back to school

I arrived at Rosedale Middle School today at about 920am. There were at least 25 community members in the library awaiting their placement in a classroom. We were each given 30 minutes in two seperate classes. I brought Zen Shorts, The Collected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, and elementia--the young adult literary magazine I edit at JOCO library.

Mikey, Wendy, and Joel from the RDA were there. Mr. Joe Faus, our muralist, was there...
as were Anne, Lynn, and Julie from Dykes Library.

Now, due to Mikey, distracting me, first, with his overgrown beard and then,second, with stories of sharks in thailand ;-) I missed the 1st classroom session.

yes! that's my story and I'm sticking to it. ;-)

Have I told you that Mikey is born two days before me; same year! yeah, distraction occurs. ;-)

But anyway, I did manage to make my way down the long hallway to Mr.Corrick's classroom for the second session. I peered into the door's window and immediatlely recognized one young man from tutoring.



There were about 15 students in the classroom and I enjoyed every minute of it. As I always do when reading and sharing poetry with young people, I had them read some of it outloud. The coolest thing was when a young man read a poem published in elementia that was written by a young girl. He knew her, was excited that she was in elementia, and read her very "girl" powered poem outloud.

They also seemed to really like Zen Shorts. They wanted to change Stillwater's name to Montario so, I changed it. They seemed tickled by my willingnes to do so.

At the very end, I did a few impromptu book talks on "Road of the Dead" by Kevin Brooks and "Black and White" by Paul Valoponi.

Two particular girls showed real interest in submitting to elementia, and I have set it up with the principal to return sometime next week with submission forms. Luckily, I'd dropped off 10 or so copies of elementia with their librarian earlier that morning.

I then got to walk the halls during the "in between" class stage. It was interesting & loud. I ran into another young man from tutoring and he had all his friend take a peek at my chuck taylors. chuck taylors are very important you see, and he said to his friends, now, if only we can get her to buy a pair of cortezs'. ;-) This young man is very witty and is always a bit difficult to contain at tutoring. Last time I worked with him, I found him a book on low riders. He seemd dis-interested at the time, but a social welfare student informed me today that he'd mentioned that book several times since that encounter. That made me smile; it really did.

Before leaving, Mikey and I paid a quick visit to the art teacher's classroom and she gave us the names of at least 10 or so potential kids to include in the mural this summer. We will hopefully go back next week to meet with the group.

"Thrivant Day" is May 24th. We will clean up/ beautify as much as we can at the mural location. If you'd like to help out, come on with it! email me. I will have more specific information on that soon and will certainly post.

have a good weekend; it's may, time for flowers.