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Hubbs Center - Summary conversation circle notes as presented to learners
Things we have read and authors we like
* Action stories
* Mysteries
* Horror (we like horror because we know it's fake)
* Stories - scary stories books - mysteries, books where people that killed somebody in them and you have to figure it out.
* True stories - based on someone's life or real experiences
* The Perfect Husband by Lisa Gardener
* Maya Angelou
* Books by Katherine Woodiwiss, esp. The Wolf and the Dove
* Books about children - how to care for them & child development
* How to prepare to have children
* Books on pregnancy
* Stephen King's books
* Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe
* I like reading all different kinds of books.
* "dark" books - like Stephen King's books are "dark"
* I watch this video called Rainbow - it's about African voodoo stuff. I really like it.
* Books with bigger type and simpler words. It's ok if we don't know all the words. But we don't like those books with the words are real big in half the sentences!About Romance &endash; romance novels aren't as trashy as people say they are and the picture on the cover is sometimes nothing like the book. Sometimes the book only has one scene and it's at the end!
Historical romances &endash; romance stories that also have history in them - like one about Harriet Tubman but its about the couple on a farm who helped her with the Underground Railroad
Poetry &endash; but it depends on the kinds of poem (like not the real long story ones). It's better if it's shorter
General
Comments about Reading
I don't like to read retarded books.
I don't like to read boring books.
I like to read books where I have to guess what's happening like, oh what's going to happen next.
One woman thought if we don't read different kinds of stuff then we won't know what interests us.
One woman said she just learned how to read. It was hard because in school everyone thought she was stupid. In 6th grade, the teacher put her in group 6 (a harder group) and the kids made fun of her. She tried to tell her mother who also didn't help. So she gave up. But now she just finished reading a 216 page book and understood it. (everyone applauded)
We talked about how we read but just can't put it together. We don't understand what all the words mean and don't understand what the reading is about.
Reading is hard. And if the material is boring then its really much harder. When it's like that, we don't want to do it.
About reading romances: "Because when I first started reading them when I was a teenager and it was all about sleepover teen nights and then the librarian came in high school and she said - here I got a book for you and you'll like it and she threw it in my lap and I thought to myself I'm never going to be able to get through that book - there's no way on earth I'm going to read that book but then I sat down and read the prolog and then I just went through it until I was done. And then I got hooked on her and I read all her books."
We talked about reading history books. Some women don't like to read history books because they're too boring. However, one woman said she DID like to read history books. Some of us only like to read certain kinds of history books, like history about African Americans. But one woman said that sometimes it's hard to read stuff about slavery because it's too painful. It's too hard for her because it hurts her so much. She cries when she reads it. It also brings up certain fears.
("It's like when I was in the 5th grade and the teacher really didn't like me. and if I didn't like to read it she really made me read it, you know and I just didn't have any interest in it and I just couldn't do it and she'd say read this book and it was always all this stuff over slavery and I couldn't. I would just leave out the classroom and sit out - because it hurt. I like a whole lot of cultural things but I just did not like slavery, I don't know. I can't read it. It paranoids me.")
We don't mind reading if it's something that really interests us.
The teacher's never ask us what we want to read. They just give it to us and we read it. If it's something we want to read we have to find it out for ourselves.
Some of Oprah's books are ok but a lot of them are too hard.
Topics or Book Subjects We Want
* Books about African American women
* Children and child development
* How to care for children and to see how important they are
* Psychology
* How to deal with life's problems
* Mev asked what we think about books on women's issues but we didn't really have much to say on that.
Other general ideas
There needs to be commercials about books. (Like there is for beer and cars and stuff). The commercials should say what are good books and tell about why.
To find out about things to read: we ask people. Some of our teachers told us about certain books. However, the people in the bookstores are not so helpful. They mostly don't know anything when you ask them. (They say like, "Maya who?") You can't get the proper help there.
We find books at the library. The librarians in downtown Minneapolis are very helpful ("…those are my girls there!").
They should have a book class so that they can show you all the different kinds of books there are.
It would be good too if we had a list - like those book club lists they send home from school with the kids. It would tell about the book and what it's about and the price and we could order it. It would have a combination of adult and children's books.
We also talked about these things (general things we talked about on the side)
We talked about the history reports that are due soon. Some are harder than others. One woman is having a hard time doing hers because she doesn't want to read about the topic. Another women has lots of information for her topic, but she just thinks the person is not very interesting.
We talked about some of our educational goals. Some women are in the diploma program. Some are working for their GEDs. One woman has her high school degree and is improving her skills so she can go to college.
One woman talked about her dream to start her own business that will provide tutors for children in their homes. The tutors would not be expensive.
One woman wants to be a lawyer.
One woman want to go into computer programming but may end up in some form of health care.
What Our Group Decided to Do
We will meet next week. Mev will bring a summary of our discussion and we can add to it or change it.
We want to do a book club. Mev will bring some more ideas for chapter books and we will pick one to read together as a group. We will decide together what the book will be. We can read together and we can read to ourselves. Then we will talk about the book.
"You know what. I have an idea - if you just bring in some books about the topics like what we're talking about and we just decide on that book and we can get together and we can read the book and we can take turns reading and read by ourselves and at the end of the book we should just say what we thought about it felt about it at the end of the book."
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Number of learner participants (all meetings) |
(no more than 7 attended at any one time) |
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Age Range |
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Race / Ethnicity |
European American - 1 Immigrant: Eritrea - 2 |
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How many are parents? |
1 NOT parent; 4 unknown |
Initially, Hubbs was chosen as a possible site because it has a reputation for serving large numbers of Asian immigrants. As it happened, this conversation circle included no Asian learners. Hubbs also has a large number of Deaf learners who I wanted to include as well. Though I initially had some contact with the director of the Deaf program, we were never able to follow through to make a conversation circle happen.
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