A Stone of Hope: A Memoir by Jim St. Germain, with Jon Sternfeld

A must read for all Passages Academy staff, A Stone of Hope is the story of former student Jim St. Germain, from his impoverished childhood in rural Haiti, his tumultuous youth in Crown Heights, his transformative adolescence with Boys Town, to his passionate pursuit of higher education and current activism seeking to improve the experiences of incarcerated and at-risk youth. St. Germain’s story is a powerful testament to the importance of second chances and the need for strong adult advocates.  Warming this librarian’s heart were passages on the pivotal moment of finding the right book at the right time.  For  St. Germain, that book was The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise, and Fulfill a Dream. Without peers to make a pact with, St. Germain made a pact with himself, one that he was able to keep because of the guidance, understanding, and assistance he was given from a team of mentors while a resident with Boys Town.  Prominently featured is Passages Academy’s own Mrs. Donna Oglio, now retired. While St. Germain gives much credit to his mentors for never giving up on him, it was obvious to this reader that much credit is due to St. Germain’s own strong-willed self-determination. Highly recommended for confident readers looking for a “real” story, and perhaps in need of the right book at the right time. --Anne Lotito-Schuh

Jim St. Germain is the cofounder of Preparing Leaders of Tomorrow (PLOT).

St Germain, Jim, with Jon Sternfeld. A Stone of Hope: A Memoir. HarperCollins, 2017. Print.

Guest Blog Post: Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini

What if there was a pill you could buy that made you cool? This is the very question author Ned Vizzini asked himself as he set out to write the wonderfully engaging Be More Chill. In Vizzini’s novel chronicling the life of teenage outcast Jeremy Heere, the protagonist purchases a technologically advanced pill-sized super computer called a SQUIP, which offers young Jeremy direction and much needed guidance navigating the cruel hallways of high school. The SQUIP’s faulty technology places Jeremy in a number of outrageous, humbling, and ultimately meaningful situations.

Be More Chill is somewhat lengthy, weighing in at just under three hundred pages. Therefore an effective way to assist Passages’ students in successfully completing this novel is to incorporate the unabridged audio version into the daily lessons. Be More Chill also proved to be useful in teaching the many elements of literature, story arch, character development and the value of implied endings (which some of the students at Boys Town challenged Mr. Vizzini on, when he visited on October 27th, 2010).
--L.A. Gabay

L.A. Gabay teaches Creative Writing at Passages Academy’s Boys Town site. L.A. Gabay is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Education Program at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His published works can be found in Teaching City Kids: Understanding and Appreciating Them and The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology.

Guest Blog Post: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

The implicit accusation that I would bring pornography into my classroom offends me to my core. Melinda, the protagonist of this brilliantly funny and poignant young adult novel, was raped by Andy, a popular upperclassman athlete, the summer before her freshman year in high school; the scene is brief and non-explicit, but visceral. Melinda is then ostracized and becomes both mute and reclusive, expressing herself through her year-long artproject- creating trees out of various media- until she gains the strength to confront her rapist, very loudly. I have taught Speak in my mixed junior high/high school English/Language Arts class and every student- from the shyest, Melinda-est girl to the most aggressive, Andy-est boy- loved it. We completed Melinda's art assignments with her, each of us - myself included- taking an object and drawing it from a new perspective and with new purpose each day before we began our official lessons. As Melinda grew with her tree, so did our class grow with Melinda. Each student, though hesitant to do so at first, came to love sharing his or her literary/art journal with the rest of the class; some even wrote accompanying free-write entries explaining how Melinda's ordeal helped them begin to process injustices they or their loved ones may have experienced. After we finished the novel and our projects, all of the students wrote ebullient letters of thanks to our DonorsChoose benefactors for enabling us to complete this educational unit by providing us with a classsroom set of this title. -- Julia Weber

Guest blogger Julia Weber is an English teacher at Passages Academy's Boys Town site. You can find teaching resources for Speak here.