educating alice

“My pets, go read!”

A Tall Tale: Laura Amy Schlitz - 4/1/2008 - School Library Journal

The school bus honked and pulled over, startling Laura Schlitz as she was taking a walk in her residential neighborhood here. The bus driver leaned out and called to Ms. Schlitz: “Aren’t you the lady who won that big book award? I recognize you!” It is at such moments that Laura Amy Schlitz, whose book “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village” recently won the 2008 Newbery Medal, the most prestigious prize in children’s literature, realizes that she is not simply a school librarian anymore.

Shy school librarian finds success as author | csmonitor.com

The medal-winning book this year, “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!,” succeeds as drama, poetry, history, and as something altogether new and wonderful.

Liz Rosenberg weighs in on our choices at The Boston Globe: It took a village to win a Newbery.

Last Friday’s Literary Salon featured my students reading selections from the monologues and dialogues of Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! For a few weeks beforehand I’d read them one or two a day during our morning meeting. Each child selected one, practiced at home, and then read it on Friday. Not only that — I recorded their readings, turned them into audio files, and yesterday the kids put them on their individual blogs as podcasts. Of course, they are not as polished as those of the Park School fifth graders for whom the pieces were originally written, but my students had fun with them and performed them ably. Do have a look, a listen, and comment if you are so inclined. (They are very eager for comments!)

HUGO, the lord’s nephew

TAGGOT, the blacksmith’s daughter

ALICE, the shepherdess

THOMAS, the doctor’s son

MOGG, the villein’s daughter

OTHO, the miller’s son

SIMON, the knight’s son

EDGAR, the falconer’s son

ISOBEL, the lord’s daughter

BARBARY, the mudslinger

JACOB BEN SALOMON, the moneylender’s son and PETRONELLA, the merchant’s daughter

PASK, the runaway

PIERS, the glassblower’s apprentice

MARIOT and MAUD, the glassblower’s daughters

NELLY, the sniggler

Drogo, the tanner’s apprentice 

GILES, the beggar

Our classroom theme for the year is immigration. We begin by discussing the children’s own metaphoric migration from a small lower school to our very large middle and high school building. We move out to oral histories — they interview people they know about their own experiences coming to America. Along the way we see movies, go places (Ellis Island, Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Walking Tour, Museum of Chinese in America), read works of historical fiction, and more. (This year, for example, we had a wonderful time with Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.)

We then move back to the time of forced immigration from Africa, the time of slavery in America. Because of my two years in Sierra Leone, I like to do a lot with the African connection. And because the captives were mostly Mende and because they went home to Africa, I love teaching the Amistad story. In fact, I’ve been working on a book for children about Sarah Magru Kinson, one of four children on the ship. Last year I put it on a blog for my students to read; this year I made it available to the other fourth grade classes. It has been wonderful to get their feedback. Here is this year’s introduction for my class. Here, here, here, and here are some of their posts about the story.

After reading and writing about the story, I showed the children a series of poems about enslavement and/or the Amistad.  I then showed them the poem the class wrote last year with Natasha Trethewey and invited them to write their own.  These will be integrated into collages like these from last year and posted on their blogs.   Their poems are wonderful and I can’t wait to see them completed!

I’m also incredibly touched and moved by the emails I’m getting from the children in other classes.  I have to thank Laura Amy Schlitz for making me brave enough to give the story to them. Last year I felt skittish about even letting my own class read it, but now that I know that Laura wrote her plays for students in her school originally I somehow felt much more relaxed about my work being used in my school.

Laura Amy Schlitz, a school librarian in Baltimore and author of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village, was wide awake when the Newbery call came. But not exactly because she had been expecting it. “I had woken up at 5 and had a stomachache,” she says, “and couldn’t go back to sleep. Finally it was 6:30, when I would have woken up anyway. I told myself, ‘OK, it’s time to be brave, the phone hasn’t rung, you have a good life, it’s time to get up and fix lunch.’ Then the phone rang.”Schlitz recalls being “thunderstruck” by the news. “I had been trying not to want one of the honors,” she says, “because I knew the chances were very slim. I don’t remember the call very well. It was some time before I remembered to stammer out ‘thank you.’ On the one hand I don’t remember the call but on the other hand I’ll remember it the rest of my life.”

Selznick and Schlitz Discuss Their Award-Winning Books - 1/17/2008 - Publishers Weekly

Here’s a lovely segment featuring Laura, her students, and the school from a local Baltimore news station: School Librarian Receives Literary Award.

The monologues were a hit with the fifth-graders, and after some urging from parents and colleagues, Schlitz sent “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies” to 11 publishers in the summer of 2000. One wrote back to inform her, she recalls, that “we have shredded your manuscript.”

Children’s Book Award Winners Break The Mold - washingtonpost.com

Park School of Baltimore librarian Laura Amy Schlitz jokingly reacts to photographers taking her photograph after telling a story to a group of second grade students, Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, in Baltimore. Schlitz, who wrote, “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village,” is this year’s winner of the John Newbery Medal for best children’s book. (AP Photo/Rob Carr)

During an all-school assembly called yesterday afternoon in Schlitz’s honor, the entire student body of nearly 900 students stood and cheered for at least 30 seconds. The applause went on and on.

Read the whole of this lovely article from Schlitz’s hometown paper here.