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

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 Kirsten, Reply

Book Review: Our Children, Our Teachers by Michael Bailey

Our Children, Our Teachers by Michael Bailey

Written Backwards, 2018

Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0996149317

Available: Kindle edition

I was not familiar with Michael Bailey’s work before reading this. Afterwards, I learned that Michael Bailey has been nominated for and has won the Stoker Award in the past. I have to assume that Our Children, Our Teachers is a momentary aberration, because it is a terrible piece of writing. There are unneccessary and misplaced dashes throughout the text, disrupting the flow of the story. It’s poorly structured, with a confusing beginning that doesn’t seem to bear a relationship to the main story, a premise that makes no sense, and an ending so abrupt that I’m still not sure if it’s done or if there are actually pages missing.

The original idea is an interesting one. Eighteen students with seemingly no connection except that all of their parents own guns conspire in planning and carrying out a school shooting. With the school on lockdown, a student in each classroom drives the teacher out into the hallway, which is then followed by the sound of guns firing. This seems to be setting up a somewhat over-the-top commentary on easy availability of guns for kids, but that’s not really where the story goes. Instead (spoiler), the conspirators livestream their demands while holding the school hostage, which are for society to show respect for teachers by compensating them appropriately. Until a long list of demands for higher pay and benefits for teachers are met, one of the conspirators will kill themselves on camera every hour with their entire school watching.

This is just not believable. Even if it were likely that a large group of kids who barely know each other would be willing to work together to plan this, and could keep this a secret, teacher pay is hardly something they would be willing to kill themselves over, and certainly their teachers would be horrified by the idea. Further, kids willing to threaten an entire school and fire live ammunition in the vicinity of their friends and teachers have zero credibility when it comes to demanding respect for their teachers. There’s also no way that this story makes sense logistically. A high school with a thousand students has more than 18 teachers, including multiple counselors, administrators, and support staff, and lockdowns are taken very seriously.

There are glimmers that this could be expanded into something interesting. While I have a hard time believing that these kids were all able to keep it quiet (in my kids’ school anything even remotely questionable ends up reported to resource officers and the front office through an app kids use to submit anonymous tips, and this certainly would have been caught), I’m curious as to how they all connected and committed to this loose plan. Bailey snagged me originally with the students texting back and forth, exerting pressure on each other to participate, as it was clear some of them were hesitant or wanted to back out. That was creepy enough for me to want to keep going a little further. That peer pressure via text message was enough to get kids who rarely met in person and had little in common to do something so horrific was an intriguing thread that I wish he’d followed through on a little more.

The multiple viewpoints have promise, as you start seeing the different students’ perspectives and the difficulty some of the conspirators are having with actually following through, but with so many people involved there isn’t enough time or space to introduce them or explain why they’re participating in this. There’s no inciting incident that seems to be at the center of this, and I honestly have difficulty believing kids are willing to face a prison sentence, kill someone else (yes, that can happen even if you fire at the ceiling or the wall) or kill themselves in front of their teachers and classmates livestreamed on social media, over the issue of teacher compensation. The fact that the reason certain kids were involved because they able to get their guns easily from their parents was also interesting and deserved follow-through. There’s potential here, but at its current length, it fails.

Given his past successes, I’m assuming that in the future Bailey will be producing quality work worth reading, but readers can give this one a pass. Not recommended.

Contains: murder, some gore.

Editor’s note: Our Children, Our Teachers is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Fiction.

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Kirsten, Reply

Women in Horror Month: “She’s a librarian, ok?”

Hi, my name is Kirsten Kowalewski, and I am a librarian.

I am currently living in a state where the governor just attempted to use tax dollars to start a state-run news service and is recommending cutting library funding. The past two weeks have also been the culmination of a year of hostility from the governor and the state board of education toward our elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, who is, like me, trained as a librarian and school media specialist and is a certified teacher. The state legislature is stripping her of her powers and assigning them to the state board. When Indiana Senate president David Long was asked about it, he implied that she wasn’t up to the job. “She’s a librarian, ok?” This has left me steaming.

The Librarian Avengers are putting you on notice, Mr. Long.

So, what’s all this got to do with women in horror?

A number of awesome librarians have contributed to promoting the horror genre and keeping this website alive. Many of them are women, and all of them are amazing. I have been lucky to work with Becky Siegel Spratford (author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror Fiction), Patricia O. Mathews (author of the reader’s advisory guide Fang-tastic Fiction), Lucy Lockley (also known as the RAT Queen), Kelly Fann, Julie Adams, and others, and to connect through the site with Heather Whiteside Ward. If you want horror fiction to thrive, and its audience to grow, you’ve got to have the librarians on your side, and (whether it’s right or not) a lot of librarians are women.

In conclusion, I give you Evie Carnahan, Librarian Most Likely To Break A Mummy’s Curse: