maurice sendak.

As I'm sure some of you heard, the children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak passed away yesterday. I, like most people, mostly knew Sendak as the beloved author of Where The Wild Things Are - his most famous children's book, which was also the theme for an amazing museum that was opened at the San Francisco Metropolitan when I was young.

On my second day of teaching at the school for the deaf, my students put on a performance of Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice. On the first of each month, I reviewed the poem of the month from that particular book and the students used it as reading practice for a week. When the students did biographies on famous people, Maurice Sendak was one of their topics. I learned that Sendak was the illustrator of the Little Bear series, which at one point in my childhood, I was reading several times a day.

It is always a shock when a famous person passes away. As a society, we respond the loudest to the passings of glamorous celebrities, especially when they die before their time, like Heath Ledger or Michael Jackson. It is people such as children's authors, though, who I will always value. As a teacher, a book lover, and as someone who cherishes childhood memories, my thoughts are with Maurice Sendak today. May he rest in peace.