200. Justice-Themed Books for Your High Schoolers with Alison Courchesne

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In this enlightening episode, Allison, a dedicated librarian who transitioned from teaching high school English, shares her passion for empowering students and fostering a lifelong love for reading. She highlights the unique role librarians play in guiding students to make their own reading choices and offers heartfelt anecdotes, along with top book recommendations like "Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship" by Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo. Additionally, Allison explores the transformative power of empathy in education through Jamil Zaki's "The War for Kindness," and discusses the importance of diverse perspectives with works by Jen DeLeon, such as "White Space," "Don't Ask Me When I'm From," and "Borderless."


The Big Dream 

Allison's big dream for education is to empower students to make their own choices and cultivate a love for reading. She envisions a world where librarians play a pivotal role in guiding students and teachers toward discovering the right books, helping them design a reading life tailored to their own curiosity and interests. Allison emphasizes the importance of librarians in education, not just as keepers of books, but as connectors of essential resources and support for the entire school community.


Mindset Shifts Required

Empathy as a Skill: Understanding that empathy is not a fixed trait but a skill that can be nurtured and developed over time. This mindset shift can help educators focus on building empathy in students and themselves, preventing empathy burnout.

Literature as a Tool for Understanding: Recognizing the power of literature in navigating multiple cultural identities and fostering empathy. Books like Jen DeLeon's "White Space," "Don't Ask Me When I'm From," and "Borderless" can provide valuable insights and should be included in school curriculums.

Librarians as Educators: Viewing librarians as integral educators who support teachers, students, and school staff by connecting them with valuable resources and guidance. This shift can lead to more collaborative efforts and better utilization of the library's offerings.


Action Steps  


Step 1: Explore Diverse Literature



Incorporate diverse books into your curriculum that reflect various cultural identities and perspectives. Start with recommended reads like "Letters from Max," "The War for Kindness," and Jen DeLeon's works.


Step 2: Cultivate Empathy in the Classroom

Use literature to teach empathy. Create activities that allow students to explore characters' emotions and situations, helping them understand and connect with different perspectives.


Step 3: Leverage Librarian Expertise

Collaborate with your school's librarian to find resources that align with your teaching goals. Librarians can provide valuable recommendations and support for both fiction and nonfiction texts.


Challenges?

One of the main challenges educators may face is overcoming the perception of librarians as mere keepers of books rather than integral educational partners. This mindset can limit the collaborative potential between teachers and librarians and restrict students' access to a wealth of resources.

One Step to Get Started 

Reach out to your school's librarian and start a conversation about your current curriculum needs. Ask for book recommendations or resources that could enhance your lessons. This simple step can open up new avenues for collaboration and enrich the educational experience for both you and your students.

Stay Connected

You can find this week’s guest on Facebook.


To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Independent Reading Selection Guide with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 200 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

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​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT

00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Allison, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Thank you, I am incredibly excited. I am an avid reader and just very excited to be talking to a real-life librarian. I'm very into this conversation we're going to have today. I'm wondering if, just to kind of ground our work today, I think people love hearing the why behind why people chose education or why people chose specific professions, and so I love. Dr Bettina loves thinking about freedom, dreaming, and she says you know their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so, with that in mind, what is that big dream that you hold for education? 

00:47 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
in mind. What is that big dream that you hold for education? Well, if you know, if all things could be magical and true, I the reason that I ended up in the library world is because I love being able to guide kids to making their own choices and helping them to learn all the options that are out there in the world and then giving them the structures to be able to make choices that work for them in terms of their own curiosity and interests. And all of that and I felt like being in the library was a place that allowed me to have that kind of a teaching life and get to know what kids were interested in, without the boundaries necessarily of like. Here is the curriculum that we must follow to be able to work with kids to design their own curriculum of. I'm interested in this enough that I want to follow this particular path, or this dream or this interest, whether it's fiction, nonfiction or non-book resources. To be able to help kids to design a reading life for themselves is the most exciting part of education for me. 

01:51 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Wow, that is super exciting. I feel like there's a quote out there somewhere that I saw once no idea who to credit, but it was like you basically just haven't found the right book yet. Like no one hates reading, you just haven't found the right book yet. Yeah, strong believer in that. So that is so cool. So you get to work with students and I imagine you also kind of coach teachers in a sense of like you have all of this knowledge of all of these books and teachers might be kind of head down. 

