Blog Post #2

Honestly I pretty much agree with and support everything that Buehler has to say about YA pedagogy. I am beyond excited that the school I am working at in the Fall seems to be really supportive of using YA in the classroom. My team and I have two units planned that use YA as the anchor text: a narrative unit using The Outsiders and an analytical unit using dystopian novel lit circles (The Hunger Games, Unwind, 5th Wave, The Giver, among others).

I guess the thing that makes me the most nervous isn’t the use of YA in a full class setting, but rather the independent reading aspect of it. During my student teaching, independent reading was not a thing that we incorporated into the daily routine. Most of my students did not read books outside of the ones we read as a full class and I didn’t really have a classroom library to pull from to recommend books. Now I am being encouraged to build a classroom library before I start in the Fall (which is awesome!) but I’m honestly feeling overwhelmed. I feel like I haven’t read nearly enough middle grades books to have a rolodex of personalized and specific recommendations for my students. Honestly I don’t even really have a clear idea of what 7th graders even want to read these days.

I am also struggling with trying to toe the line between having books that discuss serious topics and will introduce students to lives and viewpoints outside of their own, and not having all parents hate me within the first month of my first job. This is something I didn’t really have to deal with as much at my student teaching placement because my students were older and the parents were not super involved in school life. Now my students are much younger and this school has pretty impressive community involvement– which one one hand is fabulous because people are actually going to donate clorox wipes to my homeroom and parents will actually come to the open house and be interested in meeting their child’s teachers, but one the other hand it feels like I have to do a lot of appeasement in return, like if I screw up one time all of that support is immediately going out the window. I know Buehler talks about having a prepared schpeel for every book that you think might receive some backlash, a justification for why it makes sense from an academic standpoint to have students read that book, but I just find myself questioning whether that actually works. And I find myself really anxious about whether I am going to have the emotional capacity to keep doing that for years at a time.

While I am attempting to build my classroom library, it feels like I am constantly oscilating between extreme joy and extreme paranoia. I get the joy from watching book talks, adding titles to my thriftbooks.com wishlist, getting to just READ a lot of new and fantastic books, and imagining all of the things students might do with them (I will be stealing the study of book marketing and author branding from Buehler). But then on the flipside building my classroom library kind of feels like building a time bomb, and instead of thinking about putting the right book in the hands of the right kid at the right time, I’m thinking about the wrong kid showing the wrong book to the wrong adult and having to deal with the consequences.