Brian Jacques

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Three reasons we read three obituaries for children’s author Brian Jacques:

  1. To meet Common Core State Standard RI.6.9: “Compare and contrast one author’s presentation of events with that of another (e.g., a memoir written by and a biography on the same person).”
  2. Mr. Jacques lived about three obits’ worth.
  3. I couldn’t decide which I liked best:

The Telegraph

Aged 10, he was told to write a story about animals and turned in a tale about a bird that cleaned a crocodile’s teeth. His teacher refused to believe that a boy so young could write so imaginatively and caned Brian when he insisted he had not copied it.

Washington Post

Mr. Jacques (pronounced “Jakes”), who grew up near the docks of Liverpool, left school at 15 and found work as a merchant mariner. He later worked as a railway fireman, long-haul trucker, bus driver, postmaster, longshoreman, police constable and stand-up comic.

New York Times

On his route was the Royal School for the Blind. Invited in for a nice cup of tea one day, he volunteered to read to the students. Over time, he grew dissatisfied with the books available — too much adolescent angst, he later said — and vowed to write his own.

Nohemi Gonzalez

 

Nohemi Gonzalez was murdered in the 2015 massacres in Paris.

The only daughter of an immigrant mother, Nohemi pursued her studies in industrial design, worked as a teaching assistant and shop technician, and held a job at an Armani Exchange. Her professor called her “an absolute delight.”

Reading about Ms. Gonzalez introduced our 6th graders to one of higher education’s best features, the opportunity to study abroad.

After reading this lovely profile, students shared where they’d like to go: Spain and France ranked high, as did Ireland; other destinations included Hong Kong, the Dominican Republic, and Greece.

 

paris peace

 

Most of the obituaries we read each week are not heartbreaking; this one was. Rest in peace, Nohemi. May your life be an inspiration.

 

Betty Hart

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“People kept thinking, ‘Oh, we can catch kids up later,’ and her big message was to start young and make sure the environment for young children is really rich in language.”

 

Betty Hart is one of my heroes. Thanks to her, we know this:

Hart-Risley-1995

It is an unhappy fact that you can fairly accurately predict whether kids will graduate from high school by looking at their third grade reading scores. As Robert Pondiscio says:

I can think of no more urgent priority for K–12 education than getting as many children as possible to the starting line as readers by third grade. If that’s not a make-or-break issue for kids, it’s damn close.

Teaching vocabulary* is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job, so I’d do it anyway, but it’s because of Ms. Hart’s work that I do it with such urgency. And I bet she’d be pleased that her own obituary provides such a splendid array. The words we learned were: disparity, deficit, prevalent, transcribewelfare, cumulative, touchstone, and jargon.

She’d also be delighted that one student, studying the chart, asked (unprompted) this astute question: “But what if poor parents talked to their kids more [than wealthy parents]?”** The title of a recent Washington Post article sums it up: “The most powerful thing we could give poor kids is completely free.”

In her honor, each student selected one of the above vocabulary words and created a (jargon-free) poster that could explain its meaning to a child.

Deficit

 

*Shop talk: Bringing Words to Life taught me how to teach vocabulary. If my teaching bookshelf were on fire, that’s the book I’d grab.

**This led to a good discussion about averages, in which I emphasized that one could not conclude from the chart what all poor, working-class, or rich families do. In the course of this digression, we determined by how much my presence in the classroom raised its average age (noticeably), and we talked about how a visit from LeBron James would raise our average dunking skill and wealth.

 

Ruth Batson

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“She always gave back to the community, quietly and effectively.”

 

I asked my students this question: “What do people who live elsewhere think of when they think of Boston?”

Responses included the city’s distinctive accent, Revolutionary War history, and strong sports culture.

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When I asked if there were any negative associations, however, the only suggestion – to our great amusement – was “dirty water.” Boston’s former notoriety for racial division was unknown.

 

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In fairness, I didn’t know about it either when I was a 6th grader.

Moreover, that painful history wouldn’t be obvious from looking at the students, who look a lot like the city. Our classroom’s diversity is a tribute to the work of Ruth Batson, whose Boston Globe obituary we read together.

 

John F. Baker, Jr.

“In all, Sgt. Baker was credited with recovering eight fallen U.S. soldiers, destroying six bunkers and killing at least 10 enemies.”

 

When Sergeant John F. Baker, Jr. received the Medal of Honor, President Lyndon Johnson remarked that he and his fellow recipient, a former West Point basketball player, looked like Mutt and Jeff:

muttandjeff

 

It probably wasn’t the first joke Sergeant Baker ever heard about his height. But the real joke was on the Marines, who had refused him for being an inch too short.

Baker’s heroism extended beyond one terrible day in 1966. For the remainder of his tour he scouted Viet Cong tunnels, and, after receiving his Medal of Honor, sought to return to combat duty. Although his requests were denied, Baker devoted the rest of his life, both in and out of uniform, to serving fellow soldiers and veterans.

His obituary, from the Washington Post, gave us the opportunity to learn about different medals and ranks, as well as the military’s custom of saluting Medal of Honor recipients first.

Sergeant Baker’s obituary also taught us the following vocabulary: diminutive, disparate, mortally, evacuate, valor, indomitable, and gallantry.

Sergeant Baker’s father was a trapeze artist. Oddly enough, so was the father of the mathematical genius whose obituary we read last week.

 

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