02:18
Here's like the thing that I'm teaching, and I'm teaching like looking for those resources, and I'm I'm curious to know. You know there are teachers who listen to this podcast. There are leaders, there are instructional coaches who are supporting teachers in that same way. There may be fellow librarians, I'm not sure, but I think you know I'm wondering for them if this episode could be kind of a go-to place for, like here are some super cool texts that are out in the world, and if you're designing a new unit or you're doing the same thing, guiding to students to figure out what they want to read, maybe we could give them some ideas of kind of where to go. And so I will just kind of open it up. I know you have some books in mind, and so do you want to take us through some books that you are just like loving lately, that you would recommend high schoolers check out? 

03:05 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Yeah, I'd love to, and absolutely. And my first thing before I recommend any particular books is don't be afraid to ask your own librarian, because they probably know you better than you realize. So I know you know when I'll always be listening for people dropping a little piece of intel about what they're interested in or what they're thinking about next or what they heard about, and so and I'm always thinking about how I can help find somebody finds like the just right book for them, whether it's a kid or a grownup or anybody. So here's some books that I like. But ask your librarian they they might say something like oh I'm so glad you asked, because they've been dreaming up some good recommendations for you too. So I brought with me some ideas both in fiction and nonfiction. 

03:53
Before I was a librarian, I used to be an English teacher, also in high school, and so I pretty much exclusively taught fiction when I was teaching English, and becoming a librarian gave me this whole new world of resources and nonfiction that I've loved reading and learning about, and so I'll give you some nonfiction and then I'll like go back to my comfort zone and give you some fiction as well. So the first book is called Letters from Max, a poet, a teacher, a friendship, and it is coauthored by Sarah Rule and Max Ritvo. And Sarah Rule you, if anybody, is a theater fan. She's a playwright and theater is one of my first loves. That's, like you know, my happy place. And she is a wonderful playwright. And I came across this book this summer while I was doing some research work for a friend and colleague who was directing a play by her. So I was looking into her life and her background and this book came up and I tore through it and I think I never would have necessarily found it otherwise. 

04:53
But it's a book of letters between Sarah and Max. And she was a professor at Yale, and still is, and was teaching a playwriting class. And Max, who is not a playwright but was a poet, a student, walked into the class and said I know I'm not a playwright, but I would really love to take this class, can I take this class? And she was charmed by him and said sure. And that began this friendship between the two of them that started in class and her being his teacher and mentor in terms of playwriting and developed over the years into this mutually wonderful colleague relationship as writers where they would share their work with one another and comment and it really developed into this beautiful friendship. 

05:41
And unfortunately Max passed away young from cancer. So this book she put together of their letters and emails and text messages to memorialize the work that he had done as a writer, but also as a memorial to their friendship. And it was so moving because so often teachers, we have these really, really special relationships with kids that in media I've never really seen great portrayals of healthy adult relationships where you can really share with your students. This happens more obviously in high school than elementary school, but I've developed friendships with my students that have lasted into our adult lives. We live in the same community and this book was such a celebration of those kinds of relationships and it was, you know, a tissue vest it was. It was so very sad but also so heartening to see this friendship between these two people. 

06:37
So in terms of its use in school, it may be one of those books that it just. It's the book that you need as a teaching human being to validate like, yes, I am doing something in this world that is important to me, but I can also really imagine it being useful for an ELA class as a way to look at texts that are structured as, as a dialogue, as letters, as emails, as and as a way to help kids replicate that kind of text creation. Like, maybe imagine, like, take a text conversation between you and a friend and like, with their consent, see how could you turn this into a story or something like that. So there's also lots of SEL component stuff you know each letter you could take and excerpt a little piece of as a way of starting off a conversation about maybe a difficult topic, or it was beautiful. I absolutely loved this book and it was such a special find. 

07:32 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing and it reminds me. I love the structure idea because it reminds me of I just started reading Oye and then I put it down because I was like I actually want to listen to this. There's an audio book version by Melissa McGolan, I think, and so it's. It's the same idea of like it's a structured, it's conversations, like a one-way phone call, and then so it's like her version, but she's like talking to her sister and it's so. It's so cool and innovative that I love the idea of just not just content wise, but unpacking structure too. Super, super cool. 

