When I think back to my own schooling, I realize that nobody taught me note taking. I was just told to “take notes.” Nobody taught me how to annotate a text. I was just provided a highlighter. Nobody taught me how to prioritize tasks, create a smart homework schedule, manage all my obligations and so on.

As a result, I stumbled through high school and college inefficiently… or at least certainly less effectively than I could/should have. Often, I procrastinated until I had to “crash” study for tests… or pull an all-nighter to deliver the goods I owed. (I am a night owl anyway, but staying up until 5:00 am was so common in my life for so, so, so many years that to this day, I can still burn the midnight oil in a way that is almost unnatural. Or so my wife swears.)

All of that changed when I became an AVID teacher. And read Covey. And then recognized that my inability to be efficient and work intelligently was preventing me from achieving so many of the personal and professional goals I longed to attain.

Before AVID, Covey and all the others who have contributed to my conscientious re-framing (let’s be honest, I have gulped down a ton of books on this subject area), I was an inefficient wreck. I guess this is why I use the term re-framing. I needed to re-frame the way I worked top to bottom, keeping what did work well and tossing what didn’t.

Nowadays, of course, I am a lot of unspeakable things but being “an inefficient wreck” is not one of them. I write, speak, blog, teach, and so on. Is it a lot? For sure. However, my life is not characterized by chaos, which is totally ironic because before I recognized I needed to re-frame the manner in which I worked, chaos was the operative word.

It’s almost as if I did not know how to operate

from any other perspective than under the gun, late for a deadline and so on.
Of course, I loved to lie to myself as well and tell myself that, “Hey, you
work better at the last minute anyway,” and things like that.

It calls to mind a line Mark Twain once said: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

But what I really wish, when I look back, is that

someone would have taught me some of the core principles of smart work habits
and efficiency back when I was still a minor. I mean, somewhere, between 4rth
grade and 12th grade, it really would have been nice to learn things
like Cornell note taking, time management, prioritization, and the law of
procrastination. (i.e. it’s stressful, quality often gets sacrificed and the
sense of joy in doing the work is torn asunder by the need to meet a deadline,
come hell or high water.)

It’s like catching an airline flight, in a way. These

days, I always try to be an extra ½ hour early. Why? Because I used to be the
type of person that would try to cut it razor thin and make it to the gate, “just
on time”.

Of course, every moment of the journey to the airport,
going through security, and getting to the gate was a hellish and stressful “race
against the clock” event which made the entire experience tremendously “tense”.
With the extra half hour these days, I am relaxed, I have a buffer and, if there’s
a hiccup in my arrangements, things don’t go nuclear.

And if I am there a half hour early, I can read,

write, make a relaxed phone call and so on. Really, I don’t ever find that I
have wasted any half-hours. And the gray hairs on my head that I did not cause
to sprout, well… it makes it all worth it.

I just wish I wouldn’t have had to go to the school
of hard knocks to learn this stuff… and if school would have taught me these
things, I would have been much better off.

Then again, who wouldn’t?

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is about to absolutely rock the Hollywood box office this weekend. And it has been a rip-roaring success in the world of book publishing. As a teacher, when I see this I know that I can leverage the power of an author who has found a way to reach real kids into classroom success for me and my kids.

Here’s how I do it.

First of all, I know that the state has hired me to teach the content standards. (They clearly say so.) And when they assess my student performance, the material they test is not text specific but rather, standards-based. This means that they are not going to be testing my kids on Kafka, Twain, and Joyce but rather on denotation vs. connotation, theme, tone and so on.

And hey, Diary of a Wimpy Kid uses all of the literary elements of denotation vs. connotation, theme, tone and so on. So why not use Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a text to teach the standards in my classroom?

I do.

Now before I get crucified as being someone that does not revere the GREAT BOOKS of human civilization – a canon blaster, if you will — please take a few things into consideration.

California is a state with 6.4 million students. And 1.6 million of them are English Language Learners. This means that I need to differentiate, accommodate and be responsive to the real literary needs of the students that are sitting in my class — all while still teaching the appropriate grade level content standards.

I am not sure if there is a more accessible book for English Language Learners out there right now than Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

-It’s funny. (And kids will wrestle with text when the reward is material that will make them laugh).
-There’s a lot of white space on the page. (Check the research on the value of that to a student with low literacy skills – especially when English is not their first language).
-It’s relevant and kids relate. (The bumbling, fumbling shenanigans of Greg allow students to see their own lives reflected directly in the text.)

And Diary of a Wimpy Kid (for those who want to take a moment to jump off their high horse of that books in school absolutely must be dense, erudite art) is a good read. Personally, I greatly enjoyed it because it’s an energetic, funny and page turner.

