Reflection on Text Set as a Whole

Although I bought/found six books that I liked under the topic of African-American lit. The three books i chose to review all had an interesting theme of 'hair'. the other three books all dealt with segregation // desegregation. Hopefully by the end of next week, I will have a few more reviews written regarding those books.

I really enjoyed the books that i found. the first time i went to Everybody Reads, I didnt have a decided topic for this assignment. When I went in the second time, I thought my topic was going to fall into 'Asian American Lit' or 'English Language Learners' because I had already found a book entitled, I Hate English, which was a charming book about the struggles an English Language Learner might have.
However, while looking at the various sections, i decided that I really liked a few of the books on African-American lit. I thought it was interesting that overwhelmingly, the major issues of those books were self-identity, community, and segregation//desegregation. One of the most powerful books i bought was From Slave Ship to Freedom Road, which was a book that posed questions to the readers, required imagination, and seemed as though it might be used as an authentic activity in social studies. The major problem that i saw with putting that book in my classroom library is that it printed the n word in it. This offended and disappointed me. I was disappointed mostly because it made the whole book difficult to put in a classroom library (i'm still trying to come up with a way i would be able to include it anyway; I was thinking white-out or something like that).
I also thought it was nice to be able to 'book talk' these books with my mom. My mother, as mentioned before, is a speech therapist/special education teacher. We talk at length about my future classroom, and being able to talk about various books with her was very powerful. This assignment gave me the springboard and the freedom to be able to do that.
I really enjoyed trying to find books under any category, really, especially because over Thanksgiving, I was in search of anything at Borders, and it was just incredibly overwhelming (I found I liked the set up of Everybody Reads a lot more than other book stores).

All in all, i thought that this was an incredibly beneficial assignment. It helped to expand my classroom library, and it helped me to think more deeply about the books i am choosing to purchase for my own classroom library.