08:05 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Yeah, and it's always fun to feel like you're peering in on somebody's life, like the fact that we get to read somebody else's emails feels so private and intense in a way that just reading a straight up you know prose nonfiction doesn't feel so I feel really connected to both of them as writers and as thinkers. 

08:26 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Those are so good, awesome. I'm sure you have more, so I will stop talking. What else you got? 

08:32 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Yeah, no problem. Okay, I have two books by one author. Her name is Dashka Slater. We had her come to visit our school a couple of years ago and she was a fantastic speaker. The books are called 57 Boss and Accountable and these could be looked at from lots of different perspectives Social studies, ela, social, emotional psychology. Like runs the gamut. Sarah I mean sorry, not Sarah Doshka Slater is a journalist. She's a magazine writer, newspaper writer. She writes for lots of different publications and these books, oh, she also is well-known because she writes a series of picture books about gosh, that snail I forgot the name of it, but it's a French-speaking snail. It's very cute. So this is a totally different side of her work. 

09:22
57 Boss is a YA nonfiction. Ya means young adult, young adult nonfiction work, though it was read by lots of adults in our building and it was well liked by everybody, and it's lots of short chapters where she expands on the reporting that she did on a particular story for the newspaper in California that she was working at at the time and she followed this one case and the case. She's changed the names of the people involved because they were underage Sasha and Richard and Sasha. They were a student who was riding home from school on a public bus and wearing a skirt, even though they were male presenting, and Richard is an African-American boy who was also riding home on the same bus from public school and, for reasons that he has trouble articulating after the fact, decides to light Sasha's skirt on fire and Sasha is deeply injured. And Sasha is deeply injured and it kicks off a criminal case that ends up with Richard not being able to finish school and ending up incarcerated. And so she follows both of these young people through the process of the case and the emotional process of the healing and grieving and forgiveness or lack of it. 

10:46
And because we're looking at these two figures, who are so marginalized in so many ways, you really start to understand the complexities of the situation and it doesn't give you any easy. 

10:57
Well, like that's right and that's wrong because facts. So the chapters are super short and it really gives the reader and the teacher, the kid, whoever's participating in this text, lots of ways in and lots of possible angles that you could talk about. So that's 57 bus, and then a couple about a year ago she came out with a book called accountable, which when she came and talked she said well, I wasn't planning to write a second book about hate crimes but like I became the hate crimes lady, so she followed this case for several years, also in California, about a high school student who started a social media account. It was a private social media account explicitly for the purpose of making memes that this kid thought were funny, but the butt of the joke was often like racist content and so he thought it would be fine because it was like just private to a few friends who also thought this was like wry and ironic and because it's the Internet, nothing stays private for long. 

12:06
And this became public and he used pictures of other kids in the school as the base of the concept, the school as the base of the content. And so the book is called Accountable because it's again one that seems like on the surface is like an easy open and shut. You did an awful thing, you have to leave our community kind of situation. But then when you start to understand like all the nuances of the situation is not nearly as clear. So this one is, I would say it's met, it's totally readable by students. 

12:39
But I would hope that teachers would read this one for their own knowledge, because it gave me a greater insight into the workings of kind of aspects of social media and the internet and the way that it's being used in ways that I did not grow up with. So it was really helpful for me to have like a line of sight into that. And also it was one of those like bury your head in your hands slow moving disasters of how the administration handled it and like if there was a wrong move to be made, they made it, and it was just such a cautionary tale that I thought about a lot since, in terms of our tale that I thought about a lot since, in terms of our our as teachers and administrators way of approaching a situation, that it would be really great if other people could read it before this kind of thing happens at their school, or maybe it already has and you have a different way of thinking about it. 

