2017 Winter Break Special #3 - Season 2, Episode 7

Welcome to Season 2 Episode 7 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning. This episode is part of a series of special shows for winter break 2017! In each episode, we will help you figure what to do with those book store gift cards by sharing some titles you may want to add to your classroom library. Today Penny talks with Tricia Ebarvia!

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Season 2 Ep 7 Show Notes

Tricia Ebarvia teaches at Conestoga High School outside Philadelphia, PA. From her Heinemann Fellow bio:  Tricia has spent the last 15 years as a classroom educator with a student-driven approach to teaching reading and writing. Through her career, Tricia has applied the philosophy of the teacher-as-researcher while applying best practices to cultivate independent learners through independent reading and student choice. For better or worse, well enough doesn t satisfy me. I approach each school year, each course, each unit with fresh eyes. 

Find Tricia on Twitter and her web site.

Here are her book recommendations…

When Dimple Met Rishi, by Sandhya Menon

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan

The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu

The story “The Paper Menagerie” was also featured on an episode of LeVar Burton Reads.

Also, Penny talked about Reimagining Writing Assessment: from Scales to Stories, by Maja Wilson.

 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Book Love Foundation podcast. The Book Love Foundation is a non-profit 501 3(c) dedicated to putting books in the hands of teachers dedicated to nurturing the individual reading lives of their middle and high school students. In the past five years, we have awarded $223,000. If you can help us in our mission, visit booklovefoundation.org and make a donation. 100% of what you give goes to books.
– Penny

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Creators and Guests

Host

Penny Kittle

Penny is Chairman of the Book Love Foundation and is dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing. She has taught English and coached literacy in public schools for 34 years.

Guest

Tricia Ebervia

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Penny Kittle 00:00
The Book Love Foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.

Penny Kittle 00:16
Welcome to the Book Love Foundation podcast. We have a Winter Special Series going on right now to highlight some of the educators that we admire and get them to talk about books that they love. It's holiday break week, and you know what? This morning, it was minus 11 here in North Conway, New Hampshire, minus 20 something below zero when you add in the wind chill. So it's a perfect day for me to sit around thinking about reading. Today, I started my day with my notebook and Maya Wilson's new book, reimagining writing assessment from scales to stories. I found so much rich thinking in Tom Newkirk's Introduction to her book that I had to slow down list a little bit in my notebook write and just sit beside Tom Newkirk's thinking before I could move on. And I have to say, break week is a time when I just love doing that. I appreciate this time to linger in complex thinking. We all read so fast now we ride a wave of information and then the next one, but I think we also need time to read slowly. I'm so grateful. So before we get to today's book talks with the wise and thoughtful teacher, Tricia Ebervia, I want to say that Maya Wilson's book will challenge you to see assessment, grading and rubrics differently. She'll be on the podcast later this season, and I'm sure you'll respond as I did the first time I heard her speak. I need to listen to this woman. Tom says, As Wilson lays out her elegant argument, she challenges three central premises of scales, one that we can predetermine a spectrum from bad to good with descriptions of intermediate stages. Two, that we can objectively place the students writing along this scale, and three, by knowing one's rating on a scale, it will improve learning and lead to growth. I love that Maya is challenging all three of those assumptions that are at the heart of using rubrics. Then he ends his introduction by saying, this is the challenge Maya Wilson poses for us, to be responsive, open to novelty, and to proclaim our loyalty to the learner, and not to be simply agents of the institutional sorting machine. Maya Wilson teaches up at the University of Maine Farmington, and I am so looking forward to introducing some of you to her work. But today, let's talk about Trisha. She is someone who I follow on Twitter, and the link to her Twitter ID and to the book she recommends will be on the teacherlearningsessions.com page. She's someone who every time she posts a link or something she's doing in her classroom, I click on it, always, because trisha's thinking is fresh and lively and challenges me. I love that. She has been teaching for 17 years outside of Philadelphia, and she's also co director of the Philadelphia writing and literature project. Imagine those two things, and now add on that, for the last two years, she's been a Heinemann fellow. If you haven't checked out the Heinemann fellow's application for 2018 you absolutely should. I think Trisha would be the first one to tell you that it has been an unimaginably powerful experience of connecting with other colleagues in a two year professional development opportunity. So here's Trisha.

Penny Kittle 03:59
So I asked you to select some books, and you sent me the five that you want to talk about, and I have heard of none of them. So I am sitting here with my pen out to think about these things with you, and I bet you I will be ordering them by the end of this couple minutes together.

