In Your Own Words: What Do You Think?

Like most authors, I remember negative reviews. When the first two books of my Imagine Living Here Series were published back in the early nineties, the reviews were mostly quite positive. But one critic said that the books were “Not good for reports.” It got me thinking; what did that mean? This Place is Cold is about Alaska and This Place is Dry is about the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. The adjective that describes each place allowed me to write the books from a point of view: Why is it cold or dry? How does the climate affect the flora and fauna? How does it affect the lifestyle of people? How does it impact the culture –the art, clothing, festivals, etc? In other words, the information about these places was organized around the thesis that the climate had an overriding impact on every aspect of life in these parts of the world. Now let’s imagine the students who have an assignment to do a research papers about Alaska. They go to online and look up the place and get the facts. They list these facts and (ta da!) they’ve produced their reports. It’s possible that many students cut and paste the facts into a report without passing any of it through their own brains. My guess is that my books weren’t deemed worthy for reports because perhaps the unique organization and my “voice” made it difficult to plagiarize as opposed to the “vanilla” writing in reference works.

The Common Core Standards for writing are more concerned with the process of researching and writing than the product. They want students from kindergarten on to: “research to build and present knowledge.” They want students to study how nonfiction authors write and they expect that by third grade, students will “Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., read a number of books on a single topic to produce a report; record science observations).” In other words, students will have to do close reading of a number of sources to prepare to write something in their own words. So the bar for such reports is far higher now than back when my books first came out.

As every scientist, historian, and doctoral candidate knows, you have to formulate a question that your research can answer. But in order to ask a good question, you have to KNOW something. This means that reading a lot is prelude to writing. Reading a lot is also known as research. So there are two stages to research:

1: Reading to educate yourself so you can formulate a thesis.

2. Researching to fill in the blanks so you can articulate your thesis persuasively. This research can include more reading, experiments, interviews, other media, etc.

One of the things we’ve noticed in the Authors on Call pilot program with the Bogert School this year is that the teachers are in a hurry to have the kids write reports. They want to make report assignments almost as soon as they’ve introduced a topic. My interaction with the students was to help them find subjects for reports. It was immediately clear to me that the kids didn’t know enough to ask a meaningful question. They’ve been reading my book What’s The BIG Idea? in their classroom work. This book is about the questions scientists ask that lead to BIG ideas about motion, energy, matter and life. In the introduction, where I define a BIG idea as one for which there is no quick or easy answer, I tell the story of Isador Isaac Rabi (1898-1988) who discovered magnetic resonance—the phenomenon behind MRIs . (He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944.) He said that he owed his success in science to his mother. Everyday, when he came home from school, she would ask him, “So, what good question did you ask today?”

The Common Core Standards are asking for nothing less than a culture change in education. Where NCLB was focused on answers so kids could do well on high-stakes tests, now we will be focusing on process—how to get students to think critically and creatively, which means asking questions and learning how to do research to get answers. Only then will students be able to speak and write in their own words.

They are going to need our help.

Nonfiction in Doodles

There’s been a lot of discussion about invented aspects of nonfiction lately, although of course it has always been an issue: whether to use only direct quotes in context, and not to envision conversations; whether to connect points A and C with a B that seems necessary but is unknown; whether -- and how -- to fill in the blanks of a narrative.

Although the answers are full of grey area (and controversy) they seem more black and white to me than do answers to similar questions about illustrations. While illustrators must use real, reliable references, they also make tricky decisions about what to show -- and wander the border between fact and fiction struggling to envision a scene that demonstrates the heart of the story being told or the situation being described.

Take my current work, for example. I’m writing this blog post in a break from my forthcoming graphic article, White Whale on the Go, a Humanimal Doodle (For more on these, please see my Humanimal post or the Humanimal section of my website. ) Here’s the story this doodle tells:

The tiny Iñupiat Eskimo village of Point Lay, Alaska depends for its food on beluga and bowhead whales that migrate through. The Iñupiat have dispensation to hunt a small number of whales for subsistence. Scientists trying to learn more about beluga behavior and physiology asked the Iñupiat for access to the whales -- specifically, they asked for help catching whales so they could be tagged with data transmitters that would track their paths, and for tissue and blood samples from recently killed whales. These samples were used to compare the wild beluga with belugas kept at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut.

After several years of cooperative work, two Point Lay men were invited to visit Mystic to see the labs where the research was conducted and to visit the aquarium’s whales. Enthralled, they asked that other people from Point Lay be invited, and they were quite specific about whom: high schoolers. Not only did the men want the cooperative effort to continue -- because scientists are monitoring the effects on whales of climate change, expanded shipping lanes, and increased drilling for oil -- but they wanted the next generation to lock things in. Moreover, they hoped their young people might be inspired to go into science.

This year, four Point Lay girls visited Mystic, and I drove up to meet them and to talk to the scientists they were working with. I came home with good notes and great quotes, and now I had to turn them into a visual story. My Humanimal Doodles are all, uh, doodled, so photographs were out of the question. But I did have photographs showing the girls meeting Mystic’s three beluga whales, wearing chest-high waders to enter the chilly pool.

Well, what do you think I should have done? Copy a photograph as a drawing? If I did, I worried what the photographer might think. What about attaching a quote to a drawing copied from a photograph? That seemed wrong, too, because the things the girls told me weren’t associated with particular moments that might have been photographed.

What I came up with, instead, was an imaginary situation completely based in truth. Here it is: the four girls in their waders, which definitely happened; standing together and acting goofy the way people do when they put on waders, because they feel a little silly, their feet all heavy and weird; and saying things to each other that they had actually only said to me. In identifying them with their actual names and ages, I feel as though I’m saying “This is true and factual.” Overall, it isn’t exactly correct historically, if you will, but each piece is factual. In the end, I made a judgment call that the girls would not object to the context in which I placed them and their comments.

I am reminded of a favorite quotation: “Things are not untrue just because they never happened.” -- Dennis Hanley

In my Humanimal Doodles, I find myself continually confronted with these kinds of situations and decisions, and frequently check things out with the subjects of the articles. I’m lucky to be able to do this, since they’re around, and I can call them up or email them my work. And their affirmative responses to their portrayals gives me confidence that if what I am doing “works” for them in telling their stories, then it works for me in writing them up.