It's Like This, Cat: 1964 Newbery Award Winner

The beginning of March 2014 I started a new undertaking: reading every single Newbery Medal Winner book. A number of them I have read in the past, but I am reading them with fresh eyes,and reviewing them for others. I am not reading them in order, as some will require some effort on my part to find them all.  Want to keep track of which books I read?  Check them out at Confessions of a Wannabe Reader!

Cover of the book - Used for Identification purposes only under the fair use clause

Dave Mitchell: Seeing Through New Eyes

" My father is always talking about how a dog can be very educational for a boy.  This is one reason I got a cat."

Dave Mitchell is a normal teen growing up in New York City.  He is fourteen and doesn't see eye to eye with his father, which cases many shouting matches.  When they yell at each other, Dave's mom has another asthma attack.  It is after one such fight that Dave storms out, headed to the crazy cat lady Kate's home.  He meets a striped stray tomcat and decides to bring the cat home.  Naming the cat Cat, Dave starts to notice that Cat brings about a strange series of events.  First, Dave meets the strange young man Tom Ransom while trying to rescue Cat from a locked cage.  Then, while on the beach at Coney Island with Cat, he meets a sweet teenager named Mary and begins to date her.  Lastly, he begins to realize that maybe life with his dad isn't as hard as he thought, and starts to see that his family isn't as overbearing as he imagined, all because of an old tom named Cat.

Written by Emily Newville, It's Like This, Cat is a coming of age story.  Set in the late 1950s or early part of the 1960s, the has a whimsical feel of the era that happened right before the turbulence of the hippie generation.  The book is a story about a boy, his love for a cat, and the relationship he has with his father.

It is a story about learning how to perceive people, and how perceptions can change over time.  Dave sees his dad as overbearing and always yelling, but doesn't see that he is much like his dad.  He sees his mother as quiet and shy and sickly, not understanding that he and his father both have been stressing her out.  His friendships change as he grows older, and while he doesn't understand it, he vents to his cat.  Cat takes everything in and becomes Dave's confidant.  Cat also helps him to make new friends like Tom Ransom and Mary whom allow him to grow, and those friends grow with him as a result.  Dave is starting to shed his childlike perceptions and see the world through adult eyes.

This wasn't the first time I have read this book, but it was the first time I read it with the intent to study it.  It is a good read.

Mentors are needed if education is to succeed

    Carol Dweck, psychology professor and a top researcher on intelligence, insists that the brain is a malleable instrument that can be strengthened with use and that intelligence is not a fixed number but rather a trait that can grow with the right motivation.  Her research states that “students' self-theories about intelligence have a profound influence on their motivation to learn. Students who hold a "fixed" theory are mainly concerned with how smart they are―they prefer tasks they can already do well and avoid ones on which they may make mistakes and not look smart. In contrast, she said, people who believe in an 'expandable' or 'growth' theory of intelligence want to challenge themselves to increase their abilities, even if they fail at first.” (Lisa Trei, “Study yields instructive results on how mindset affects learning” Stanford Report, February 7, 2007)

    Those who are concerned more with their own image of how smart they look to themselves and others are afraid of failures and will do anything to avoid any failure.  They avoid changing, even if it means languishing in life and not developing any new skills which they may surely need to survive in this ever changing world.  Those who believe that they can control how smart they are and are taught to expand their intelligence through challenges and learning are then able to grow and adapt when the world around them changes.  After all, “research (has shown) how changing a key belief―a student's self-theory about intelligence and motivation―with a relatively simple intervention can make a big difference.” (Trei) Students need to be taught that intelligence is not a fixed trait that only some are naturally gifted.


    What does this mean to educators?  It means that we as teachers must learn to teach and empower students to grow  and change and teach them the skills needed to do that.  We must touch the lives of each and every one of our students to make sure they get the help they need and learn to find their own elements of creativity.  We have to show them that they must have some failure if they are able to succeed.  We need to give them the ability to adapt in the rapidly ever-changing world. Yet we can't do it alone.  The education system needs help in educating our students.

    That is where mentors need to be able to step up to the plate.  Teachers need to learn to utilize people in the community that can and should be able to help students.  Professionals and amateurs alike should be able to reach out to students in the classroom and outside the classroom alike. Mentors can become like teachers, often in settings that are not school-like to reach kids that may not be able to be reached in the school setting.

    Ken Robinson, in chapter eight of his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, points out that most mentors serves most, if not all, of  four roles;  recognizer, encourager, facilitator, and stretcher. Mentors recognize that there is a need and also recognize how to go about filling that need.  They also encourage students that nothing is impossible and expect students to live up to that encouragement.  They facilitate the student through their work and teach students techniques that help the to succeed while being an example of those techniques and their successes or failures.  Mentors also expand possibilities for students by stretching students past their limits and showing them that they can in fact do things.

    Some might argue that teachers should be already doing this in their classrooms.  That is true, teachers need to also be trying to mentor students.  However, teachers have limited resources, especially the resource of time.  Often they have thirty students in a class, and middle and high school teachers can see upwards of two hundred or more students in a day.  The current school system makes it hard for teachers to reach out and individually mentor each of those students on even a weekly basis.    Even the best teachers have students that fall through the cracks, and mentors should be there to gather those kids up, show them that they have the potential to grow and shape the world they live in, and help the education system in creating the future.