13:31 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, oh, my gosh, I love both of these sound fantastic. I love that you chose them, or or maybe I don't know if this is why you chose them, but I love that you chose them. Or maybe I don't know if this is why you chose them, but I love that they have complexity in them. And I totally see how that could be like a social studies ELA crossover or something where you're investigating, especially because they're like actual, it's actual reporting, to be able to unpack the themes from that in an ELA class, for example, and then have like an interdisciplinary unit where in social studies, they're unpacking events either current or past. I just feel like that could be so interesting. And the other piece that I love about that is that the same, you said, the same author writes like a fun children's children's series. Like I just love the example of range right, Like I think in high school particularly, there's kind of this feeling of this is the person you will be forever, and it's like no no, you can have an evolution of the thing you're into. 

14:23
You can have both. I think it also just speaks to like the human soul being capable of many things. 

14:29 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Right, and a writer's life isn't just one thing. Our interests change over time, and that's true of our kids. Like there's plenty of freshmen who come in loving one kind of thing and leave as seniors being totally interested in something else, and that's the way things should work. We shouldn't just be interested in one kind of thing forever and ever, the end. 

14:47 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. Oh my gosh, these are amazing. Okay, I can't wait to hear more. What else you got? All right? 

14:53 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
My next book is by Jamil Zaki. It's called the War for Kindness. The subtitle is Building Empathy in a Fractured World. This one came out a couple of years ago and he has a new book that just came out like days ago, called Hope for Cynics. And I haven't read Hope for Cynics yet because it's literally just had its birthday. But the War for Kindness is. 

15:17
He's a psychologist from Stanford who runs a lab and he focuses on the study of empathy, so how empathy works in human beings. And a lot of people in the past thought that empathy was a trait. So you were born with X level of empathy and that's just that's the way that you were. But his work and a lot of other recent work with psychologists looks at empathy more as a learned skill and as, like he uses the example of it being a muscle that you have to continually work in order to build that skill. So he talks about certain situations being like an empathy gym and how you can like work out. 

16:02
So it's not as much a how-to book but more a summary of recent research and he's a great writer, so a lot of science writing. It can be a little bit challenging for people to access if that's not their field, but this is really accessible. If that's not their field, but this is really accessible. And so each chapter has its own kind of focus, and one that I think is super interesting for teachers is about kind of like empathy burnout. So it focuses on people who are in our field and in nursing and medicine and what we have to do all the time in terms of our empathy work and what happens when that muscle gets overworked. And I thought that was a particularly interesting thing for those of us who live in this empathy gym all the time to think about what that means for our own mental health and well-being. 

16:59 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Wow, yes, I mean there are people who leave the profession for that reason. Right, I mean that's just Wow, yes, and I also just love that the so much of I'm doing a lot of work with the younger students kind of social studies curriculum that the state is doing investigating history, and so much of that is like one of their core state is doing investigating history and so much of that is like one of their core pillars is called historical empathy and human connection. And so it's how do we cultivate this empathy, like it can be cultivated one, and how do we cultivate it as we're looking at historical events and different things, and so I see so many ties again to like the possibility of I think this is my social studies heart but like the possibility of looking again past, present, current events, historical events and just the day-to-day, like the empathy gym that is school, right, right. 

17:49 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
And this has a lot of ways, different ways, of looking at ways that you can help others to develop empathy, as well as yourself. So, yeah, I would definitely recommend that for people who are who are doing SEL work with any kind of kids or or young adults. 

18:06 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's incredible and I know a lot of schools particularly. I mean I think this would be a great read for high schoolers. And I also know that, like I think even middle schools have like wind blocks or what I need blocks where it's like, yeah, like what can we work on, or like sometimes they even have like SEL blocks specifically. But having those spaces be opportunities to read a text like this would be so cool. 

18:27 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
I think that'd be a good one, right, and to know like no, really it's science, like this can be done, right, we're not just making this up. 

18:36 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Exactly, exactly, oh my gosh. Okay, I love it, I think. The next one, I think you had what is related to both categories of fiction and nonfiction. The next author right, I'd love to hear kind of that crossover of like how you might be able to use an author's multiple text as like a set perhaps. 

18:53 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. So the next author's name is Jen DeLeon and she teaches at a university near us, so she teaches at Framingham us being folks in Massachusetts. So she teaches at Framingham State University. And I'm going to talk about first her series of essays. It's called White Space and these are personal essays where she talks about different moments in her own past. 

