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.

Wishes for the New Year

‘Tis the season for both gifts and good wishes. Sometimes the two are one and the same. Still good wishes don’t always sound so pretty.

1. I, like so many people, am confused and outraged by the article in the New York Times about certain parents deciding to bypass picture books as quickly as possible to move on to chapter books. (Full disclosure—I write picture books.) This reported trend reminds me of a past fad using flashcards with quasi-verbal kids in an attempt to catapult them into SAT courses about the same time they finished toilet training. Hey, I’m a parent too; I worry all the time about my kids being well and happy and getting ahead. BUT COME ON!

My first wish? I wish that parents will realize that snuggling with their young child and a picture book, looking at it together accomplishes more than the chapter books I write as well. The child hears words she could never read at her age and enjoys a sophistication of story, relationships and ideas he could never read about by himself. The pictures act as an artistic dictionary, helping that young reader equate the look of a word and the word itself with its meaning via a drawing. Why be one of the seven blind men trying to define an elephant when you can just look at a picture of one? Furthermore we live in an increasingly visual age; why deprive a child of a model of using word and image together from the start?

And finally, we not only learn by doing, we learn by liking what we do. Kids love spending undistracted, interactive time with their parents (at that age, anyway) when the parent and a book are guides into new exciting worlds. They love reading picture books. And once they’ve practiced decoding letters and become used to bunches of them together with spaces between them, they love reading chapter books.

So I wish you guys would just calm down, then sit down and read a picture book to your kids.


2. Many writers here at I.N.K. have blogged about evolution and its detractors. They have been as impassioned and eloquent as I could ever be. So I’ll just start this wish/rant by saying, “ditto,” and move on to the general principal that we have never had better access to good, accurate information.

I wish we would value it more. Enough with “truthiness,” Mr. Colbert! And enough of cherrypicking facts or factoids that simply support our previously held views. I wish people would work harder to dig for this accurate information, find it, actually THINK about it, and use the results to create their opinions. Then let’s talk about how to reduce the deficit or raise our students’ math scores.

In other words, I wish we’d all start ascribing to a wise thought attributed to everyone from Bernard Baruch to Daniel Moynihan: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.


3. I mentioned in a previous blog that I am currently an author-in-residence in a Boston school located in the middle of a public housing community. There is nothing like extended time in a school to remind you that teachers are heroes. They’ve got a hard job that is everyday and most of them try their best to do it well. I wish society appreciated them more.

As an author, I also wish they would/could use better hand-crafted books (nonfiction and otherwise) in their classrooms. I now understand better than ever how hard it is for teachers to use initiative and personalize the lessons they teach. There are seemingly endless mandated tests beyond the required state exams. Grade level curricula have units that must be covered from, say, October 11th to November 7th and others that pick up on November 8th. Where is the time for spontaneity? For the magic that comes from an inspired lesson or experiment or book?

I wish that we can somehow figure out how to slip more want-to’s in with ought-to’s. I can see from my time at the Perkins School that sparks do get kindled in kids and we just have to have a sufficient variety of kindling around to reach the future poet and scientist alike.


4. Besides all this, I wish we all could have world peace and a Happy New Year.

Why Our Books Can Save Education

Teachers are living in fear these days. Their administrators are equally fearful. Here’s why: ASSESSMENT TESTS. And why are their knees shaking so hard? If students don’t measure up, a school’s reputation suffers, real estate values in their district suffer, taxes go down, there is less money for education, school budgets must be cut and people (teachers and administrators) can lose their jobs. So everyone frantically focuses on THE TESTS.

The top educators have been thinking hard about what kids need to know. Each district/state, even the nation has developed standards and content strands—the so-called scope and sequence of what kids need to know and when they need to know it. They make their scope and sequence—their lists— available to the public and to the people who create educational materials, including textbook publishers and others who produce product for the very lucrative (and highly competitive) school market. These publishers take the lists as written, use them as outlines and hand them to writers. “Cover this material” are their instructions. And their efforts are there for all to see in heavy tomes, in wikipedias, and in Google search results.

The expository prose created in this way is flat at best and positively boring and insulting to the reader at worst. How do I know? I was once asked to write a text book and was handed THE OUTLINE. Yes, I can write a decent declarative sentence. I’m not a bad speller and I know the rudiments of punctuation. But, much as I needed the money, I turned down the job. Why? I told them that I don’t write their way. I tried to ‘splain it to them (as Desi Arnaz would say): They could hire Shakespeare and give him THE OUTLINE to follow and they might get something they’d want to publish, but they wouldn’t get Shakespeare. They didn’t get it. I moved on.

