Links Worth Talking About 10-4-15

Inspired by Elisabeth Ellington's weekly Links I Loved Last Week posts, I've decided to curate my own set of notable links from the past week.

If you live in or near southeastern Michigan, you need to come to #EdCampEMWP on Saturday October 24th. It's going to be a fantastic day of learning, plus there's going to be giveaways and SWAG. Speaking of which, this is what greeted me on my front porch when I came home from work on Friday:

A delivery of TWELVE boxes of ARCs and SWAG from Scholastic! We also have SWAG and giveaways from Candlewick Press, Simon & Schuster, and a few professional texts from NCTE.

Speaking of NCTE, to close out Banned Books Week, I wrote a post on the NCTE blog:
On Banned Books and Beyond: Say YA to Reading

And on this Banned Books Week, Laurie Halse Anderson was awarded the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award. I can't wait to congratulate her in person at #ncte15 in November.

Dav Pilkey shares a great video for Banned Books Week and why we need to change the language of censorship.

And Jacqueline Woodson is eloquent as always in this Washington Post article: It's Banned Books Week. Can We Stop Yelling at Each Other about It?

"Are you really protecting your child, or are you keeping your child from the tools they’ll need to deal with these issues?”

My friend Kaitlin just started a PhD program at Wayne State this fall and she came to my classroom on Friday to hang out and to share a book and a writing prompt with my students. She read the book Magic Trash about Tyree Guyton, founder of the Heidelberg Project, and then shared about a tour she took through Detroit last week to experience its street art.

I love this Washington Post article about private schools allowing staff to bring dogs into the classroom. It reminded me of an interview I did a while ago with my friend Danielle Kulawiak who brings her dog Tonka, a certified therapy dog, to her high school classroom.

This week hasn't only been full of good news and warm and fuzzy stories. We also had tragedy. Tragedy that I believe could be prevented. I'm tired of hearing these stories of mass shootings at schools. It's time to start doing something about it. The first thing I'm going to do is start better educating myself about the topic of gun safety and gun control, starting with the Brady Campaign, which was brought to my attention when someone shared it on Facebook this week when a friend asked for reliable sources about the topic of gun control. And this opinion piece from the Sydney Morning Herald eloquently explains why Australia is not like the U.S. to counter what President Obama said in his press conference this week. And while we're on this topic, here are a few more articles to read:
Mental Illness is the Wrong Scapegoat after Mass Shootings
Rehearsing for death: a pre-K teacher on the trouble with lockdown drills


Other blog posts I wrote this week:
One of my all-time favorite Twitter encounters
Confidence is a roller coaster
Celebrate the need for change


And apropos of nothing:
This "movie trailer" for Saving Daylight had me laughing until I was crying.