Al Capone Does My Shirts

Al Capone does my Shirts is my favorite book that we have read in this class. I really could relate the situations in the story because one of my sisters is autistic. I understood how the family felt and it seemed like quite an accurate depiction. In our class discussion we discussed the use of language that people use when describing people with disabilities. I found that discussion particularly interesting. I think that its interesting how many people fail to realize by calling someone mentally retarded is actually a very mean term. When people with impairments are being spoken about, their impairment is said before their name. This is something that isn't Politically correct. The person's name should come before the impairment. This made me think about the language that was being used in the book. The only words that described Natalie, were stupid and retarded only a few times. I was surprised about this especially when this book was written about the 1930s.This led me to question if this book was written back in the 1930s would the language used to describe Natalie change and become more negative.

Book Awards

Today in class we had a discussion about children book awards and if having awards for different minority groups was a good idea or not. I had never realized that the Calidcott and other awards like that were so limiting in who was chosen for the award. When reflecting back on the readings, I agree with the Pinkney article more than the Aronson article. Pinkney makes a good point that the awards are meant to showcase the work of different minorities that may never win a Calidcott or other well known award. The children of these minority groups are then more able to see successful writers that come from the same backgrounds as they did. I think that having these awards like the CSK award and the Schneider Family book award are allowing minority authors a chance to be recognized for their work. Having these people in different miniority groups shows children that people like them are writers and are successful. This could possibly lead to more writers from different backgrounds in the future. Also, by having these awards it allows people from different backgrounds to easily find great pieces of literature about different groups of people that are possibly well written.