Plus, guess what? There’s a theme. (A few of them, in fact: 1) We learn from our mistakes. 2) Self-image is very important. 3) No one escapes problems in their life. 4) You’ve got to show initiative if you are going to get anywhere in this world.)

And there are examples of denotation vs. connotation.

And the text provides me examples of tone, perspective, hyperbole and on and on.

The same stuff that the standards ask me to teach.

Should Diary of a Wimpy Kid replace Mark Twain? Nope, not even close. But can it be used as a bridge to build capacity? Can it be used as a text to illuminate literary devices?

Can it be used as a vehicle to get 100% of your class to do ALL the assigned reading? (And how often do our classes do that? I mean “faking it” through books has become so ingrained in our culture that there’s a multi-million dollar industry to provide resources as to how to better fake it — Cliff’s Notes, Spark Notes, Pink Monkey and so on.)

Yes, I read Diary of a Wimpy Kid with my classes. And guess what? It was a home-run success and a great teaching tool.

And guess what else?

We had FUN!

Since when are fun and and learning mutually exclusive to one another?

But, don’t worry — keep using those 20th century tools to reach today’s 21rst century kids. After all I am sure Hollywood is going to race right out and make a movie of your classroom textbook any day this week.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid… it certainly can have it’s place in a classroom where students are achieving.

I am not sure if sexual molestation by school personnel against students is on the rise or if the explosion of web-based media has simply drawn more attention and awareness to the problem. Either way, it’s absolutely tragic when this stuff happens.

And it devastates lives.

As this story in the L.A. Times shows, the victims, the kids, suffer in ways that color their existence and worldview for the rest of their life… and what scares me is how numb I think we in our society have become to the crime because of the frequency with which it is being reported these days.

Having had students confess to me their victimhood over and over (it’s so much more common than I ever realized — like SO MUCH MORE!) is what drove me to want to do more. And the fact is, an incident right out of my own classroom (the tale a female student told me about her uncle) was the original spark for my latest book of fiction, The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez.

In some ways, I am just amazed how SONIA has hit a nerve with so many kids. Especially girls. And even more especially, with Latina girls. This novel hasn’t become breakout big like TWILIGHT or anything like that but it does have a very strong group of kids and teachers that really support it extremely well and it’s being brought into classrooms all around the country. (And oh the emails they send to me.) For that I am honored.

But still, I want to do more.

I guess the question is, how can we better protect our kids? And what more can we do to help them when this stuff happens?

BTW, was it always so prevalent and yet under-reported, or is society so much more sexualized that seeing more and more of this type of abhorrent behavior is simply inevitable?

Yet, this still brings me back to the bigger point: what can be done?

I do know that banning books like Laurie Halse Anderson’s SPEAK is not the answer. Books open conversations in a way that few other forms of media can do. Read Laurie’s answer as to how she feels about banning books right here… you go Laurie!

The tragedy of sexual molestation is a plague on teens today and yet so many folks are sweeping it under the rug pretending it’s not happening in their school, their community, their world.

As Mark Twain once quipped, “Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.”

I just got back from a day spent out at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. This is a gathering on the campus of UCLA where readers, writers, fans of the written word, students, the famed, unknowns, and bestselling authors from all over the country come to read, sign, chat about books, sell books, buy books and simply celebrate the written word. Not a couple of spinsters from Rhode Island, mind you, but the entire West Coast of the country seemed to be out there today. (Well over a hundred thousand people.) Packed — I mean PACKED — crowds with some of the most famous authors in the nation sitting side by side with absolute nobodies (yep, I was there… LOL!). All in all, probably over a million books available from self-published first timers to genuine literary legends, all of them gathered this weekend to celebrate… you guessed it… books.

It was rockin’!!

Especially because I got to meet S.E. Hinton today. I mean this is the author of The Outsiders, a book which people claim gave birth to the Young Adult novel. Let’s just say that without this genre of fiction, yours truly truly might not be yours truly.

But that wasn’t even the best moment for me. The best moment for me was that I brought my 2 year old daughter out there (this is her second time in attendance — we got a little streak going) and let her choose whatever she wanted. Her choice of titles today yielded an Eric Carle book. (Yep, he was out there today.) And right now, before she goes to bed tonight, we are reading The Very Busy Spider.

Me, I am gonna spend the night with a new title by Thomas Newkirk called Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. I hear the book is great.

And if does for me anywhere near what Eric Carle did for my little girl, consider me a lucky ducky.

Mark Twain once said about his demise, “Tales of my death are greatly exaggerated,” I say, “Fables about the death of reading are exceedingly hyperbolic.”

READING IS ALIVE IN AMERICA. Very much so. Matter of fact, I’d suggest that we are all reading more than we ever have before. Books have simply become a part of the reading pie and not the whole darn thing — yet folks are still drinking ‘em down.

And it looks like they will be for quite long time. Is the book sky really falling? Seems to me, not so much.