From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:30:05 -0500

On 20-Jul-09, at 5:53 PM, Kristin Butcher wrote:

> When I discovered, at about age 8 or 9, that people wrote books
> other than
> textbooks for children, I was astonished and grateful (when I liked
> the
> book) that some adult had wanted to connect with me. I wouldn't have
> articulated it in that way, or at all, but the feeling was that the
> writer was
> sharing something unique and personal, an immersion into a world
> unknown to
> me. The writer, I thought, must really have some kind of link to
> childhood,
> a link most other adults in my life lacked.

I just wanted to note how fascinated i am, Kristin, at the idea of you at 8 or 9 thinking of yourself as being in a sort of generalizable childhood and not just yourself, a children, but part of something less personal and more communal that an adult writer might link to. Do others remember having this sort of communal childhood consciousness--a sense of being not just you and young but actually something you understood as childlike in specific ways you assumed were shared by other children? For me, that possibility suggests a level of acculturation in individual children into a specific cultural idea of childhood that I would never have suspected. Children who believe they are childlike in the ways adults understand what childhood is--fascinating.

Perry
_____________ Perry Nodelman http://pernodel.wordpress.com/

Book Trailers: The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k
Received on Wed 22 Jul 2009 10:30:05 AM CDT