Ms. Baker

Hello everyone! Although you probably have met me, I'll add some more information just for the heck of it.

I'm currently the 10th grade English teacher, which I bet you can guess means I love books. Actually, I love them even more than you might guess. I grew up going to the Farmington Public Library b/c we didn't have a public library in New Vineyard where I lived. I loved the children's reading room there, and was obsessed with Dr. Seuss and Curious George books. There was also a glass floor upstairs, and if you haven't seen it, you need to go visit it. My dad would take me up there just to marvel at the idea of standing on glass.

I also would do chores around the house so that my mom would take me to Mr. Paperback and buy me books; I didn't get a regular allowance, but books were good enough. As I got older, I loved Stephen King and my favorite of his books is It. If you haven't read that, but love horror, try it. In fact, I had an enormous crush on the main character, a writer named Bill. It was a little obsessive. Kind of like girls now with Edward Cullen, I think.

After graduating high school, I went to Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and majored in English literature. This pretty much guaranteed I got college credit for, guess what, reading! How cool is that? Anyway, while there I figured out how to really analyze books and how to appreciate tomes that others find incredibly dull. My dad still thinks I'm insane for thinking that Moby Dick is funny. But it is, if you bother to read it. Herman Melville had a wicked sense of humor.

So now that I'm at MTA, I've worked with Mrs. E for 5 years now in creating and running Girls' Book Club. Basically, we wanted to share our love of reading with others and because girls typically choose different books from boys, we decided to go with only one group to limit our discussion and book buying. We started off with 5 girls or so, and have now grown to around 37!!! Can you believe it? We've also gone from just reading books to interacting with them; we've watched films based on books, done additional research on topics related to our books, and have even talked to an author of one of our choices on the phone! It was awesome!

I hope this year, too, is a wonderful one for reading... let's hope we find some books we love, and ones that we can recommend to others to encourage them to read, too. Let's make it our mission: spread the reading bug! Oh, and check out that glass floor. It's amazing.

Hey Ms. Baker!
I LOVED the Curious George books when i was little too!!
they were all i would read for a while!

Dr. Seuss was a big hit for me when I was a little kid. I'm pretty sure I owned close to all of his stories! And the glass floor in the library sounds super cool. I think I should check that out some time, now that i have my license I can drive myself! lol.

Hey Mrs. Baker! It's so interesting you loved It. I only say that cause clowns make my eye twitch. You've got me interested in Moby Dick, I'm going to have to read it now...perhaps on the glass floor of the library!