Cool for School

In a previous post, I discussed the internecine warfare that sometimes goes on among the literati who like to distinguish between “literary” and commercial fiction. I made the case that, because reading is a partnership between reader and writer, readers naturally like to have a choice about who they partner with.

That said, as a writer of what some would call “genre” fiction, it always gives me a bit of a thrill when an educator awards my work the imprimatur of inclusion in a course of study or approval as part of a curriculum or even a spot on a summer reading list.

I have been fortunate to be invited to schools for author visits and writing workshops. My books have also received a number of state book awards and have been included on state recommended reading lists.

(When that happens, sometimes the author is the last to know. I used to keep a Google Alert running, just so I’d stay in the loop.)

Often, I find that students bring my work to the attention of educators, rather than the other way around. (As a former educator, I can attest that teachers find it thrilling to encounter a student brimming with enthusiasm about a book.)

Years ago, I began receiving a spate of emails from Catholic school students in California, asking me highly specific questions about my first published novel, The Warrior Heir. Some even asked if there were reading guides available.

Something is up, I thought. So I began asking questions.

It turned out that The Warrior Heir had been included in a Battle of the Books (or similar contest) list for an entire Catholic Diocese. I was thrilled and excited, feeling the, well, the imprimatur of the Catholic Church.

Then I received an email from a nun asking why I thought my book was appropriate for Catholic schoolchildren. I didn’t know how to answer that one.

It all turned out well, and when I let my publisher know, their School and Library team developed a Classroom Reading Guide. So, cool.

A few years later, an Ohio high school English teacher, Eddie Black, used The Warrior Heir in her literature class.

Then, recently, I heard about teacher Maggie Houts’s elective Mythology class at Parkway High School in Rockford, Ohio. (Where was the Mythology class when I was in high school?)

According to Maggie, the class is centered around Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton. It also includes primary sources like The Odyssey, The Iliad, and the Aeneid (translated by Fagles) The Prose and Poetic Edda (Larrington) and The Saga of the Volsungs (Crawford.) Other readings include A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, which is a female-centered novel about the Trojan War, Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex (Thomas) and Children of Ragnarok, the first novel in my Runestone Saga duology.

Not only was it cool for me to rub shoulders with the classics, I was impressed that these students had moved beyond the Marvel Universe to read the foundational texts of the Norse pantheon (as I did when preparing to write my own saga.)

I was also happy that Norse mythology was included. It always seemed to me that elementary school units on mythology focused on Greek and Roman mythology, to the exclusion of everybody else. (Though that might have changed with the publication of Rick Riordan’s Norse-focused Magnus Chase series.)

One of Maggie’s students’ assignments was to create “Bloom Ball” structures, based on Bloom’s taxonomy, centered on Children of Ragnarok. Here are some examples of what they did. Are these cool or what?

And me? I am finally Cool for School.