(This won’t be my best blog entry, since I have a screaming horrible headache, so please do forgive…) 

The 5th grade book group met yesterday, and we had a fantastic meeting.  Nine kids were in attendance (a tenth had to miss the meeting due to soccer practice, and an eleventh joined the group as the group was meeting – he’ll attend next month).  As I’ve mentioned many times before, this month’s book was one of my personal favorites, The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton.

Based on past book group meetings, and on comments I’ve heard from the kids in the weeks leading up to this meeting, I was really, really afraid the kids would hate the book, and that they would have difficulties with the non-linear plot development.  I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon concocting ways to discuss the book and delve into its more philosophical elements.  So our group discussion was a very happy surprise for me.  The kids all loved the book, passionately and completely, except for one boy who had not finished it because he thought it was realistic fiction (hmmm – go figure on that one).

One girl had memorized a line from the book:  “Beware how you paint yourself!  Carve yourself well!”, which led to a wonderful discussion of the mirror dream and what it means.  Another girl opened her book and read aloud the lines that Uncle Freddy had cross-stitched for his family’s Christmas gifts:  Longfellow’s “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and, departing, leave behind us footprints in the sands of time,” Thoreau’s “Fish in the sky,” Emerson’s “Hitch your wagon to a star.”  The kids had not figured out that “H.D.T” stood for Henry David Thoreau, or that “R.W.E” for Ralph Waldo Emerson, but that’s of little consequence, since they each processed the meaning of these phrases and now these phrases are a part of each child’s subconscious.  That’s the beauty of this book, that it serves as a bridge from children’s literature to the literature of the Transcendentalists, and in so doing creates a foundation of knowledge that can be drawn upon later in life. 

Surprisingly, the kids did miss two things that I thought for sure were obvious: when I asked them a pointed question (the kind I usually try to avoid), no one knew that I was refering to the role of Louisa May Alcott in the story.  And when we were discussing the dream about the line of great men leaving footprints in the sand, I asked them “Who was the man who left the greatest, deepest footprints in the sand, and who passed on the brightest light to Mrs. Truth?”  Not one child in the group knew who that man was.  I had to tell them, “Ummmm, it was Jesus.”  Which prompted one child to cry out:  “It’s a RELIGIOUS book??!?!”  Which led us to discuss that no, it’s not a religious book, really, that this dream is about the impact one has on the world: that one person can be so full of truth and vision and goodness and intelligence that his or her impact on the world is lasting, and many other people walk in the virtual footprints left by that one person. 

We also talked a bit about literature in general, for the benefit of the two kids who joined the group yesterday and therefore had not read the book.  The general literature discussion quickly became a one-ups-man-ship contest – “I read way above my grade level” and “I have to read REALLY thick books because I read so fast – a skinny book like this doesn’t last me long enough!”  Cringing, I subtly put the brakes on this conversation, and we talked about the value of literature, as opposed to its size and speed and “level.”  I picked a random passage from TDITW and read it out loud to the group as fast as I possibly could.  Several kids giggled and said, “huh?  What did you say?”, to which I responded, “Exactly!  When you’re reading a book really quickly, that’s probably the speed at which you’re reading.  When you read that fast, you’re getting the plot line, but you’re not picking up on the beauty of the language and the deeper meaning of the words.”  And then I read the same passage again, slowly and thoughtfully, lingering on the longer, more delicious words, stopping to contemplate, out loud, the meaning of the phrases.  I saw a lot of virtual lightbulbs go off over the kids’ heads at that moment.

It was the best book group meeting ever.  We all had a fabulous time, and it was hard to pack up and leave.  And the one boy who hadn’t finished the book shyly asked me to renew it, since he thought he’d like to keep reading it, after all.