I nearly left Kirkpatrick Hill’s The Year of Miss Agnes sitting on a rolling cart at the local friends of the library sale. Feeling guilty that I had bought only one or two books for my kids opposite choosing over a dozen for myself, I picked it up, read the synopsis, and decided to buy it for one or both of them.
My kids still haven’t read the book. It would be a very quick read for my daughter, probably less than an hour, maybe less than half an hour. Sadly, she has shown zero interest. The worn paperback sat on the end table beside my end of the couch for a week before I picked it up myself and read it. It is now on my bookshelf alongside my teaching materials. I’ve also given my husband an unsolicited and quite detailed book report on it. Passages I loved are marked with Post-It notes.
I love that this book addressed inclusion and accommodations:
Here we used to think some things were so bad you just had to give in to them, like being deaf or blind, but now we were finding out that there’s always something they’ve thought of to help people like that. It was hard to do, this sign language and blind reading, but it’s better to kick some instead of just sinking.
I equally love that the book advocated life-long learning.
Miss Agnes didn’t think school was just for kids.
“You have to keep learning all your life,” she said.
That was a good thing to think about, always learning something new. It wasn’t like you had to hurry up and learn everything right away before the learning time was over, it was like you could kind of relax and take your time and enjoy it.
As an English teacher, I also appreciated that the book addressed that you talk differently in different settings and with different audiences.
We knew that we didn’t talk the right way, because the other teachers had told us we had terrible English.
But Miss Agnes said there were lots of right ways to talk.
What we talked in the village was right, she said. That’s the way to talk here. And when we talk in Athabascan, that’s the right way, too. But there’s another way to talk, and that’s what we want to talk when we go to the city or go away to school, and that’s what she said she was going to teach us.
So we learned that when we’re somewhere else, we shouldn’t say ain’t, and we shouldn’t mix up our e’s and i’s, like say pin when we mean pen.
In fact, the book gave us a good idea for catching colloquial grammar in our own household.
After we studied English for a while, we made up this Good English game. Every time we caught somebody saying ain’t, or using too many words, or anything like that, we had to say, “Gotcha!” Then we could put a check mark by their name on the board. Whoever had the littlest check marks was the winner for that day.
I was the winner in that game lots, but it seemed like I had to think over every word I said before I said it.
I was so inspired by Miss Agnes that I tossed some of our workbooks, brought up my husband’s old globes from his office area, bought some laminated maps from the walls, and took a trip to Barnes and Noble and bought a ton of educational games.
I’m not saying this is the greatest story you will ever read, and it definitely isn’t The Grapes of Wrath. But if you are a homeschooling parent or a teacher, this predictable book will likely inspire you anyway.
Never stop learning,
Erin
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