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Musings: The Disconnect Between What Kids Want and What Teachers Recommend

Table with sign that says "Need a Book? Check out thes authors and titles that Mr. ____ recommends" with a number of books face up on the table.

The reason I went back to school after working as a children’s librarian in a public library was that I noticed that sometime around grade four kids stopped coming to the library, They were too busy, they had too much homework, they had stuff going on. Even programs carefully designed around their interests weren’t attracting those kids.

 

I wanted to reach those kids. And I was willing to quit my job and go back to school to reach them where they were– school– a captive audience I could finally reach. And I did. But even in 2005, the librarians were the first ones to go when the budget got sliced.

 

In grad school and through 2005 I was part of a children’s choice committee for grades 4-6. We had a list of books proposed that we had to read, evaluate, discuss, and eventually choose 20 books for our nomination list. Kids who read at least 5 could vote for their choice for  best book. And the book with the most votes won the award.

Where am I going with this?

I currently volunteer in my kids’ former middle school library.

In early February I was asked to pull teacher favorites for a display. These included many of what would be considered classics- To Kill a Mockingbord, Night, The Call of the Wild, 1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only two of them had been written since 2005.

 

In mid-February, a teacher put a table of best books out on a table These were great choices I would have no problem recommending.  But I recognized almost all of them as books I had read while on the children’s choice committee. Only a few had been written in the last five years. One (Scythe) is taught as required reading at the high school.

 

We are not reaching teachers. They may be tolerating or even accepting horror in their classrooms but many aren’t promoting or providing horror genre titles to their students. And teachers have a huge influence on what gets checked out. It has to be a cooperative effort. The media specialist had a virtual visit with students with Lorien Lawrence in February, but on the day I came in, his books were still on the shelf.

 

I have helped the media specialist pull and promote scary and horror-themed books in the past. At the elementary, there’s time for storytelling to shape readers. But that isn’t enough at the secondary level. How do we reach teachers, especially at a time when giving kids books is so dangerous?  It’s time to think outside the box.

 

Editor’s note: I have had this characterized as a “diatribe against teachers”. It’s not. Teachers have a difficult job that is being made harder by conservative school boards and state legislatures. There is currently an effort to pass a law that would criminalize teachers and librarians for giving students “inappropriate” books in my state. Many school and classroom libraries have been cleared away elsewhere. 

Teachers face the difficulty of finding reading material their students will find relevant and engaging within challenging restraints. 20 years ago I was working to convince other school librarians horror was relevant and had the potential to be engaging to their students. Today there’s a Librarian’s Day at StokerCon: librarians are engaged in collection development  and promoting the horror genre. I am asking, where do we, as members of the horror community, go from here? What can we do to help? 

Posted on March 3, 2023 by , Reply

Musings: Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

 

cover art for Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare  (  Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

HarperTeen, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0062854599

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Clown in a Cornfield has the cover art, title, and pacing I’d expect from a pulp paperback from the 1970s-1980s, but a very contemporary feel. It takes place in a small, rural town in Missouri. Quinn Maybrook has just moved from Philadelphia to Kettle Springs, where her father has taken over the town doctor’s practice to give both of them a fresh start after her mother died by drug overdose. A year prior to the events of the book, Cole Hill and his friends livestreamed a prank for their YouTube channel that led to the accidental death of Cole’s younger sister, and shortly before the story begins, Cole attempted to burn down an abandoned factory owned by his father’s company, Baypen. Baypen’s mascot is a clown, Frendo, and it might as well be Kettle Springs’ mascot, as well.

Quinn’s first day at school gets a rocky start when she is caught in the crossfire between Cole and his friends and the science teacher as he angrily ejects them from his classroom, but she soon finds herself included in the group. Quinn discovers that almost everything they do is to get an on-camera reaction. A dangerous prank at the town’s Founder’s Day parade causes a lot of anger in the community, especially from the sheriff, who holds a lot of power and is a very convincing man.

