Team LRK has a new video for you, based on a piece of prose you may recognize:
“I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes…”
Common Core supplements
Whether you’re interested in the Beekeeper’s Apprentice Common Core syllabus for a class, or would just like to see some background material, we’ve now added a whole lot of materials to the supplemental section–such as a selection of cartoons from Mr Punch Goes to War:
SCENE: HOTEL.
LITTLE GIRL: “Oh, Mummy! They’ve given me a dirty plate.”
MOTHER: “Hush, darling. That’s the soup.”
And a piece on Great War poems:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backsAnd towards our distant rest began to trudge…
There’s an excerpt from Maurice Maeterlinck’s classical treatise on Beekeeping (the one that appears at the head of each chapter of Beekeeper):
And now let us return to the city that is being repeopled, where myriad cradles are incessantly opening, and the solid walls even appear to be moving. But this city still lacks a queen. Seven or eight curious structures arise from the centre of one of the combs, and remind us, scattered as they are over the surface of the ordinary cells, of the circles and protuberances that appear so strange on the photographs of the moon.
Videos of the 12 year-old Great War soldier:
There is also a student packet, for teachers who want to introduce their students to the Twentieth Century through The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. The idea of a Common Core syllabus is to give students primary source material they can build a research project around.
There is also a student packet, for teachers who want to introduce their students to the Twentieth Century through The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. The idea of a Common Core syllabus is to give students primary source material they can build a research project around.
Or, for people who are just interested in reading them. It’s all here.
Mary Russell’s War
One hundred years ago, the armies in Europe were locked head to head all along a line from the North Sea to Switzerland.
In the past twelve months, hundreds of thousands had fallen, soldiers and civilians alike.
An entire swath of Europe lay devastated, the technology of War was building.
And Mary Russell met Sherlock Holmes.
Yes, the e-book Mary Russell’s War is on sale today, on Kindle, here, and on Nook and other formats here.
I hope you enjoy your visit with a young Miss Russell.
School Daze for Miss Russell
Sorry kids, but here in the northern hemisphere, we’re getting close to the new school year. (Was that a chorus of parents saying Yay! I just heard?) So I thought I’d make another mention of the study program that two great Middle School teachers put together based on The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.
As Jake and Katye say:
This unit breaks A Beekeeper’s Apprentice into six sections, and was originally taught over the course of seven and a half weeks. Each week, students were expected to complete a vocabulary unit, read a nonfiction piece from the time period, write an essay or piece of fiction given the nonfiction piece, and complete a comprehension packet.
These two (and their students!) did a really impressive piece of work, a fabulous resource for anyone wanting a richly textured way to use The Beekeeper’s Apprentice as a foundation for a teaching curriculum. They’ve built vocabulary lists, comprehension quizzes, and exams, and other sections of the project open doors to student research on early 20th century history, women’s studies, and an assortment of other themes. There’s even a teachers’ packet, which is as free as the student packet is (although for Teacher Packet, you’ll need to email Jake and Katye, since it gives all the quiz answers!)
44 states in the US have adopted the Common Core standards as a guideline for teaching students from elementary to high school levels. As the Common Core page says, the standards are:
- Research and evidence based
- Clear, understandable, and consistent
- Aligned with college and career expectations
- Based on rigorous content and the application of knowledge through higher-order thinking skills
In other words, they’re an attempt to challenge students, not just drill them preparing for exams. And since teachers are free to approach it any way they want, these community efforts are essential.
The Beekeeper’s Common Core is an ongoing project, so let us know what you think of it. If you use it (either in a class or in some other way) please tell us how things went, and what suggestions you’d have for changing or adding to the program.
One of those areas under construction is the nonfiction supplemental section of the curriculum, aimed at giving students primary source material on which to base study units. Included in this version of the study packet are such diverse essays as Manners and Rules of Good Society: Or, Solecisms to be Avoided; Trenches at Vimy Ridge; To The Members of The Women’s Land Army; Gypsy Lore; Syria and the Holy Land; and Chess-Humanics. We’re in the process of adding to those, so, if you’ve found any early videos, letters, journals, photographic collections, and the like that teachers of Middle School students might find helpful to illustrate and explore areas touched on by Beekeeper, send them to me, and I’ll add them to the list.
Read about Jake and Katye’s project here, and you can download the Common Core study unit itself here.
And another generation falls into love with Mary Russell!
BBC Beekeeper
Several years ago, BBC Radio 4 did an adaptation of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. If you don’t know Radio Four, this is the radio station that covers not music, but the word: dramas, comedies, in-depth reports on news and history, it’s a genius source of wit and wisdom the like of which does not really exist in the US.
For a while, the CDs of Beekeeper and similar works could be bought in the BBC shops, but then they went out of stock, and the 2000 recording went back into the dim recesses of the Beeb’s archives.
