The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": teenagers

Showing posts with label teenagers. Show all posts

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Something About Teens

I am, quite openly, not much of a movie fan. I've never had the same quality of experience while watching a movie as I've had while reading. I endure most movies, but I cannot abide romantic comedy of any sort. Ever. So last night, after a really scattered week, I wanted to spend time with my two boys."Let's rent that movie, Something About Dan," they suggested. They had previewed a scene where Dan gets a couple of tickets, they said as I winced, and I should be open to new experiences. I shouldn't pre-judge. My own words coming back to me. A browsing Blockbuster customer told us the movied had gotten excellent reviews. The boys smiled smugly.

So fine.

A third into the movie, as the Disneyesque tribe of family gathered and played board games, ate amicably at a Viking-sized table, and openly discussed their emotions, my oldest son started laughing. "There's like nothing wrong with these people," he said, "all they do is get angry then frolic. It's a fury and frolic movie."

Thinking I had missed this genre, I asked him to explain.

"Watch. They get mad, then they go and put on a talent show or hop around on the lawn. No family is like this. No one gets drunk or stays mad or is really fat and weird. I never met a family like this. It's like a family made up by camp counselors."

"I think it's a lake house," I pointed out, "they all gather there."

"Right. And everyone gets along the whole time. No one messes up," my middle guy added.

"I think he likes his brother's girlfriend," I pointed out, "that's the conflict."

"So? That's the whole conflict cause like nothing else is going on. Right about right now, I'd like to see a bear come along or someone take out a gun and do something crazy," my oldest guy said, "you know he's going to get together with that girl in the end because nothing happens in this movie like it happens in real life."

"So what? Did you want him to kill his brother or something?" I asked. "Maybe take the grandma hostage?"

"Nah," Philip, my middle guy said, "just like mess him up or fight or insult him. And how come all of those kids get along so well? They do what the adults say almost every time. And they're all dorks."

"Yes," I said eagerly, "that's not at all like you two. They're so wonderfully obedient."

They both laughed. "Pull this crap," they agreed, "put something on that's realistic."

We ended up watching the last hour of To Kill A Mockingbird, the old black and white version where Tom Robinson's undeniable innocence falls victim to racism. The boys had no comments while watching this except to say it was pretty good.

Pretty good.

Perhaps that's the lure of YA literature: the audience has such a low b.s. threshhold that romantic comedy would never be a possible genre...

Monday, April 28, 2008

Teen Spaces

Over the weekend, I was in the library looking at new YA titles. The part of the library was called Teen Zone, a space separate from the rest of the library. An older woman walked by and asked me why this fiction was separated from the rest of the fiction. "I think the topics are different," I shrugged. She clearly disapproved of the expansive area given over to teenage themed fiction. "There's a children's section over there," she pointed out. I nodded, not wanting to get into an argument since I already live with teens and argue too much. I didn't think of the woman again until this morning at breakfast.
My nine year old enthusiatically confided details of her imminent plans: planting a strawberry patch, scattering seeds on a barren patch by our house to create a wildflower garden, a trip she wants to plan to the zoo, and because she is still a kid, she informed me that she may (or may not) pen a novel. Lovely. Then, because I was in a good mood, I went in to talk to my sixteen year old. He is not a kid so I try to be in a good mood when I talk to him. I figure that way I won't grit my teeth quite so visibly. Of course, his door is locked, the music is blaring, and he doesn't answer my knock. "Christopher!" I holler. The cats run for cover. The dog raises her head. I pound on the door. "Did you die in there?" When he finally opens the door, he stands silently and glares."Why didn't you answer?" I ask. He yawns. "'Cause I knew it was you."

I mention how getting him to open the door is like goading the troll under the bridge, only it's more like a troll glued to the Internet.

"Huh." He half closes the door.

"I'm wondering what you have planned since you have three days off." He shuts the door. I hear the distinct click of a lock.
Teen Space. Different from kid space. Completely. And not just in the library.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Contraband - Part II

So what happened to the student who filmed the teacher speaking inappropriately to the class?
He DID post the video to youtube, sent the link to the emails of several building administrators, and got suspended.
The teacher? Just began an "early retirement" --

Monday, March 10, 2008

The New Contraband - Part I

Cell phones are banned by most schools, at least for the student population. Their reasoning is that students will not focus on their work if they are carrying a cell phone. They are probably right about that. And since there is nothing else to distract high school and middle school kids from memorizing the chief exports of Guatemala, I'm sure the cell phone banish is, like so many educational policies, highly effective.

The thing is, almost every kid has a cell phone. And if they don't have a cell phone, they want one. And the ban on cell phones has only served to cast them into the Hidden Zone, like the cigarette/pot contraband of yesteryear. (Ok, my year)

On the days when I pick my kids up from school, I like to count the steps their friends take before pulling their cells out. They like to glare at any adult around while holding the phone to their ear. The other day, while picking my son up early, a student I knew did just this. She walked importantly around the courtyard where the buses were gathering, frowning into the phone like a diplomat getting bad news about the war.

Since it was one of the few times I have stood in that courtyard without any other students around, I decided to ask Sarah a question that has been haunting me. "Hey," I said quietly,
"how are you, Sarah?"
She nodded, then clicked off the phone.
"Listen, can you answer a question?"
She shrugged. "Maybe."
"Who do you guys talk to as soon as you leave the building? Aren't all your friends here?"
"Yeah. I was just talking to my mom. I asked her to wash my red pants." Sarah rolled her eyes.
"And she didn't?" I asked, remembering the frown.
"Nope. She forgot."
"Is that who you usually call?"
"Yeah. None of my friends can answer now. All their phones are in their lockers."
"Right," I agreed.
My son walked toward us, his eyes riveted to his phone, his thumb moving frantically across the keypad. As I watched him check phantom messages, it occurred to me that cell phones had replaced cigarettes not only as locker contraband, but as social behavior. I was about to tell him this when Christopher told me how a student, a friend of his, had just used his camera phone to
film a teacher speaking inappropiately during a class.
"What's he going to do with the film?" I asked.
"Maybe post it onto youtube."
At that moment, I began to rethink my position on why the school administration really had banned phones from the building.

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***