The teens have planned a party in a barn in the middle of a cornfield on the farm of a family who has left on vacation, and despite the damage, a huge crowd arrives to drink and dance. That’s when Frendo, the clown, shows up, and events quickly escalate into a large-scale, fast-paced, violent, and bloody massacre.

Small, rural towns in mid-America tend to be very conservative, very white, and attached to traditional values. They are mostly financially depressed, mainly because nearby manufacturing has failed and family farming isn’t very profitable. Gun ownership, especially for hunting, is common. And communities are usually small enough that their identities center on high school sports, including the mascots. I’ve worked in a really small, rural town, and every day when I got off the highway exit I drove past miles and miles of corn. Cesare really captures the character of these communities, and while some characters are relatively stock, such as the sheriff, others are well-fleshed out.  I especially was impressed with the portrayal of Rust,  who could easily have been a cariacature of a gun-happy redneck but instead was a nuanced, thoughtful, and resourceful character. There’s also positive representation of gay characters, and an interesting Asian “mean girl”.

My daughter didn’t feel that the motivation for the massacre was believable, but having watched the events of the past week play out, I can now fully believe that clowns could turn in a violent and deadly way on people they feel alienated from if they believe there is a threat to their way of life. Clown in a Cornfield moves along quickly and may appeal to reluctant readers. Slasher fans and teens looking for a terrifying, gory story will find it here. Highly recommended for grades 9+.

Contains: extreme violence, gore, murder, body horror

 

 

Posted on January 14, 2021 by , Reply

15 Years of Monster Librarian

It is hard to believe we’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. My husband Dylan, the original Monster Librarian, posted the first reviews on January 1, 2006, just three months (and a couple of days) after our first child was born, because what better time to take on a gigantic project than when you have a newborn.

He founded Monster Librarian because at the time, he was working an internship at a branch of the Indianapolis Public Library as part of completing his master’s degree in library science, and he found that the librarians there didn’t know anything about the horror genre past Stephen King and had no interest in putting in the effort to learn more about it. At the time, much of the horror fiction available was also being published only by small presses not listed in the databases of major wholesalers like Baker & Taylor, Follett, and Ingram. It required a commitment for librarians to seek out publishers and order individual titles, and the books could be expensive ( I was working as an elementary school library media specialist at the time, and Baker & Taylor provided a 40% discount. That’s a big deal for a small budget). As a longtime horror reader who started building his collection as a teenager by haunting his local used book store, the indifference the librarians had to the horror genre was something her felt he needed to do something about.

At the same time, I was working with elementary kids who were asking me for scary books while sitting on an awards committee for my state library association’s children’s choice award. The way that was supposed to work was that we read all nominated books, then met to choose a representative sample of 20 books that would cover all genres. The genre I had to fight for was horror. It went beyond indifference– some committee members actively disliked it. I had done research into reading engagement while working on my MLS and one thing Dylan and I both agreed on was how important it was to hook kids and teens with what researcher Stephen Krashen calls “home run books”. So many kids and teens get hooked through scary stories and horror that he felt it was important to reach librarians and advocate for the horror genre for readers. This was his passion and he posted reviews even after he became ill and through five years of painful migraines and chronic, life-imparing pain, until just before he died in 2014. I think he’d be delighted to see all the positive changes that have occurred in the horror genre and in librarians’ attitudes and knowledge of the horror genre and scary stories for kids since the site was founded in 2006.

I love seeing the diversity growing in the genre. There is still plenty of room for growth, but wow, things have changed a lot, and mostly for the better. I think Dylan would love to see it.

I would like to make sure we are providing useful information to you. Monster Librarian is an all-volunteer effort and I need to make sure we are at least covering our hosting costs and postage. That costs about $200  every year and we almost didn’t make it this year. Without your support, either through purchasing items through Monster Librarian’s store at Bookshop.org or contributing through Paypal, we will struggle to continue our work, and after this long at running the site, I’m not sure what I would do without it! Thanks for visiting, and I hope you’ll be back again soon!

 

Posted on January 1, 2021 by , Reply
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