I agree, Marc, that interpreting history means making use of good reading skills -- those same skills that we bring to fiction. Readers use those skills every day. Teachers reinforce those skills in readers every day. So . . . why not transfer those skills to the reading of history?

When teachers fear that they don't have the training to interpret history -- that they may get it wrong -- I also think about writing and the skills it requires. DIdn't most of us have to take freshman composition in college, a course in which we had to write comparison papers? research papers? As teachers, didn't we learn Bloom's taxonomy? Aren't those also the same skills that we use to read and interpret history?

And while we're at it, why not transfer writing skills? (I am speaking here as a former teacher -- 8th grade, nearly 20 years in the classroom.) I want students to read nonfiction books, as part of the curriculum and for pleasure. I also want them to write their own nonfiction and to write about nonfiction written by others. I want them to learn to write essays and to write narratively.

Yes, kids are swamped with multiple choice tests and NCLB. But what better way to get kids to remember facts than to get them to wrap them in their own narrative nonfiction? What better way to get them to think through their ideas than to expand them into paragraphs and multi-paragraph essays and narrative nonfiction (that tells a story)?

I left the classroom ten years ago. It was, thank goodness, before NCLB.

Susan:

You express perfectly exactly what I believe. Nonfiction is creative not because we need to make it read like fiction, or make up details, or even make sure we know the precise angle of the sunlight as Jefferson's pen touched the page of the Declaration, but because engaging with the past can be done in as many ways as the mind/heart/intuition/creative talent can function. One person may find a century in a button, another may carry us along through thousands of years on a wave of interpretive brilliance, yet another may capture how faces looked different when there were few mirrors, and still another the heat billowing out from a burning cross. Deciding what we investigate it and how to render it is a creative process, a Language Arts challenge, and one teachers would, I would wish, embrace

I'm an editor, not a teacher. But I wonder if part of the problem is that curricula call for analyzing and interpreting literature, but not nonfiction. I think there is tremendous opportunity in reading the classics (say, The Great Gatsby), and using that as a bridge into the history of the 1920s. How did Fitzgerald interpret the times? Which parts of the book reflected what was happening in the world and which were part of his characters? And then going a step further--reading more than one nonfiction book about the time and asking the same questions one does about literature: what were the author's motivations, why is this part included, why did one author spend more pages on one part of the topic. Perhaps as nonfiction writers, editors, publishers, we need to give teachers some tools for how to go about teaching nonfiction and incorporating it into already existing curricula.

Rebecca

Tools, yes. But really this is a frame of mind. The problem is a textbook attempts to have no, as well as every, point of view. Take any other source and you can question it, see the same information differently. If a piece of NF has an author, it has an "I" in there somewhere and the teacher can train the class to look for that point of view, that angle of vision. As William Blake put it "the eye altering, alters all." Surely he also meant the "I"