Written by two teachers, Jennie Withers and Phyllis Hendrickson, M. Ed., Hey, Back Off! sheds lights on the topics of Teen Harassment and Bullying At School.  It helps both parents and teens understand more about the Harassment Law , the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing harassment),  the Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (prohibiting discrimination based on disability).

This book helps readers realize different types of bullying: cyberbullying (sending mean text messages), sexual harassment, verbal teasing, and hitting or punching.  It explores different cases and different personalities:  passive teens (who have passive parents) becoming victims, and bullies being bullies because they have aggressive parents, and it shows how a person can become assertive from being passive or aggressive.  It portrays true life experiences of agressive people and how they become that way.  After reading the chapters on these cases of Passive Personalities and Aggressive Personalities, I realized that the authors have helped people on both sides of the spectrum:  victims of bullying and the bullies.

October was the Bullying Prevention Awareness Month.  www.nctsn.org is an important web site to check out.  Go to "Resources, "Public Awareness", click on "Bullying Prevention Awareness Month" to learn about "Facts and Tips for Teens" to stay safe from cyberbullying.  This site also provides us with links regarding other types of abuse/bullying:  "Finding Help for Sexually Abused Children", "National Homeless Youth Awareness Month", and "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month".  Under "Get Help Now", there are links to crisis hotlines, victim assistance programs, how to deal with school crises, how to help abused or neglected children, and more.

Written by two conselors and moms, Gina Scarano-Osika and KimDever-Johnson, this book You Grow Girl:  A Self-Empowering Workbook for Tweens and Teens is definitely a book to be shared with your friends and you parents/teachers/conselors.  It helps you build self-esteem and body confidence, understand and maintain healthy eating attitudes, learning about stress management and how to cope with stress, how to nourish positive thinking and eliminate negative feelings.  It depicts female role models from various backgrounds and ethnicities.  It encourages teens to become beautiful inside and out by giving teens different scenarios and thought-provoking exercises.  Issues such as culture and peer pressures, deceptive media images, food/weight, mindfulness, etc. are also explored. 

Gracefully prepared by two conselors, this book offers a lot of wisdom to girls ages 9 to 16.  Strongly recommended to not just girls, but to Moms and Dads alike.

After hitting the book market in 2011, this book Inside Out and Back Again quickly became a best-seller.  The month of October was the Bullying Prevention Awareness Month, and this book once again was actively sought after.  Every year thousands of high school students are being bullied due to differences in religion and culture or norm, or the way they portray themselves, dress, talk, or socialize.   Among these student victims of bullying, many came from Vietnam.  This book is a series of heartfelt poems telling stories of how Ha`, the protagonist, went through years of being bullied by her classmates, and how she coped with bullying. 

Her story is symbolic of the high school life of many other Vietnamese students and students of other ethnic backgrounds who came here to America when they were in the ages of 9 to 18.  In the end of the book,  Ha` delivered a powerful message to the world:  she stood up, "gave her bullies a lesson" by becoming an excellent student whom both her family members and the school officials were so proud of.

This book won many awards such as Newbery Honor, National Book Award, and was placed on the New York Times Bestsellers list.  You can access the Newbery Medal home page through SJPL (San Jose Public Library) home page, www.sjpl.org, under "Homework, research, articles", then go to "Research Guides", "Books and Literature", "Book Awards", "Newbery Medal".

June was the month to recognize the refugees' plight.  Again, check out the web site www.nctsn.org to understand the refugees and the circumstances they have to live through.  Go to "Resources", "Public Awareness, click on "World Refugee Awareness Month". 

Hopefully you will see the image of yourself and your friends' through these books and the web sites recommended here, and will do your part to foster a better learning environment for your school.

Ha` was one of hundreds of thousands of political refugees who left Vietnam in 1975 when she was 10 years old.  She and her family settled in Alabama.  Her pen-name is Thanhha Lai.  Her first name is Ha`, Thanhha`, or Thanhha.

For March 2012, our Online Book Club continues by discussing The Butterfly Mosque by Willow Wilson, another featured title of this year's community reading program, Silicon Valley Reads, which focuses on the theme "Muslim and American."

Each week, we'll put forth a different question to prompt reflection on the book and its ideas.  We hope you will participate in the discussion by leaving comments below!

For Week 4, we'd like to ask: After reading about Willow's experience living in Egypt, how has your perception of life in the United States changed or deepened? Have any personal trips abroad had a similar effect on you?

Reading about Willow's life in Cairo, it really hit me how fortunate we are in the United States to have relatively clean environments in which to live.  Dealing with our air pollution is one thing, but I'm not sure how long I would last breathing in smelly dust from desert dirt.  And I'd gladly risk pesticides and preservatives over having to dodge maggot-infested fruit and contaminated meat.

I also was struck by Willow's surreal experience with Patriot Act survelliance in the Denver airport.  Of course, she still has no idea what really happened - that trenchcoat-wearing man who snapped her photo could have just been an ordinary guy who wanted a picture of an odd white woman in a hijab.  But clearly survelliance was going on - as evidenced by the experience of her friends who were questioned.  I guess I'd hope the authorities would've concluded much earlier that she didn't pose a threat.  It's scary that this could happen to you for so long without any obvious signs and then that innocent people would continue to have their lives inconvenienced by their own government.

Finally, I could relate to the embarassment she felt in the taxi when the other American girls launched into a loud, sexually-explicit, conversation.  In my first trip overseas, I was intent on experiencing life in another country on its own terms and not my own.  Unfortunately, I had to share this experience with other American college students who were only interested in getting drunk on a daily basis and made no attempt to modify their behavior to fit their new environment.

