Q: How much is The Noisy Classroom based on your own experiences?
A: One hundred percent! My classroom is definitely the noisy
classroom. They were young kids. Even with the older kids, you can get crafty
ways to make the classroom a fun place to learn.
Q: At what point did you decide to write the book?
A: It was always an idea in the back of my head. When I left
the classroom in 2015, I had more free time. I was working as an educational
consultant. I was able to sit down and write it out, and get the manuscript
together.
A: They all have an equal piece of the puzzle for me. I’m
always tweeting about injustices, and better practices in schools, and the
writing realm is equally important for me. I’m a pie chart—I’m equally split
between them. I never want to get out of any of these spaces. I want to make
all of them fit into my adult life!
Q: What do you hope kids take away from the story?
A: This story has a two-fer. When I watched cartoons, there
were always nuggets for adults. I want kids to see that a scary new situation
can work out in the end. And also to understand that there’s no one set way to
have a classroom. It’s a nod to teachers. It’s okay to have fun. If it gets a
little loud, and you create a classroom community where that’s okay, it’s a space
for kids to find their voice.
Especially now, going back to school is going to be scary,
navigating everything.
Q: What do you see as the right approach for going back to
the classroom?
A: We’re in a good place to adjust how we look at schools.
There’s some rhetoric that parents need to go back to work so school it is. We
should be having honest conversations with students, parents, and teachers
about what they feel comfortable with, and weighing that with the science. We
don’t want to have to homeschool kids; we have jobs. But we have to be safe.
Just throwing kids back in is tricky.
The same way we bailed out big corporations, we need to
funnel money in to schools and use creative solutions to keep teachers and
students safe while trying to get parents back to normal.
Q: What do you think Alison Hawkins’ illustrations add to
the book?
A: I love her. I was very nervous—I’m a visual learner and I
was giving my baby over to someone. But she hit it out of the park. I wanted
some sort of noise illustration—she made a rainbow of noise coming out of the
classroom.
I wanted the facial expressions to be very expressive—they
can say so much, and in Black culture, facial expressions are a nonverbal way
of communicating. And she knocked that out of the park.
She took the book up another level. She’s my partner in bringing the book to life. She’s also a debut illustrator.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have When My Cousins Come to Town, which will be out in
May 2021. It’s about Black cousin culture, and the rite of passage of earning a
nickname. The girl in the book is the smallest in her family, and she doesn’t
have a nickname. Her cousins come to New York City, and explore the city.
Everyone has a nickname, and throughout the book she does a lot of pretending,
adopting the names of her cousins.
Ultimately she learns that being yourself is a way to gain
your nickname.
I just finished a manuscript for the Noisy Classroom sequel,
The Noisy Classroom Goes to the Library. Ideally I would like this to be a
picture book series with the Black Miss Frizzle [from The Magic School Bus],
based on these kids getting into a bunch of crazy things.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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