19:22
She grew up in suburban Massachusetts and is from a family who emigrated from Latin America when her parents were younger. She grew up in Massachusetts, so she has the experience of being in multiple worlds and talking about, like, her sense of feeling, like she does and does not fit in in different situations, which is definitely something that many, many of my students at our high school can really relate to. So these essays are short, they just look at like a minute slice of life, and a lot of them are from when she was in high school and college, so they're really, really relatable for our younger high school students and even middle school. A lot of them would be, I think, really accessible for middle school students. And she's also the author of several YA novels which we've had on our summer reading list and we've also had white space on our summer reading lists for our high school students. 

20:22
So the novels are called Don't Ask Me when I'm From and Borderless. And Don't Ask Me when I'm From takes place in a suburban Massachusetts high school and it focuses on a young woman who is bossed to that school from her, where she lives in Boston, through what in Massachusetts is called the METCO program I imagine there's similar kind of acronyms in different states so she is, similarly to the author in her own personal essays, dealing with similar feelings of fitting in in one aspect of her life and not in another. So that one's called Don't Ask Me when I'm From. And then the other book, called Borderless, takes place. The first half of it takes place in Guatemala and the second half in the United States. 

21:12
And the young woman who is the protagonist in that novel, she is a fashion design student. So she's in college and she is studying fashion design and she's at the studio and she's making new designs and then, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up in a dangerous situation and has to leave the country and has to make a lot of really challenging decisions about who's going and how am I leaving, and so it really gives you a wonderful perspective on the choices that she does and doesn't have available to her. And then we follow her through the complexities of being a refugee and dealing with the American immigration system and so that one's called Borderless and that one just came out, I think about a year ago Don't Ask Me when I'm From is a couple of years back. So both of them would be such a nice text pairing with like any one of Jen DeLeon's white space essays and you could see a really beautiful connection between the nonfiction and fiction. 

22:18 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
That is super cool. I also imagine I mean my teaching when I was a teacher was in a New York City high school that was designed to be all students who had just recently immigrated to the States, and so I imagine working with those students. For example, my students would have a lot of things to say and wanting to say about their own experience and contrasting or finding similarities to these stories. So imagine, depending on the population of students people teach like that could also be a nice entry point of like are there things you'd like to share, or or not, but like are there? That's an invitation. I think that would be kind of cool too. 

22:53 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Absolutely yeah, and being able to see that done by someone who has has multiple different works to their name and is really like aiming to share. Jen also spoke at our school once and she was phenomenal speaker and is is really, really generous with her, her work with students, so she really reaches out and it's important to her that students feel seen. 

23:20 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, right, and I I I almost feel like that's my students. We would also do these like projects where we would choose a line of activism, for example, and kind of like pursue that. And this is one of the topics that would usually come up, like how do I use like my life understandings that I have? And I use like my life understandings that I have and I would like to share with others that may not have had that experience, or I need to like be essentially what Jen is doing, like being this model right Of like this is what it could look like to use your lived experience to like help and support these other people. I imagine there's like a tone of activism there as well that students could kind of unpack there in her writing absolutely yeah super cool. 

24:01
All right, the next one I think you had on this list I am very intrigued by, because I hadn't heard about it. But as, like a literary nerd and as a feminist scholar, I'm like yeah, this sounds cool yeah, this one was like written for you then. 

24:15 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Um, this book is called enter the body and it's by Joy McCullough, and you don't really need to have read a lot of Shakespeare in order to enjoy it, but it definitely would crack open a new line of inquiry for you about Shakespeare if you're a Shakespeare nerd. 

24:32
So it takes place in the imaginary space underneath the stage where the bodies fall. So you know, like, if you imagine, like when the Wicked Witch melts right, she like melts into a trapped door and falls under the stage Like surprise, that's how it really happens. So it's set in this trap space, which is kind of like this netherworld, in between life and death and also the space underneath the theater, and it focuses on four female characters from Shakespeare plays who all die young and all in like unfair, grievous ways. So it's um Cordelia from King Lear, ophelia from Hamlet, juliet from Romeo and Juliet and the last one very few people have read is Lavinia from Titus Andronicus, and she goes in the worst possible way. So we have these four young women whose lives were cut short by pretty much the violent actions of men, whose lives were cut short by pretty much of the violent actions of men no-transcript space in between worlds, underneath the stage, and they start telling their own stories out loud to one another. And the act of telling the story is like you're talking about before, like this act of self-determination, um, and the way that it's written is in, uh, it's inverse, which could be really intimidating because sometimes people feel like they don't know how to read poetry. 