Until now.
Adapted by Shaun Prendergast, starring Pendergast, James Fox, Monica Dolan, and Sian Thomas, these four episodes were re-broadcast a couple of weeks ago, and are being streamed for the next two weeks on the Radio 4 site, here.
Let me know what you think of them!
Sheep; gorse: Sussex
I spent a few days in Sussex recently, and…
In my seven weeks of peripatetic reading amongst the sheep
(which tended to move out of my way)
and the gorse bushes
(to which I had painfully developed an instinctive awareness)
I had never before stepped on a person…
The Meeting, a hundred years on
One hundred years ago, something happened. Something vastly important. An event that reverberated down the ages. If you’ve been following the Monday posts on this blog, you’ll know that two days and a hundred years ago, Miss Russell planned on taking a walk from her inherited home across the Sussex Downs to the Channel.
And we all know what happened next, on April 8, 1915, one hundred years ago today.
As Miss Mary Russell put it:
I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him….
It was a cool, sunny day in early April, and the book was by Virgil. I had set out at dawn from the silent farmhouse, chosen a different direction from my usual—in this case southeasterly, towards the sea—and had spent the intervening hours wrestling with Latin verbs, climbing unconsciously over stone walls, and unthinkingly circling hedgerows, and would probably not have noticed the sea until I stepped off one of the chalk cliffs into it.
As it was, my first awareness that there was another soul in the universe was when a male throat cleared itself loudly not four feet from me…
Or from HIS point of view:
After twelve years in Sussex, I was well accustomed to busybodies. Everyone in the county knew who I was, and although they took care to protect me from the intrusion of outsiders, they felt no compunction to offer the same protection from their own attentions. Stepping into the village shop for Mrs Hudson would bring a knowing wink and a heavy-handed jest about investigating the choices of soap powder. If I paused to examine an unfamiliar variety of shoe-print on the ground, a short time later I would look back to find a knot of villagers gazing down to see what had drawn my attention. One time, a casual remark to a passing farmer about the sky—that a storm would arrive by midnight—led to a near-panic throughout the Downland community, until the farmer’s wife had the sense to ring Mrs Hudson and ask if I’d actually intended to warn him that the Kaiser’s troops were lying offshore, waiting for dark.
Only the pub had proved safe ground: When an Englishman orders a pint, his privacy is sacrosanct.
Every so often, perhaps once a year, I would become aware of what is known as a “fan.” These were generally village lads with too much time on their hands and too many penny-dreadful novels on their shelves. Trial and error had shown that a terse lecture on personal rights coupled with a threat to speak to their fathers would send them on their way.
Now, it seemed, I had another one.
And thus, it begins…
Lives Change @ Mary Russell
Today’s your last day to tell me
“How The Beekeeper’s Apprentice Changed my Life”
or:
“When I First Met Mary Russell, She…”
This year’s celebration of libraries, whose theme for National Library Week this year has been:
Lives Change @ Your Library.
(And yes, there will be Extra Points Given for a mention of libraries in the submissions.)
First prize: a complete hardback set of the UK editions of Russell’s Memoirs, plus a copy of the new US 20th anniversary hardback of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.
Runner-up: a complete set of the UK Allison & Busby paperbacks of the Russell Memoirs.
Email them to me by midnight tonight, Pacific time, as text or image, here.
I’ll try my best to look through them all by Monday, and post the winners.
Beekeeper, renewed!
Today we’re celebrating twenty years of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, when Mary Russell was introduced to the world and her “author” (or—editor?) Laurie R. King encountered the joys and madness of a fan community. Yes, I’m talking about you guys.
Today also marks the sale date for the gorgeous new Picador hardback:
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Twentieth Anniversary Edition:
There’s a fresh new LRK foreword, a fresh correction of a few stray typos, and a fresh new cover that makes you just want to run your hand all up and down it for a while.
(…and isn’t this cover a whole lot better than the original proposed one the pair nearly got saddled with?
Oh, shudder! There’s other cover art here from Beekeeper’s history, here.)
But this one is new! It’s shiny! It’s so very cool! This is a book to give your teenagers, to suggest to your library, to use as bathtub reading—replacing that tattered and dangerously swollen paperback edition you’ve had for fifteen years, perhaps. (The 20th Anniversary edition is also available in a paperback, if you prefer, but where’s the fun in that?)
If you’d like a signed copy, you can order one through Bookshop Santa Cruz, here.
And through Poisoned Pen Bookstore, here.
Or unsigned through:
Oh, a whole new era for lovers of Russell & Holmes. Thank you, Picador books. And thank you, readers, for making Picador believe that enough people might like a hardback version to justify a brand new edition, twenty years on.