Dear Reader,
During the school year, teachers produce an enormous amount of output. Lesson plans, assessments, family communication, bulletin board designs: it's relentless. There's not always much time for deep thinking.
During breaks, I advocate for teachers to focus on input. Read books. Listen to podcasts. Try new foods. See new sites. Take in information and ideas without the pressure of doing anything with them. Let them percolate during your morning run, your bike ride across town, your evening pottery class.
When it's back to school, you'll be full of ideas, ready to turn them into output that will serve your students.
Along those lines: are you a teacher who wants to try a Book Club unit? Reply to this email with what you're thinking and I'll offer a suggestion.
Today's Book Recommendation
Title: Cleo Porter and the Body Electric
Author: Jake Burt
Genre: Dystopian
Age Range: 11+
Summary: Cleo is 12-years-old, studying to be a doctor, and has never left her apartment. That's because the government constructed huge apartment buildings to protect people from a devastating influenza pandemic. Drones and machines service the buildings so that no one ever leaves their unit. Everything runs smoothly — until the day when someone else's life-saving medicine is delivered to Cleo's apartment. Cleo sees only one option: to leave her apartment and deliver the misplaced medicine herself. In doing so, she discovers the truth — part ugly, part beautiful — about her society.
Teaching with Cleo Porter and the Body Electric
Recommend this book to students who:
🕹️ Are intrigued by but not yet ready for Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Both books toggle between virtual and real lives, as well as how the state of the real world contributed to the intoxicating growth of virtual reality.
📚 Have devoured other dystopian stories, such as The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera, The Town With No Mirrors by Christina Collins, or The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.
Read it for these themes:
Technological dependency: Cleo's journey reveals the incredible mechanical systems that sustain their way of life AND the dark, deadly side of when the machines fail.
Isolation: Inside, families are physically isolated but virtually connected. Outside, Cleo discovers her first in-person community, but it's forced to be isolated from society.
Autonomy: People in Cleo's world can choose their jobs, their hobbies, their food, their friends. They can choose how they spend their time and energy. But are all those choices enough to provide autonomy if they can never leave their apartment?
My Two Cents: I was surprised, at first, to realize that this book was written before COVID. But by being a "what if?" story that is not specific to COVID, it allows readers to think about what could happen without dredging up the stress, anxiety, and trauma from their own experiences.
Resource of the Week
Want to pair character analysis with identity exploration? Invite students to analyze the seen and unseen parts of their character with our Identity Iceberg Graphic Organizer.
Have a good one and learn everything you can,
Hannah
PS: What has been your best input so far this summer?