26:09
But this is really really it grabs you. There's a lot of white space on the page. It's easy to read verse, um, and so you're flipping the pages really fast because you're getting through them really quickly and it's really, really gripping. A lot of it is actually verse that's found text from the play itself, um, so it has a fun extra layer if you're reading that play, to read, like juliet's real thoughts that she didn't say out loud perhaps in the play. So this one is awesome. If you're a fan of the musical six I know a lot of people love six, I do this kind of has a feel of like six, like the six wives of Henry VIII. Speaking back to history, this is like that, but for Shakespeare. 

26:57
Okay, this might be like my favorite book and just haven't read it yet, I know it got wonderful reviews when it came out, but I think it's a hard one for people to understand if, if you don't get that sell. So, yeah, I really love this. We had this one on our summer reading list and in fact, our staff book club is going to be talking about it tomorrow, because we always try for our staff book club to read at least something that the kids read over summer reading, so that we have a way to chat with them about a book that maybe we crossed over with them. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what everybody says about that one tomorrow. That is super exciting. 

27:32 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I also love the connection to sex because I do think you could do like. I mean, this is from a former New York city teacher, so I get. There's maybe not quite as much access in other spaces, but imagine you could do a field trip to like actually see a play and do do that. 

27:47 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
That would be so yeah, romeo and juliet is going up at the art in cambridge, near us in massachusetts in a couple months, so this would be a great tie-in also in terms of um, if there was a theater teacher who was looking for something. These make great monologues, like they're. They're basically a contemporary version of of shakespeare, so there would be a really neat monologue pairing with like here was the original monologue or here was a man's monologue in the play. 

28:12
And here was the um, the monologue that didn't get spoken in the play by the, the female character so yeah, there's a lot of really fun stuff with that book that you could do. 

28:21 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I am also imagining like something student written, where they're reading other books that don't have the, the here's the female perspective, like you write that or like that, doesn't have the. The here's the female perspective. 

28:29 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Like you write the or like the, it doesn't have to be female, but it could be whatever missing characters. 

28:32 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, absolutely Okay, someone build that out and then get back One more. 

28:36 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
And this one is like a little bit outside of my wheelhouse Cause it's sort of more designed for a middle school reading audience. But this one is because my daughter and I both read it and she was like you have to talk about this one. So so the last one on my list is the Probability of Everything by Sarah Everett. So this is a novel that is aimed at a middle grade reader, though honestly, I found it fascinating as an adult and I think that most of my high school kids would really love it too. It's from the perspective of an 11 year old young woman named Kemi Carter, and she understands everything. She's a she's a science brain and so she understands everything in terms of, like it's, numerical space in the world. So she's fascinated by statistics and probability and so she has this like wonderful family and they're really supportive of her. Even though, like science isn't necessarily the thing that most black girls are encouraged to love, this is the thing that she does love and she's really supported in that. 

29:41
And then, um, this asteroid shows up over her town. It's called and plus 68. And she starts calculating, like, the chances that it's going to implode the world and, um, she doesn't understand why everybody else around her isn't reacting to it in her same like, well, there's an 84.7% chance that this is going to do that and she's processing it really differently than everybody else around her. Um, and we follow her for four days and she's not understanding why she's seeing the world right now so differently than everybody else. And I don't want to spoil the the ending of it, so I'll just say that perhaps perhaps it's not an asteroid. Say that perhaps perhaps it's not an asteroid. 

30:35
And so this book is really underneath, about social justice and about issues in the way that young Black people have to behave with the police. There's a lot that's going on underneath the surface that she doesn't necessarily understand, and the way that she's processing it is the way that that she can process something through math. But as a reader, you start to pick up on clues about that. There may be a different problem that she's dealing with in her community. So it's so, so good. My daughter and I both like when I I finished the book and I gave it to her and and I was like, just it's a little bit sad. And then she, after she finished, she's like but it was a lot more sad that you thought you know puffy eyes. So, um, we both got a lot of out of it and we ended up having a lot of really big conversations after we read it, so this would be a really good one. 