Meanwhile the test creators are cooking up THE TESTS. One of their main focuses is on reading comprehension. A typical question involves giving kids three or four paragraphs to read and then asking them about what they’ve just read. But the test manufacturers aren’t hiring writers to create these paragraphs. They are searching high and wide for samples of excellent writing—literature—so that they can write questions like “What is the author’s point of view?” And just where are those test makers finding their writing samples? Are you ready for this surprising insight? FROM OUR BOOKS!!!! How do I know? I have a file full of permissions I’ve granted to test publishers over the years as do my I.N.K. colleagues.

So my questions to educators are: Why teach from inferior reading materials to prepare for tests that are based on literature? Why not teach from our books in the first place? How can kids develop the critical thinking skills to answer questions like “What is the author’s point of view?” when they are learning from materials where the author has no point of view? This is particularly true of reading in the content area—science, math and social studies. Don't you get that "covering" the material is not the same as teaching it?

There’s a leap of faith here that must be taken. I’ve read the standards. They are NOT LIMITING. There’s a lot of room for many voices, a myriad of approaches, and a variety of topics within curriculum guidelines. EVERY STUDENT DOESN’T HAVE TO LEARN EXACTLY THE SAME CONTENT. (Not that every student ever did). Education is not about an assembly line approach. Each child is hand-crafted. It’s about respect; respect for the learner and respect for the teacher. A formulaic, limited, strict interpretation that becomes simply teaching to the test doesn’t respect either. And that’s what sets literature apart. We authors have nothing but respect for our readers. We assume that the children we write for are intelligent human beings capable of comprehending the subject matter that gets us excited. The evidence is there in every sentence we write. And if you're worried about meeting the standards, use our free database, with each book aligned to the standards by the authors themselves who have a deep understanding of how their work fits into these broad definitions.

So my challenge to educators is to abandon the training wheels of prescribed texts. Do what the high-scoring schools have done for years. Liberate your teachers. Use our books to bring the joy of learning back into the classroom. Believe that learning happens when kids are engaged. Then, give them a few practice tests the week or so before the big bad assessment tests. You might be surprised at the results and wonder just what all the fuss was about.

Presenting Our Brand-New I.N.K. Brainchild!

This blog was originally posted on October 7, 2009


The I.N.K. bloggers, past and present, are pleased to announce the launch of our new website: INK Think Tank: Nonfiction Authors in Your Classroom. The main feature of this website is a FREE, searchable database of hundreds of in-print books all written by the 22 award-winning I.N.K. authors. Now you can find lists of books for all grade levels covering content mandated by National Education Standards and your state curriculum. Instead of feeding kids material from bland, uninteresting books, we offer a cornucopia of delicious, appetizing titles guaranteed to nourish both reading and learning. No single book can be all things to all students, but the LISTS of books generated by our database will come close. We believe that if kids learn through these high-interest, well-researched books that have been vetted for accuracy, they will perform better on the required assessment tests. We have included, on our new website, a page of references and studies that support our position. Now you can have fun playing with our database. For teachers, it’s designed to give you peace-of-mind that you’re fulfilling the requirements of your school district while you’re rediscovering the joy of teaching. For parents and librarians, it will provide you with a quick reference to pull books from shelves that tie in with children’s interests and classroom content.
We built our database from the ground up. The books were analyzed for it by those who know them best, their authors. Like any new idea in today’s technological world, our database is still a work in progress. We expect it to grow and change, depending on feedback from you, our users. We will be adding books of new author/bloggers to give you increased breadth of subject areas. And, of course, we will be adding our new books as they are published. We want to know how you search so the database can be as user friendly as possible. There are links on our website for you to contact us with your suggestions. You can also email us at: thoughts@inkthinktank.com




In addition to our books, we authors are also an under-utilized resource for classrooms. So, through the Ink Think Tank website, we are making ourselves available to teachers. You can see our encapsulated author profiles on our INK Thinkers page. We are an amazing group! There is probably no corner of the globe that one of us hasn’t visited. Without exception, we are all life-long learners. We are not afraid to admit when we don’t know something. Indeed, not-knowing is a welcome opportunity to learn something new. Now we want to inject our enthusiasm for learning into your classroom. We have included our email addresses and links to our websites. Many of us are available for school visits and professional development. We will also answer questions related to our books. (BTW, the word “author” means “source.”)



This month our blogs will be devoted to creative ways our books can be used in classrooms. We want to excite you to the possibilities!



The internet has spawned behemoth websites that seem to require a Ph.D to navigate. There is so much information and so much choice! The INK Think Tank is a boutique. We’re small so the choice is not limitless. The selection is made for you. For many, that may come as a relief! On the other hand, as a group we are quite powerful. We are prepared to work as teams to help you and your district. We offer guidance and professional development unique to the worlds of both publishing and education. The launch of the INK Think Tank: Nonfiction Authors in Your Classroom website is just the beginning. Contact us. Let us help you empower your students so that they love to learn!