Nonfiction Matters

November 23, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Some Thoughts From a Quick Trip to NCTE

I hobbled on to the train down to Philadelphia on Friday to attend the National Council of Teachers of English conference. My view of the meeting was skewed in a few ways -- I attended two seesions honoring notable books, so I got a close view of a selected group of books. My tours of the booths was limited by the slow pace of being  on crutches-- so again I saw fewer books, but in a bit more detail. Still, the overwhelming impression the books and the conf. left me with was of the vitality, experiment, and creativity now going on in books  for young readers. With the wide acceptance  of  the graphic novel format for middle grade and older readers, publishers have felt more and more free to experiment with the use of visuals and text, different kinds of type, creating  new collage forms. While mos...Read More

November 20, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

More Facts or More Thoughts?

Last night I met with two experts on education and education reform. They have both been working with the government, foundations, and private companies for decades -- seeing one phase of reform replaced by another. They made clear to me something Nina had raised in her comment the other day about teachers -- the focus on facts. The shift to standards loads more and more and more and more and more stuff onto what a teacher is theoretically supposed to cover and the student is supposed to know. Of course it is really all a shell game -- what the student needs to know is that tiny subset of all of that stuff that will be on the test. But since neither student nor teacher knows what that subset will be, coverage is all. Standards have come to mean loads of facts -- not how to find them, think about them, organize them, make sense of them, or exp...Read More

November 19, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The Times coverage of last night's NBA awards fits our interests perfectly -- note the speech from the adult NF winner and the focus on the young readers' winner -- again for the first time a NF author -- congratulations to Philip Hoose and to non fiction writers, editors, copy editors and proof readers everywhere

tinyurl.com/ygbcqse

November 18, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (6)

"Question the Answers"

Time out for a quick book report -- you'll see, there is a reason for this:
My men's reading group meets in a couple of weeks, and we'll be talking about Craig Mullaney's book whose title is the title of this post. Mullaney is a graduate of West Point, an Army Ranger, as well as a Rhodes scholar who led a platoon in Afhghanistan right next to the border with Pakistan. It may say more about me than the book that it strikes me as a young man's writing -- he writes clear, engaging sentences. He uses many well chosen and apt quotations from impressively wide reading ranging from T.S. Eliot to Rumi and -- as part of the book is the story of his courtship of his South Indian-American wife -- Hindu texts. And yet there is a sense in which the book mainly records what happened to him: the rigors  and challenges  of tra...Read More

November 17, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

My Doctoral Adviser Once Said of Historians, "We Are the Elders; We Pass On the Knowledge of the Past"

If you know something, it is your responsibility to share it with those who lack that knowledge. You have been presented with a gift, but the terms of the bequest are clear -- you must share it, pass it on, to all those who need it. That friends is what it means to be a nonfiction author for younger readers -- we have been gifted with the chance to learn, to discover, to know, and thus we have the responsibility to share, to inform, to educate. This preamble applies to Afghanistan, but, I realized yesterday, also to Fort Hood. Here's why: a columnist in Forbes raised the question of whether the killings should be known as Going Muslim -- ala Going Postal tinyurl.com/yfk3rms
      &nbs...Read More