Tricia Ebervia 04:13
Well, I did narrow down to three for time's sake. So I'll start with the first one, which is a YA novel that I have on my shelf right now. It's called When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon. It's Menon or Menon, M, E, N, O N. I love this book for so many reasons. I think one reason I love it is because I just don't think that there's enough books that feature really wonderfully written Indian American characters. And as someone who is an Asian American, I think that representation matters, and I think that that is just wonderful to be able to see. It's a book that takes place in California. It's about a teenage girl named Dimple who is Indian American, and she comes from a very well relative. Traditional Indian family, and she's very high achieving, loves Science and Engineering, but her family, they would actually be very happy if she could just, kind of like, you know, get her education, but then find a nice Indian boy who then could just be a potential husband for her. Dimple of course, has her own plans. Like I said, she loves computer science and coding, and when the book opens, she's actually trying to convince her parents to let her go to this really prestigious like coding camp that's at San Francisco State University. To her surprise, her parents let her go, and that's where she should have been suspicious, because unbeknownst to her, parents have talked to her their family friends, and they've arranged it so that their son, Rishi, is also at this coding camp. And Rishi knows about her and knows and what he knows is that he's supposed to marry her one day and and he's very traditional, in a way. So he's like, okay, he's like, going with it. Now, Dimple doesn't know anything about this, so you can imagine when they meet for the first time, she is furious, and the novel kind of unfolds from there. And so the other way that I like to describe the book is if, like, a if you took a Bollywood film and you put it into a book, this would be that book. So Bollywood films have a lot of they're romantic and there there's humor, and there's song and dance and comedy and yet also social commentary and all of those things end up in this book in really surprising and clever ways. So like I said, I would highly recommend this book. It's just really it's a unique book. It's something I haven't ever seen before. It's also told in dual perspectives from Dimples and Rishis. So I think kids who like those types of books, which I know a lot of our YA books, is kind of a trend right now. I think they would enjoy this book for those reasons as well. So that's first one.

Penny Kittle 07:01
I kind of want to be named Dimple now.

Tricia Ebervia 07:04
Yeah, great, yeah. Okay.

Penny Kittle 07:08
What else you got?

Tricia Ebervia 07:09
All right, so the next book is, now, this is not a YA book, it, but it would appeal to, I think, a lot of adolescents. In fact, it was one of my ninth graders who recommended to me the book is called Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. Now it's getting a lot of buzz, or it was getting a lot of buzz in the past months because they just wrapped up production on the film adaptation, which is coming out in August. It's like I said, not a YA book, but it was recommended to be my ninth grader who said she loved it. And I thought, okay, it wasn't really my type of book, to be honest. I mean, the title is Crazy Rich Asians, and it seemed to be this very kind of glitzy, maybe even superficial, type of book, as the title suggests. And I was just like, I don't know, but she recommended it to me, and I thought, Okay, I'm going to read it. And I'm really glad I did, because I was just really wrong. I mean, it was like, fun and light, but it was also like an amazing social commentary. So the story is about a young couple named Rachel and Nick, and when the novel opens it, they're in New York City. They're both faculty, young faculty at, I think a university. I think it might be supposed to be NYU. Nick's best friend. Nick is from Singapore. Nick's best friend is getting married, and so he wants to bring Rachel with him. Rachel is Chinese American. He wants to bring Rachel home with him to meet his parents and go to this wedding. So Rachel, of course, is is a complete, I don't want to say a mess, but she's nervous because now she's meeting her significant other's parents and family. But what she doesn't know, when what Nick has kept a secret from her, is that he's actually part of one of the oldest and richest families in Singapore, like, really, like, all really old money, centuries rich, kind of crazy rich. And so she goes there with him, and he's kept this whole life a secret, because he's just not learned not to talk about his money. And of course, she is not good enough for, like, the family looks very down on her, and she's not good enough. And so it seems, in a lot of ways, kind of the plot of a romantic comedy. But what I found really interesting was Kevin Kwan has this such a great touch in terms of the satire, because he is really able to capture the attitudes of the uber rich, the ostentatiousness, but he does it with a kind of humor and kind of humanity at the same time. And it's actually the first in a series, and I went on to read the rest of the series, and it just blows your mind. It's a whole society and world that I was totally unaware of. And I think for those reads I think a lot of people would like it. The way I would describe it is, if you would like books that are kind of like about high class society and comedies of manners with Jane Austin, Edith Wharton, this is like that, except in Singapore, so it's like, again, I would highly recommend that book as well.

Penny Kittle 10:17
Oh, you're killing me because it's like Jane Austin, and I'm a Jane Austin, like crazy fan

Tricia Ebervia 10:22
At a well, like, it is just, it's like that, like all the rules about society and like them, those manners, everything. He's just has it down. It's perfect. It really is. It's just, it's amazing.

Penny Kittle 10:36
You Know the thing about a Series books? Kylene Beers talked about how 98% of adult readers read Series books as a kid.

Tricia Ebervia 10:43
Yes, yes. I think I read that too. Like, I think that's the one of the biggest predictors of, like, adult reading if you had a series when you were a child.

Penny Kittle 10:53
Yeah. I think it's awesome. And what's your third.

