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Snapshot: Pandemic Teaching


I am sad. They have officially cancelled school for the remainder of the year.

I feel lost. My identity is very much wrapped up in my teaching. I love what I do.

I miss my students and colleagues, I miss the excitement of interacting with people everyday and exploring their curiosity and ideas. I miss being able to commiserate with my friends. Moving online with my team and students is not the same as being together in our school. People are anxious and overwhelmed and not sure how to best move forward.

It could be any day of the week, as we have lost all of the markers that delineate one day from another. It’s like living in the movie GroundHog Day. I believe today is Tuesday, because Mommy School was up and running, the emails from school have not stopped and I think Isaac might have an online piano lesson this afternoon.

There are many lessons that will come with this time, I hope we will be better able to see them as we try to move forward through this quagmire. I will try to write through the successes as we continue through.

I did want to link this article from Edutopia, as it has lots more great YA Book Recommendations, that might be just what you (or someone you’re spending your days with) needs right now.

“22 Young Adult Novels to Help Students Process the Pandemic (or Forget It for a Bit)” Check it out here. Order online from your local book store!

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Snapshot: Passage Study

Take a look at this passage:

from Shoe Dog: A Memoir By The Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.


        “Perhaps nothing ever revealed my mother’s true nature like the frequent drills she put me through. As a young girl she’d witnessed a house in her neighborhood burn to the ground; one of the people inside had been killed. So she often tied a rope to the post of my bed and made me use it to rappel out of my second-floor window. While she timed  me. What must the neighbors have thought? What must I have thought? Probably this: Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared.

          And this: My mother loves me.”

I loved this passage. As a writer, I like how he poses several questions after he shares such a vivid image of he and his mother practising escaping a burning building. In recounting the story, he wonders what it must have looked like to others– but more importantly, he answers what it made him think of… and in the stragest of circumstances, he sees that his mother’s odd behaviour was really her love for him.

This was a great passage for students to note and imitate craft. Share a vignette, pose the questions. End with possibilities: Probably this:… And this… And this…

Read my review of Shoe Dog here.

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Snapshots: Teaching

This blog started because I read a lot because I want to be able to recommend titles to my students. I also look for wonderful passages and beautiful sentences– those too are for my students. I want them to take notice of what they read: what it means to them; what it makes them think about; what they question; what it looks like on the page; how it is crafted to get our attention.

The Snapshots Page includes posts that snapshot moments and thoughts about my teaching of reading and writing.

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Book Snap #78

Title: Patron Saints of Nothing

Author: Randy Ribay

Date Read: April 12, 2020

One and a half snaps.

Young Adult authors are exploring more and more topics that expose readers to the uncomfortable truths of our world. Patron Saints of Nothing takes readers to the Philippines, to discover with Jay, the truth of his cousin, Jun’s death.

Rodrigo Duterte is the President of the Philippines, elected in 2016. After his inauguration, Duterte gave a speech urging Filipino citizens to kill drug addicts. The Philippine Daily Inquirer published a “kill list.” Duterte has justified the drug war by claiming that the Philippines was becoming a “narco-state”. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the prevalence of drug use in the country is lower than the global average. Duterte has dismissed human rights concerns by dehumanizing drug users. This is the current political context surrounding this story.

Jay is jolted from his all-American existence when his father tells him that his cousin is dead. He pieces together that he was shot by the police for being a drug pusher. Then he receives a mysterious message telling him that his cousin did not deserve to die. He insists on travelling to Manilla on his own to uncover the real story of the cousin he knew and loved.

This is a lovely story of guilt and coming-of-age, marked by the very real and raw political context of the poverty, abuse, and violence of the Philippines.

A heart-wrenching and powerful read. It was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award, LA Times Book Prize, Edgar Award for YA, and CILIP Carnegie Medal.



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Book Snap #77

Title: American Dirt

Author: Jeanine Cummins

Date Read: March 21, 2020

Two snaps.

So, Oprah chose this one for her Book Club– and boy, did it stir up some controversy.

The complaints about the book mix concerns with its execution (including what some have said is Spanish not typical of Mexico), the identity of the author and the belief that a Latino writer telling the same story would not get the same support.

The novel tells the story of Lydia, a mother fleeing Mexico with her son, after a drug cartel kills her husband and family. Cummins has been accused of trafficking in stereotypes while appropriating a culture to which she does not belong.

Well, I am no rookie to controversies surrounding the books that Oprah has chosen for her Book Clubs. In 2005, she declared that James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was revelatory and that James Frey was the man that kept her up at night.

You know what? Both times, Oprah was right. They were really good books. Regardless of the controversy that spins around them. Because, really, what is story telling? Connecting with another person is one of the highest forms of social being for humans, and at the heart of it is good storytelling. When I’m telling you a story, and you’re engaged in it, you match your thinking with mine. Both Cummins and Frey were able to do this– whether they fictionalized parts of their memoir or if “someone slightly browner” should have written it (as Cummins concedes in her Author’s Notes). More importantly, she did spend four years researching and writing the novel, but she also was compelled to write the story because she was frustrated by the discourse surrounding immigration in the United States.

I was appalled at the way Latino migrants, even five years ago — and it has gotten exponentially worse since then — were characterized within that public discourse. At worse, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamouring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.

(Cummins, p.381)

Cummins drew me in to Lydia’s story. I pained for her incomprehensible loss; I was bereft, as she was, at the impossible choices left for her and her son, Luca. I followed their journey through Mexico to the border with breath caught in my lungs and my heart in my stomach.

This is emotional story telling, balanced with terror. It is Narcos layered with This Is Us. It is about a mother who simply will not give up– because her son moves her to defy all the odds placed at her feet. It is fear and hope, and love and pain all mixed into a riveting page-turner I could not put down. Ignore the controversy. Read it.