Boyd Middle School has just finished its own Battle of the Books since we
came back
to school in January after our holiday break. I started out with 16
arbitrary titles
chosen by me—books that have been very popular in our library. Some you
would
probably expect—Twilight, The Lightning Thief, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid—but
others, such as The House of the Scorpion, The Giver, and Walk Two Moons
have
been read by a number of students in English classes. Others, like Hatchet
and Holes,
are perennial favorites. Actually, to encourage participation I
intentionally included
books that have been made into movies. If the book was part of a series,
the contestant
was the first book in the series.
I vaguely remember from my Pep Club days in high school that brackets work
in
multiples of 4, so I Googled a 16-team bracket (and how to seed it) and drew
it out on
the big portable white board in the library. To build excitement, I filled
out the bracket
as we went along, two contestants at a time. We had one contest per week, so
the first
round took 8 weeks. I wanted the students to have read the books, but I
didn’t make
them prove it. Students, however, did have to put their names on the
ballots, so I could
be sure no-one “stuffed” the ballot box, and so I could discard the votes
made by Brad
Pitt and Celine Dion.
I’m sure this is nothing new (although it’s something we’ve never tried
before) but what
I thought might be interesting to you are some of the results. The House of
the Scorpion,
which was read in class by 2/3 of our 8th graders last year, beat Diary of a
Wimpy Kid.
Then in the next round Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone beat The House
of the
Scorpion by 2 votes. The biggest surprise was in Round 2, when Runaway by
Wendelin
van Draanen, last year’s state children’s choice book award winner, beat
Twilight.
Apparently there was a Twilight backlash vote which I’m guessing can be
attributed to
some boys and others who don’t like to follow the crowd. In my naďveté, I
had seeded
Twilight as number 1, so that threw the whole top of my bracket into
disarray. The semi-
final round, between The Lightning Thief and The Outsiders was a dead tie,
so the final
round was a vote among the three books that were left, The Outsiders, The
Lightning Thief,
and Runaway. The Lightning Thief won.
My conclusions: 1. Old favorites are old favorites for a reason. The
Outsiders was written
over 40 years ago, but it still speaks to young people. 2. You can never
under-estimate
what is considered “cool” by middle school students. 3. Books that might
never be picked up
in the school library can become favorites because of being read in the
classroom.
Becky Hatchett, Librarian
Clyde Boyd Middle School
Sand Springs, OK
becky.hatchett@sandites.org
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