Yes, I read this book. Yes, it scared the poop out of me. Yes, it made me cry. This is a uniquely horrific horror story that is so realistic that you know that it has actually happened in real life somewhere, sometime. Only the names of the characters would be different.
I have a deep abiding respect for Richard Peck as a writer. He earned that with his books A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago. Those books made me laugh so hard it blew chocolate milk out of my nose. And, yes, I was drinking chocolate milk at the time. They are so realistic because the people in those stories are real people. I know those people personally. Of course, they have different names in real life.
But Are You In the House Alone? is a very different book from those other two masterpieces. It tears your heart out and eats your liver because it is a first person narrative in the voice of a high school girl being stalked by a sexual predator. Everything that happens to Gail in the high school, at home, and at the house where she babysits is hyper-real with horror movie levels of attention to detail. I don’t wish to be a spoiler for this well-written book, but the narrator does not die in the book and it definitely does not have a happy ending. For anyone who has the amount of empathy I do, and in many ways becomes the narrator-character by reading, reading a book like this can physically hurt. A teacher like me has lived through horrible things like this happening to students before, it even happened to me as a boy, and it adds the slings and arrows of those things being re-lived as you read.
This is not the only book that has ever done this sort of damage to my heart strings. I remember the pain from the conclusion of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. You root for Little Nell and boo Daniel Quilp. But the bad guy wins. No happy ending can linger in the harp-strings of your memory-feeling song as long as a tragic outcome does. I was there with Scout in that ridiculous costume in the dark when Bob Ewell was attacking her brother Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. That story was filled with wise and laughable things, but the stark horror of that climactic moment nearly wiped all the good feelings away, if not for the heroics of ghostly Boo Radley whose timely intervention brings it all back before the novel ends. It horrifies me to admit it, but I was there, too, in the moment when the boys all turn on Simon on the beach with their sharpened sticks in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. They mistook him for the monster. I still haven’t fully recovered from that reading trauma.
The thing about books that hurt to read which makes it essential that I never try to avoid them, is that they can add more depth and resonance to your soul than any light and fluffy piece ever could. Life is much more like Lord of the Flies than it is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I am sadder but wiser for having read Are You In the House Alone? I am recommending it to other readers like me who don’t so much live to read as they read in order to live. Not because it is easy and good to read, but because it is hard and essential to read. It will hurt you. But it will leave you like it leaves its narrator, damaged, but both alive and purely resolved to carry on.
I have written one too.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why School Should Be Cool
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Tagged as education, Finland's education system, humor, learning, lessons learned, teachers, teaching, teaching better, writing