As a junior high teacher I’ve witnessed and engaged in my share of kerfuffles over the value of middle grade novels. A joke made at a recent writing conference I attended gets at the heart of the debate: “There’s high grade literature and then there is middle grade literature.” Many cases have been made, on this blog and others, in defense of middle grade texts. If I may, I’d like to add some slightly personal evidence affirming the value of this literature.

About six months ago my father passed away. Needless to say the last six months have been trying for me, my family, and especially my elderly mother. When tragedy hits, most of the world reads self-help books; English majors turn to fiction.  Therefore, I attempted to understand and categorize my grief through the literary arts.  I initially attempted to find a path through my grief by engaging with the the canon, relying upon what my collegiate studies and the literati consider “high literature.”  I went through my Faulkner phase, and on a few occasions, put on Cash’s face, especially when dealing with the business side of death; as an only child, the loss of a parent brings more paperwork, phone calls, decisions, and meetings than is healthy. I went through my next phase of “high literature” and looked to poetry as I read or penned verse in my attempts to engage my emotions head-on. Frankly, this didn’t help much at all. None of my explorations into the literary cannon bore meaningful fruit and I found myself still adrift, feeling isolated, irrational, and impulsive.

I didn’t find any solace until I remembered a book. A middle grade book that, frankly, doesn’t bear the weight of hundreds of academics pressing its importance and relevance down on me. Maybe that is why it can speak so freely and deliver such individualized impact. In Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech provided something that the literary giants didn’t bring to the table as I tried to process my grief—an honest and heartfelt exploration of what grief feels like in its rawest moments and what unexpected and personalized ways we find to cope with and make sense of it. For me, Faulkner, Whitman or Dickenson and their literary equals—despite the fact that I deeply appreciate their writing—offer predictable, academic, or metaphysical explorations of suffering. They explore the abstract concepts of human existence. But when one is adrift in an ocean of confusion and personal suffering, such musings lack an applicability. It’s difficult to connect to the intellectual when you are brought down to your own instinctual, confusing, and childlike yearnings for something out of reach that you can’t even seem to articulate. Finding myself amidst that experience only happened in the concrete realism of Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons.

Salamanca and Phoebe are two girls attempting to navigate their normal lives, but continually find themselves running into waves of fear, confusion, grief, and . . . at least one lunatic. Both girls have lost their mothers—one to death and another to abandonment. But the girls, in an attempt to deal with the pain, determine that Phoebe’s mother was really kidnapped by a lunatic, and they set off on a journey to find the lunatic and thus rescue the missing mother. Grief and loss are not philosophical investigations in this novel; they’re portrayed honestly, concretely, and as somehow simple in their complexity, because they bring us back down to the childlike impulses that drive us to do irrational and emotional things—the kind of impulses we all experience in times of trauma.

I’ve read and taught Walk Two Moons before, but it wasn’t until after my father died that I realized how logical Salamanca and Phoebe are. As adults we might try write off their response to grief as bizarre, juvenile, or irrational, but when one is in the midst of upheaval and loss, who is to say the juvenile response is not actually an appropriate reaction? Dealing with tragedy brings us all to the level of children, because we are once again yearning for someone to take us in their arms and tell us it will all be alright; we want someone else to fix it, and want to believe miracles can happen. Literature written for the middle grades has the ability to connect to the awkward, frightened, stumbling pre-teen in all of us. And like Phoebe and Salamanca, we could very easily find ourselves pursuing a mysterious lunatic or embarking on a journey across the country to find our lost parent.

So, to those middle grade nay-sayers and members of the real or even pseudo-intelligentsia, I suggest, as we read over and over in Creech’s text: “Never judge a man before you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.” Don’t pass judgment on the value of any family of books until you’ve fully sampled from them.  If “YA saves,” then I propose that middle-grade can heal.

Please let me know how middle-grade has mattered to you.

Bruce Eschler teaches junior high school students most of the year, writes speculative fiction for kids as much as he can, and is hoping he’ll soon be done with his pesky doctoral program. He has occasionally been spotted at www.bruceeschler.com.

