Newbery Encased in Marble
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
– Michelangelo
Among the people who follow the Youth Media Awards awards closely (and specifically the two oldest awards, The Newbery and Caldecott), I think there are two extremes.
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On one end are those who feel that THE (I should say THEE) winner is out there – there is one “best” – and the committee must find it. They read the Michelangelo quote above and say, “Yep.”
On the other extreme are those who feel that the block of marble doesn’t hold one statue, but a world of possibilities. There is no one “best”. Every year has many potential winners of it and the committee members fight for their favorites.
I tend to fall more toward the latter group.
Where do you stand? One best? Or many?
Filed under: Articles
About Travis Jonker
Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter: @100scopenotes.
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I, agree, Travis, with your point of view. That’s why we have seen many honor books, right? “Best” is a bit limiting. “Most notable” perhaps says it best. It is fun, however, to participate in discussions of “best of the best” to get excited for award season. Thanks for helping get us all fired up!
Sharon Verbeten
Brown County (WI) Central Library
There may be ONE best book for an individual person (though I can’t really even imagine that), but I think there are a number of books every year worthy of these awards. All of those top 1% of books published are worthy, actually. I’ve heard several committee members say that the award goes to the best book that that group could all agree on. I know just from being on the CYBILS judging panels for several years how tricky it is for a group to come to a consensus on the “best” book. Ack! Can’t even imagine the pressure of being on the Newbery or Caldecott committee!
Yeah, the thing is that everyone has a different opinion on what is “Most Distinguished.” So the actual winner depends on the make-up of that year’s committee. I do like that the Newbery and Caldecott committees have 15 people — so a *lot* of people have to think the book is distinguished for it to win the award. And I think that’s a good thing. But yes, I do believe that a different committee may well pick a different winner — and it would still be a worthy book.
Coming from a Mathematician’s perspective, I’d like to think that, oh, 75% of all possible theoretical committees that could be composed from ALSC members would choose the same winner. But it’s possible that figure is much lower. An interesting thought… no way to check, because there are more possible committees than atoms in the universe. But the idea is interesting.
Now if you looked at what percentage of theoretical committees would choose the winning book as winner *or honor book*, the number would definitely be higher…. We could call this a book’s “Consensus Score.” Of course, there’s no way to measure it, but we can speculate. For example, The Lion and the Mouse had a Consensus Score close to 100%, in my opinion….