I am a ROCK STAR

See, I even have my very own parking spot!

Still need convincing? Just ask Mrs. Ahuja's 4th grade class at Cranbrook's Brookside Elementary. They'll tell you.

Yesterday morning I hung out with 16 of the nicest kids you'd ever want to meet. Serirously, they were so well-behaved you wouldn't even believe it. So I'm posting this photo just so you'll see that they are in fact regular kids:

(I told them, "Be goofy. You know you wanna.")

Somehow Mrs. Ahuja managed to keep this whole bring-an-author-to-class thing a secret, so I got to flabbergast the lot of them when I walked through the door.

They are SO into Miss Spitfire. By page 40, they've already covered this much of a bulletin board with words and phrases they like:

And boy, can they give Barbara O'Connor a fun for her money in the highlighter department. Most of their books won't even close properly anymore, they're so stuffed with post-its, highlighting, underlining, and so on.

After we got over the shock of meeting each other, we all sat down in a circle and I watched them read and talk about a short passage (pages 43-44). They miss NOTHING. I'd even venture saying they're thinking harder about this book than I did, at least in a conscious way. What I mean is, when I sit down to write a scene like that, I'm mostly running on gut. I take what I know about Annie's personality and let it react with the plot. It's a little bit like acting. You climb in and give your best shot at being a different person for a while.

But these kids, they're thinking deliberately about how Annie feels -- sad, lonely, rejected -- why she feels that way, and how it affects what she does. Done the wrong way, that could be dreadfully boring and stifling, but Mrs. Ahuja asks qusetions that let the kids simply react to Annie as they work toward understanding her. It's like I've done the showing and they reverse the process and do the telling. I mostly sat there nodding as they untangled all the stuff that fueled that scene while I was writing it. Here's some of what they said -- paraphrased, of course:

"The Perkins doll is kind of like a piece of home for Annie, because it came from her school."

"Holding it reminds her of her brother."

"She wishes it was Helen."

"It makes Annie feel unwanted when Helen leaves the doll under the bed."

Meanwhile I'm saying eloquent things like, "Well...yeah!" I hadn't consciously thought each and every one of those points (and I'd never thought of the first one at all) as I wrote the scene, but they're all true. I can't quite get over that. I guess if you get the show right, the readers can tell you a thing or two.

After that I read them a parallel section of Annie's biography, showed some pictures of the real people and places in the book, did a little pantomine game to help them understand what it's like to be Helen, and then I signed, signed, and signed some more. I signed books, covers, and dust jackets. I drew hearts, smiley faces, and birds on request. I stopped short of signing their actual arms and foreheads, but not by much. Following that, I was quite literally showered with gifts, including a bag full of sparkly Indian things from Mrs. Ahuja.

Then Mrs. Ahuja invited me for lunch in the cafeteria, where I proceeded to be further dazzled by the kids of Cranbrook. After Phoebe explained to the table that I'd written a book about Helen Keller's teacher, the girl in the end chair asked if Miss Spitfire was fiction or nonfiction. "Fiction," I said.

"Oh, so you've added dialogue and thoughts and feelings."

I nodded, but I was really thinking, "Dang, these kids are smart!" I know a few libraries that didn't classify Miss Spitfire that quickly or correctly.

When I got back from lunch and popping in on a few other classes, Mrs. Ahuja's kids were away in science class, but I found this little love note on the board:

Teachers take note: the school visit bar is now impossibly high.

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Currently reading:

The Earth Dragon Awakes
by Laurence Yep