31:30 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
And you were saying for a lot of different angles middle school. 

31:33 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
right, this is, yeah, it's aimed at middle school, but I think it could be right in high school, Right? Um yeah, but it's definitely at a reading level that middle schoolers would be absolutely into. 

31:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
You know it reminds me of, um, my life as an Ice Cream Sandwich by Evie Zaboy, which is a middle school book and also very much like. This, is like kind of she's very into NASA. The main character, who is a young black girl and like raised a lot by her grandfather, her grandfather's like well, I don't want to give things away either, but like very into NASA and there's just a lot of themes of science there, but there's also that underlying, like what is actually happening in the world piece. 

32:10
And there's also the piece of about like how to be a black girl but that's into science, and like other peers are not right. And then also like how do I exist in a world where I might be it never comes out and says this, but a lot of things are very much like like she might be on the spectrum. It's like also just how she's interacting with people and like how it can be so hard to be interested in different things and just be a different like way of operating, way of looking at things as part of your processing of part events. So I think there's some really cool text that could happen there. 

32:43 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
That sounds like a really good combination, yeah. 

32:46 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I imagine I'm thinking, so many of these have such similar themes, I'm also imagining literature circles across these books. For, like, an ELA teacher who's like let's just get students excited about things like reading, get a few copies of each book and say to your students, like, read the one you want to read, but we'll have conversations in groups or a whole class about the overarching themes that don't all need to be related. Like, I think a lot of times we think literature circles have to be related to the specific book but they could be thematic and I think there's opportunity here for this to be like your list, to use that with. 

33:28 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Definitely. Yeah, that was that used to be. One of my favorite things to do in my ELA classes was to do book clubs and then to all come together and talk about how, how the connections happen between the books, even though they hadn't necessarily read that book, and then they had the benefit of becoming interested in reading that other book and having that cross-pollination. 

33:46 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, oh, my gosh. This has been such an absolute joy to learn about all these things from you, allison. Thank you so much. Is there any kind of like final librarian wisdom that you would like to impart? 

33:56 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Oh boy. 

33:57 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, I'm thinking about. Like me, as a teacher, I don't think I ever thought to seek out a librarian and maybe didn't even know what that would look like or when I should go see a librarian. Is there a specific example or like an idea of like? Here's a moment when you can come to me. 

34:13 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Yeah, so often people say I'm really sorry to bother you and it's like no, literally this is my job. My job is to help you do your job better. And because there's almost nobody in a building whose job is to help the other teachers do their job, we're not always comfortable with asking for help because we think that it will mean somebody else is taking their time to do it. And it is actually my job to help you figure out, like I have this idea for a research project but I'm just not sure where to go with it. And I've seen lots of people do similar projects and I have examples of ones that might work and the kinds of questions that would elicit good interest. And so, like, if you ever have that instinct of saying like I'm really sorry, don't start with I'm really sorry, start with like I'd like to ask you this question, and your librarian will be just like yay, this is my purpose. 

35:11
I see my role as a librarian to be kind of like the chaplain for the school, and not in any way in a religious way, because I'm not religious at all, but as the person who can be available to help anybody, no matter what their role is in the school, whether it's a kid, a custodian, a teacher, a administrator, parent, I I'd like to be available to help them connect with the information resource or whatever other resource they need to be successful. So that's how librarians see our role. So always ask us, because it makes us feel like we are needed and we are loved. 

35:48 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Amazing and I imagine, like you said, reach out to your own librarians people who are listening or reading this blog post and if people want to see some of the work at the Framingham High School Library, is there somewhere where they can go or to either connect with you or just the school space? 

36:04 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Sure, I mean, framingham High School Library has a Facebook page, which I sometimes am really good about updating and sometimes I forget about for a little while. Also, the Framingham Public Library. We all do a lot of like cross work with them and yeah. 

36:23 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
That's great, perfect. Thank you, oh my gosh, thank you so much. This was really really fun for me, so I really appreciate you coming on, allison. 

36:31 - Alison Courchesne (Guest)
Yeah, my pleasure. It's been great to talk to you.

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