What about you? How has your perception of life in the United States changed or deepened after reading the book? Have personal trips abroad had a similar effect on you?

See our Online Book Club page for more information about this book and the previous weeks' questions

For February 2012, our new Online Book Club is discussing The Muslim Next Door: The Qur'an, the Media, and that Veil Thing, by Sumbul Ali-Karamali.  This is one of the books chosen for the community reading program, Silicon Valley Reads, which this year focuses on the theme "Muslim and American."

Each week, we'll put forth a different question to prompt reflection on the book and its ideas.  We hope you will participate in the discussion by leaving comments below!

For Week 4, we'd like to ask:
What was your perception of Islam before reading this book and has it been transformed or confirmed after reading The Muslim Next Door?

Years before reading The Muslim Next Door, I read a translated interpretation of the Qur’an as a college assignment. I remember being surprised by how similar it was to the Bible. I grew up in a small town that wasn’t particularly friendly towards non-Christian ideas, so it was a transforming experience to learn about different religions and discover that I could to relate to them.  As a result of my college education, my perception of Islam prior to reading The Muslim Next Door was that the religion is strikingly similar to Christianity, but largely misunderstood (and even feared) in America. Ali-Karamali confirmed this perception.

Despite my (admittedly cursory) study of Islam, I was surprised to learn in The Muslim Next Door that nuances of the Arabic language allow for a large degree of gender neutrality in the Qur’an. The English interpretation of the Qur’an that I read defaulted to male pronouns. This choice may have been intentional, or it may simply have been the interpreter’s generic use of so-called gender neutral English. Either way, according to Ali-Karamali, English interpretations of the Qur’an feed into the idea that Islam is a male-centric religion. Though I have never subscribed to the stereotype that Islam was an inherently sexist religion, I was surprised to learn that the Qur’an was actually quite feminist for its time.

What was your perception of Islam before reading this book and has it been transformed or confirmed? Let us know!

See our Online Book Club page for more information about this book and to preview the next weeks' questions

For February 2012, our new Online Book Club is discussing The Muslim Next Door: The Qur'an, the Media, and that Veil Thing, by Sumbul Ali-Karamali.  This is one of the books chosen for the community reading program, Silicon Valley Reads, which this year focuses on the theme "Muslim and American."

Each week, we'll put forth a different question to prompt reflection on the book and its ideas.  We hope you will participate in the discussion by leaving comments below!

For Week 3, we'd like to ask:

Can you think of aspects of your own tradition/culture/religion that could be misunderstood or perceived in a negative light?

Throughout her book Ms. Ali-Karamali writes about how Islam is misunderstood and often confused with culture/politics.  She writes about the misunderstandings her friends and co-workers had about her religious beliefs and practices, ranging from dating to the role of women, to evolution. 

As a child, my family was never involved in any organized religion.  Upon leaving my hometown for college, I was surprised to have new friends and acquaintances ask me how I could live a moral life without a religion to guide me.  My parents had taught me much about evaluating a situation and acting in a responsible manner; yet my friends wondered how I could know I was doing the right thing if I didn’t have a religious text or tradition to turn to.

This is only my personal experience, but perhaps you have a completely different experience you would like to share.  Tell us:  Can you think of aspects of your own tradition/culture/religion that could be misunderstood or perceived in a negative light?

See our Online Book Club page for more information about this book and to preview the next weeks' questions

For February 2012, our new Online Book Club is discussing The Muslim Next Door: The Qur'an, the Media, and that Veil Thing, by Sumbul Ali-Karamali.  This is one of the books chosen for the community reading program, Silicon Valley Reads, which this year focuses on the theme "Muslim and American."

Each week, we'll put forth a different question to prompt reflection on the book and its ideas.  We hope you will participate in the discussion by leaving comments below!

For Week 1, we'd like to ask:
What information, anecdote, or argument in The Muslim Next Door surprised or left a deep impression on you?

Before reading this book, I had some exposure to the very basics of Islam from overview-history courses in college and Muslims I've known; things like the five pillars, prayers, fasting, dietary restrictions, how Islam fit into the Judeo-Christian tradition, Muhammad's life, and the Sunni/Shi'a split. 

I appreciated the chance to learn much more from this book.  As basic as this may sound, I don't recall ever reading translated portions of the Qur'an before - and found it wasn't what I expected. Several things surprised me about the Qur'an:

• It's actually a very lyrical work (more so in Arabic, it would seem) that appeals to the heart as much as the head.  Hearing so much about "Islamic law", that is basically what I expected the Qur'an to be - dry "laundry lists" of rules.
• Many of the translated verses (at least, those Ali-Karamali chose here) sound like they could fit right into the Bible without any difficulty; in their tone, subject matter, and message.
• The Qur'an is not translated in order to avoid altering its meaning.  This is an interesting approach for a religion to take. Seems it might make it more difficult to convert followers if they have to learn another language too.

There's much more I could bring up, but what did you think?  What information, anecdote, or argument in The Muslim Next Door surprised or left a deep impression on you? Let us know!

See our Online Book Club page for more information about this book and to preview the next weeks' questions

The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose is a book about young man who transfers from Brown University, an elite Ivy League school, to Liberty Baptist University. He encounters a different mind set among the students at each university and learns about himself and his faith. He reconciles the competing views that are presented to him. Check it out!