As a teacher, I spend 180 days a year with tweens and teens. I’ve observed students in many teaching scenarios, including while other adults (guest authors or newbie teachers) tried instructing or entertaining them. The sessions that tend to bore the kids and stress out the presenter fall prey to three mistakes—all of which come from not understanding the audience.

Teaching or presenting to tweens and teens can be an intimidating task. After all, kids can be honest—i.e., brutal—about whether they like your book, subject matter, or you, and/or are often noticeably uninterested in what adults try to share with them. As a veteran teacher, I mentor new teachers and student teachers who have some of the same fears authors bring along when entering the classroom or auditorium. The advice in the post is the same advice new teachers get. Even when an author may have some background experience working with large groups of kids, it’s important to note that no author’s presentation—just like no curriculum lesson—will ever go off perfectly or exactly the same each time; this is because each group of students is different. So in order to ensure that luck is on your side more often than not, you can prepare each presentation based on the needs of the audience rather than the topic.

There are three things to keep in mind any time you’re teaching or presenting to kids or teens—three big mistakes not to make:

Mistake 1: Thinking It’s About You/Your Book

But wait, didn’t the librarian or that teacher invite you to come to the school because their students love your book or they’re going to love your book? And don’t you have this great activity that will help    students learn the craft of writing or what makes compelling characters? This all may be true, but you need to remember that with tweens and teens, the entire world revolves around them—not you. (Unless you’re J.K. Rowling; but even then only some kids are persistently orbiting the Potter Universe.) There are likely to be students in attendance who are reluctant readers, who haven’t heard of you, or aren’t thrilled about your genre. So you have to do the heavy lifting: you need to figure out a way to make what you’re presenting seem connected to them and their world, to make it relevant for them. For example, when I teach junior high students about the elements of fiction each fall, I start with movies, not novels or short stories. Why? Because I know all of my students watched one if not one hundred movies over the summer. Movies are what the majority of them know and are passionate about when it comes to their experiences with “story.” When discussing fiction genres, we talk about music genres. When discussing conflict, we talk about sports and teams. Help the kids see that what they care about is actually connected to what you’re trying to explore with them, thus making it relevant. Figuring out how the content of your presentation relates to something teens already    care about will get them involved—which does wonders for author anxiety and your success in school tours.

Mistake 2:    Failure to Ask Questions

One of the best ways to get kids and teens involved and to help them make connections with your content is to ask them questions. There might be some trial-and-error on your part as you experiment with the right questions to ask, but teaching and presenting are just like writing: it takes practice to do them well, and that includes learning from previous attempts. Use both closed and opened-ended questions (yes/no answers and opinion-based answers, respectively). For example, recently I went to hear two of my author friends present at a library. In part of the program, they talked about books they were forced to read in school. One of them asked the simple question, “Anyone here ever been force to read a book they didn’t like?” Then he paused as many hands from the audience flew up, tightening the kids’ connection with the presenters. Later, as the duo started discussing heroes, they asked the group of tweens and teens “what makes a hero” and then took three to five minutes and let the audience do the teaching. From my seat in the back, I could see how engaged and attentive the kids were. Most of them had never read either of these authors’ books, but because the authors brought the kids into the presentation, their audience was hooked.

Mistake 3: Forgetting to Mix It Up

Remember that kids have limited attention spans. Each of us can focus on a task or subject for only a limited amount of time before our minds wander and we become distracted. I’ve even heard that companies like 3M and Google dedicate something like 15% of the employee workday to free time—knowing that employee concentration suffers otherwise. For tweens and teens, the magic number is also fifteen—ten to fifteen minutes, that is. Every ten to fifteen minutes you want to switch topics, move to a new activity, or change your instructional approach from lecture to discussion or from discussion to something hands-on, etc. Whatever you’re doing, figure out a way to break up your gig into ten-to-fifteen-minute segments.

Now it’s time to practice what I preach. You’re blog reading attention span is almost up. I hope these ideas help. Let me know what’s worked for you in reaching your audience. As a teacher and writer, I love to teach and I love to learn—everyone can improve their craft.

Bruce Eschler teaches junior high school students most of the year, writes speculative fiction for kids as much he can, and is hoping he’ll soon be done with his pesky doctoral program. He has occasionally been spotted at www.bruceeschler.com.