For many children, meeting Jean Little was perhaps the first time they'd met an author, but almost certainly the first time they'd met an author with a seeing-eye dog. (She was born with scars on her cornea, partially blind, and her vision worsened as the years went by.) When her book Hey World, Here I Am! came out in 1986, she was traveling on her book tour with her seeing eye dog, Zephyr, and explained to the children that she did her writing with a talking computer called SAM. (They always had lots of questions for her.)
Hey World, Here I Am! marked the return of the narrator from Kate and Look Through My Window. But here, Kate Bloomfield became a mascot for the growing Whole Language Movement. Teachers were turning away from textbooks and toward trade books. Kate's poem "After English Class" expressed how teachers and their students felt about the way textbooks had taken the joy out of literature:
I used to like "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
I liked the coming darkness,
The jingle of harness bells,
breaking--and adding to--the stillness,
The gentle drift of snow...But today, the teacher told us what everything stood for.
The woods, the horse, the miles to go, the sleep--
They all have "hidden meanings."It's grown so complicated now that,
Next time I drive by,
I don't think I'll bother to stop.
Kate also wrote of notebooks and family squabbles and the first signs of spring. Her poem "Louisa, Louisa," about her best friend's six-week-old baby sister, still makes me tear up: Kate holds baby Louisa and tells her of all the things she has to look forward to, good and bad. Jean Little, a former teacher, never forgot what it was like to be a child, or to be among children. She wrote of anger, disappointment, joy and surprise in ways that validated children. In my copy of Hey World, Here I Am! she inscribed, "Keep reading a Little." You can count on it. --Jennifer M. Brown