text: Tag Archives: Cassandra Clare
  Earlier this week, one of the few days we were in school without snow and ice days, one of my students stopped to talk to me after class. This is not an odd occurrence because the students have lunch after this particular block so they’re not rushing to be on-time for a class – but I digress. The conversation began with my student recommending a book to me. Then the conversation took a turn. The young lady was upset and needed to share that she was upset. And as an aside, I love that books can be the bridge to start to build the teacher – student relationship since connections with teachers are so important to middle school students. At first I thought she was upset about a grade or an assignment or a peer. Nope. None of the above. She was upset because she had just finished the first two books of a series, and she now had to wait until July to find out what was going to happen next.
  It’s the end of January. I’m down to the final days of the month, and I have a problem. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big problem – it’s probably not even a problem at all. But in the world of my classroom, it’s a problem of monumental proportions. It could derail the reading we have going on. I have no Schmidt’s Pick title for February. None. I’m empty. Dry. Barren.
  As 2010 draws to close, I, like so many others, am taking stock of the year. The good, the bad, the ugly – it’s all there laid out in front of me like books on a shelf for me to view and ponder. Overall, this has been a pretty good year. I don’t know if it’s the best ever since I have more years in front of me. It certainly wasn’t the worst. There were moments of pure joy and moments of heartache. Moments of peace and moments of strife. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything, which helps when I set ridiculously unrealistic goals or expect to be able to control everything including the uncontrollable. So as I sit next to a fire that is slowly dying reflecting on a year that is quickly dying, I can say it was a pretty good year.
  If you were to look up fantasy in the American Heritgage Dictionary, you would find nine definitions of the word fantasy. Definition number 4 reads, “Fantasy – n- Fiction characterized by highly fanciful or supernatural elements,” which doesn’t really do much to capture the genre.
  Looking up fantasy as a genre, you can find that fantasy is separated into high fantasy and low fantasy. High fantasy contains the elements one “normally” associates with fantasy novels – heroes and villains, quests, action, magical beings (ogres, fairies, witches, dragons), and magic. Low fantasy deals with things that can’t really happen in the world as we know it but leaves out the dragons and such of high fantasy (think Freaky Friday or Tuck Everlasting).