Cupid Doesn’t Flip Hamburgers

The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids

#12 Cupid Doesn’t Flip Hamburgers by Debbie Dadey and Marcia Thornton Jones, 1995.

Valentine’s Day is approaching, and Eddie is annoyed by all of the hearts and girly decorations around the school.  However, that’s nothing compared to Mrs. Rosenbloom, the new cook in the cafeteria at school.  The first time the kids meet her, she gushes about how much she loves Valentine’s Day.  Everything she serves them has a Valentine theme – lots of red foods and heart-shaped foods.  Most of the other kids don’t mind the Valentine theme because the food is better than it used to be, but Eddie resolves to do something about it.

Before Eddie can do anything, Carey, a girl Eddie normally doesn’t like, suddenly develops a crush on him after eating one of Mrs. Rosenbloom’s Valentine cookies.  The next day, Ben, the fourth-grade bully, gets a sudden crush on Issy after eating a Valentine cookie.  Even Mrs. Jeepers and Principal Davis are falling in love!  (Mrs. Jeepers is a widow.)  Eddie becomes convinced that Mrs. Rosenbloom has doctored the Valentine cookies with a love potion!  He thinks that she’s going to use it to take over the school!

At first, the others don’t believe Eddie, and in any case, what’s wrong with spreading a little love around?  The problems start when both Melody and Liza eat Valentine cookies at the same time and both of them fall in love with Howie.  The two girls, normally best friends, start fighting over Howie.  Howie is embarrassed and worried that this weird love fight will break up their friendship.  The two boys find themselves trying to dodge the girls while starting to worry that, if the romance between Mrs. Jeepers and the principal flourishes, Mrs. Jeepers will turn Principal Davis into a vampire. (One of the things I appreciate about this series is how it draws on real folklore and mythology. The boys are right that, assuming that Mrs. Jeepers actually is a vampire, she can’t be in love with the principal without revealing it to him and probably changing him into a vampire, too.)

The boys come up with a plan to change Mrs. Rosenbloom’s cookie recipe for the worst, but before this escapade is over, even Eddie gets a taste of love.  As with other books in this series, Mrs. Rosenbloom eventually leaves the school, and things return to normal (or what passes for normal in Mrs. Jeepers’ class).

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