Tricia Ebervia 10:57
Yeah, so my third one is a beautiful book. It's actually a book of short stories, and this book is called the Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu. Ken Liu is a science fiction and fantasy writer. So again, this is kind of interesting, because these books, in a lot of ways, are not generally my genre, but he is a short story writer of science fiction and fantasy the Paper Menagerie. Now I'm actually in the middle of reading it, so what I'd like to recommend it in it is actually one specific story, and it's the title story called The Paper Menagerie. It is a coming of age story about a young boy who's trying to come to terms with his identity as the son of immigrant parents. He's trying to fit in with his peers. He feels ashamed of his mother, who is Chinese and can't speak English. She tries to communicate with him and develop this relationship with him as much as she can. So she makes these beautiful little paper animals. She uses old Christmas wrapping paper to make these beautiful animals, almost like origami. And there's this element of magical realism, where the animals actually come to life when he's playing with them as a young boy, and they're kind of his companions. So it's just, it's just beautiful, the way that the paper animals and his relationship with his mother kind of mirror each other, because he's the story starts out, he's a young boy, but by the time the story ends, he's a grown up, and all these things kind of happen in between. And I want to say too that this story is actually featured on the podcast LeVar Burton reads, I don't know if you know that podcast?

Penny Kittle 12:33
I don't, yeah.

Tricia Ebervia 12:36
So it's basically Reading Rainbow for adults, yeah, so LeVar Burton just chooses a short story every episode, and he reads it. So you just listen to LeVar Burton read to you when you're driving on your way to work. And this was one of the stories The Paper Menagerie. I don't know, I forget what episode it is, but you can find it. And so to have this beautiful story, and then to have LeVar Burton read it to you, it's, it is a magical experience.

Penny Kittle 13:03
Is incredible, and so great for kids who love that bridge with Audible.

Tricia Ebervia 13:09
Yes, exactly. And actually, my colleague next door to me, my my school, she actually used this story with her AP Lit students, and they listened to it. They listen to LeVar Burton read it to them, and she said it was so quiet, the kids were completely captivated, like you could not they would not move when the bell rang. So it is, and so part of it was his reading, but part of it, and a lot of it is a story, because, again, it's about that tension of growing up and coming to terms with your family and really what it means to love, which the main character doesn't fully understand. I mean, this is life, right? He doesn't fully understand until much later. So there's a lot of there's a lot of that in there. It's just beautiful.

Penny Kittle 13:57
It's, you know, what I love is, I can see Bridges to the Namesake, yeah, that was so powerful, that idea of the child that's raised here, but by immigrant parents and so. And the other one I thought of is how we always try to create those ladders to magical realism and like, 100 Years of Solitude. And what about a short story that's somewhere on that ladder, you know? So they can read Bone Gap in middle school, but they could then look at or an early high school, a short story along that path.

Tricia Ebervia 14:26
Yeah, exactly it really is. I think it's just a great bridge for kids.

Penny Kittle 14:30
Absolutely you are so awesome. Thank you for giving us these recommendations. Sure. Of course, It's so great to talk to you. Tricia, I love your work. I hope everybody follows you on Twitter, because you just say important things.

Tricia Ebervia 14:43
Oh, thank you Penny. That's really nice of you to say, Well, have a great evening. Happy holidays. Okay, you too. I'll talk to you soon. Okay, bye.

Penny Kittle 14:55
Thanks so much to Tricia Ebervia for that fabulous round of book talks. I have to say When Dimple Met Rishi was in my daughter's Christmas stocking, and she has since started it, she's home this week and she said, Mom, you are going to love this. I know, Tricia told me. Tune in tomorrow for our winter break special podcast number four, where I talked to Dana Johansen, who's a middle school teacher in Connecticut at Greenwich Academy. Happy reading.

Kevin Carlson 15:28
Hello. This is Kevin Carlson from the teacher learning sessions. Thank you for listening to the third of our special winter break reading episodes. If you missed Penny's book talks or missed hearing the books that Cornelius Minor recommended in the previous two episodes. You should definitely check those out after we finish this series of mini episodes. For the break, everybody on the teacher learning sessions email list will receive a full list of the books that people talk about in the episodes, both the trade books and the professional books. If you would like to receive that list yourself. Just go to teacherlearningsessions.com, and join the email list. You can do it right now. It's simple and it's quick. If you are already on the email list. Thank you very much. In our next episode, Dana Johansen.

Dana Johansen 16:17
Oh my gosh. I love this book every single time I read it. So great so Great. It draws readers right in. They can't put this down, because everyone wants to know what's going to happen to these kids in this castle and will they survive? And it has it all. It has ancient curses. It has charms. It has spies. It has war, it has magic. It just has it all.

Kevin Carlson 16:38
Thanks for listening. Keep enjoying your winter break and happy reading. Support for the Book Love Foundation podcast comes from Booksource. As a leading distributor of authentic literature for K 12 classrooms, Booksource makes it easy for educators to build, grow and organize classroom libraries that engage readers. With 300 title grade level starter libraries for grades K 12, featuring a mix of fiction and non fiction, and covering a variety of topics and genres, Booksource can help you build a strong foundation of books at every grade level. To stock your classroom library with titles that engage readers visit booksource.com today. The Book Love Foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.