Syllabus #250

I love cats as much as any human possibly can (more than any human probably should) and yet this chills me to my core.  Scholastic, you've gone too far.

Every line of work has a particularly bad season.  Accountants dread tax season.  Retail workers dread the holiday season.  Restaurant workers loathe Valentine's Day.  For school librarians, our personal hell is Book Fair.  

All those memes about the magic childhood memories of the book fair straight up give me hives.  Making children give me money for books, when I am normally in the business of giving them books for free.99 feels so very wrong.  It's like if you were a police officer teaching the DARE program and then for one week out of the school year, you said, ok kids, now I'm here to sell you some meth.

Aside from the overall principle of the thing, the book fair is just an unrelenting hellscape.  Inevitably, children will cry.  They will cry when whatever highly specific Minecraft diary of the moment sells out before they can buy one.  They will cry when they have $30 and it's not enough to buy all 25 things they absolutely have to acquire.  They will cry when they have $0.13 and can't buy any of the 25 things they also require in order to live.  

Children do not understand how to handle money, conceptually or with regard to socially acceptable behaviors.  They will extract sweaty, crumpled bills from inside a shoe.  They will produce cigarette-scented sandwich baggies full of assorted, fuzz-covered coins.  They will steal money from their classmates to buy that frigging spy pen that works for approximately 19 seconds and then dries out.  They will spend the money that was supposed to go on their lunch account to buy the gem mining kit, and then cry when I won't let them return it with all the gems missing.  They will steal their little sister's field trip money to buy a poster, and then cry when I won't let them return it after they folded it in quarters and used it as an umbrella to walk home in the rain.  They will complain about the price of books, as if I am personally persecuting them by charging $14.99 (plus tax!  Don't forget about sales tax!) for the new hardcover Dog Man.  They will try to haggle, as if we are in a medieval bazaar and not a 21st century corporate-sponsored school fundraiser.

Book Fair's only redeeming value is that it makes me appreciate the more pedestrian indignities I face on a typical school day.

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Read banned books.

I'm not even going to read this article about Australia's "cat problem" because I know they don't mean "we don't have enough cats and it's a problem because we are sad."  I don't want to know how they are reducing their cat population.  All I need to know is that I'm never going to Australia, so you can throw that shrimp on your barbie and smoke it, ozzies. 

Analog Reading:

Finished reading Percival Everett's James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective.  It takes some kind of virtuosity to successfully pull off this type of alternate perspective novel.  Sometimes it comes off as merely interesting, as in The Wide Sargasso Sea  by Jean Rhys (the backstory for the crazy wife in the attic from Jane Eyre) and sometimes it is borderline unreadable, as in The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall.  (I don't know if that was user error on my part, but I had a hard time following that one.)  I'm going to declare this one a victory for Everett.  It preserves the wit and the appreciation for the absurdity of circumstances you find in Twain's original, but the depth of humanity and the richness of Jim's interior life make this version, to me, superior.

Just started reading Kristin Hannah's The Women.  It's too early to have an informed opinion, but I'm enjoying it so far.