It’s always very energizing and encouraging to attend a conference. Mostly it’s because you are immersed in a group of people who all care about the subject of the conference. I LOVE going to the American Library Association because it’s a huge chorus for books and reading and children. We’re all, so to speak, on the same page. What’s more, as a well-established children’s book author, I need only say my name and people know who I am. (Very gratifying for the ego — I love to talk to librarians because they truly value us authors.) Librarians constantly work at knowing children’s literature so that they can target books for the reluctant reader, the kid doing a research assignment, the bored kid who has no interests or the kid with the Harry Potter halo effect, looking for more like HP after having read all seven HP books umpteen times. When we come together it is an unabashed love fest.
Lately I’ve been attending education conferences. It has been a humbling experience. After decades of putting my best educational practices as a trained teacher into my fun science books for kids, I’m starting over. My mission is to do what many school librarians have failed to do — get literature into the classroom, particularly nonfiction literature. Why doesn’t this happen more often? Beats me. Teachers would probably say that they have no time. They are already so overburdened that learning about children’s literature is not their job. They don’t know what they’re missing. Teaching with top nonfiction children’s books could make their job easier and more fun. I have long believed that school librarians should conduct professional development sessions for their own teachers on specific good books for their curricula. There is a lot of evidence that proves libraries and librarians enhance learning. And the better schools of the nation do have close collaboration between the librarian and classroom teachers. (These faculty members also turn up at education conferences. They’re the ones who know my name.)
But my goal is not to preach to the converted but to reach the vast number of schools who don’t have close relationships between librarians and teachers, don’t have librarians, are doing away with their school libraries thinking they can just download content off the Web and are narrowly focused on preparing their kids for the assessment tests, which is not preparing them for life.
So I’m reaching out to the people who aren’t listening. I attend Twitter chats and ask questions (that get re-Tweeted). I’m buttonholing, one by one, anyone at a conference who will give me an elevator moment. I notice at education conferences that books are almost never discussed, that there are rarely authors or publishers in attendance or giving sessions, and that people are polite or dismissive when I mention that there are wonderful books for kids on the subjects they’re required to teach. What I’m trying to communicate is that we already have resources in place that could transform education by engaging kids, inspiring them and challenging them. It just requires thinking out of the box to incorporate these resources into lesson plans. I may be the only children’s book author who is doing this. (It’s a lot easier to make a school visit where they’re paying you enough to be treated as if you’re valuable.)
Every teacher has a voice to reach kids. Each child pays particular attention to the teachers who resonate with him or her. It’s a highly individualized process. Literature is also comprised of many voices. (Textbooks don’t have “voice.”) Where is it written that a particular single voice is the only one a person should listen to? If we want to teach critical thinking, why don’t we ask students to read at least two books (articles? chapters?) on a subject and compare them?
The value of collaboration lies in divergent points of view coming together to solve a problem. The problems of education won’t be solved until the different species of “birds” concerned with education start tweeting to each other. So I keep piping up.
My favorite movies this year include Invictus, The Blind Side, Secretariat, and The King’s Speech. Aside from the fact that they are all improbable stories of going against all odds, do you know what these hit movies have in common? THEY ARE ALL TRUE!!! They are nonfiction. Hollywood has long mined literature as a source for new product and lately it seems that truth has more power at the box office than fiction. (I also liked The Social Network, but its image was tarnished for me when I found out that some of the truth of that story was embroidered.)
Yet when it comes to the teaching of reading and writing to kids, fiction rules. My colleague Penny Colman did an informal survey in 2005 when she collected the summer reading lists for children of all ages from 11 public libraries in northern New Jersey. All the books on the list were fiction. When she asked teachers to do an inventory of their classroom libraries there were six times as many fiction as nonfiction books. She debunks the myths that nonfiction is boring, that it won’t hook kids on reading, that it’s more appealing for boys than for girls, that it is not literature. Many fiction writers include lots of information about the real world in their novels. But the key difference between the two genres is in the constraints on the author. Fiction writers can make stuff up; nonfiction authors can’t. And whether or not something is really true seems to have added value, at least to Hollywood audiences if not for kids as well.
Nonfiction is far more important than fiction if one is to be literate in today’s society. It’s what we write in our tweets, texts, and blogs. It’s directions in a manual, or a recipe book. It’s explanations of how things work. It’s in understanding the collective product of human minds in science, law, history and engineering. In a seminal study 10 years ago, literacy researcher Nell K. Duke found that first-grade classrooms spent only 3.6 minutes a day reading/listening to expository text material, and this had a deleterious effect on reading in later years. Yet as children go from elementary school to high school, the percentage of nonfiction reading comprehension on assessment tests increases from 50 to 70 percent, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It seems that the main sources in many schools of nonfiction are basal textbooks — once-over-lightly treatments that are not designed to capture imaginations and make kids want to learn more. Kids are not reading the kind of material they’re being tested on! (Which happens to be excerpts from award-winning nonfiction books.) No wonder teachers are terrified. But does this scare them into teaching from high-quality nonfiction? If it does, it’s not showing up on my royalty statements.
When Penny asked teachers why they don’t teach from nonfiction books many responded, “I don’t know enough about the subject.” They felt inadequate when contemplating straying from prescribed texts. This response should make you stop and think about the role of the teacher. Is it the role of the teacher to be the source of knowledge, especially when a kid in the back of the room can easily check facts using Google? At the elementary school level a teacher’s authority doesn’t necessarily come from intimate knowledge of a discipline. Granted it’s quicker and easier to supply an answer when known (which shuts off all further inquiry) rather than ask the student what they could do to find the answer. Why can’t learning be a shared experience between student and teacher by reading a book that is for the uninitiated into the subject matter? Why can’t a teacher hand a book to a student and say, “I haven’t read this but why don’t you read it and let us know what you’ve learned?” Can you imagine how empowering it is to a student to teach the teacher and other students? The notion that students are empty vessels to be filled from a teacher’s font of knowledge is not in synch with the information explosion that the digital age has provided.
The new-style teacher models curiosity and that it’s never too late to learn something new, and that collaboration with students enhances learning process. These are the skills needed for twenty-first century workers. Teachers who try to sustain their image as “the sage on the stage” are so last century. And that’s the truth.
The winds of change are blowing over the Middle East. After thirty years of constantly looking over their shoulders, young Egyptians have used social networking and nonviolent demonstration tactics to cause the downfall of an authoritarian dictator. They want a say in the determination of their nation’s future. The uprisings in Libya should strike fear in the hearts of other regional autocrats even as Qaddafi tries to appear sanguine. “Democracy” and “freedom” are contagious “viral ideas” that can only be contained by isolation from the Internet and by force. But a populace can be controlled by fear only as long as force or the threat of force is present. The minute these punishers are made impotent, the suppressed behavior (both good and bad) erupts.
Authoritarian rule doesn’t only exist in state dictatorships. It is present in some school districts and classrooms. Teachers toe the line for fear of losing their jobs. Students attend school to avoid the consequences of not coming. For those who play by the rules, some goals may be accomplished. If nothing else, this system is perceived of as being efficient and orderly. And for the people at the top, they have the power to impose their will on others. Heady stuff. But there are way too many negative side effects. Authoritarian rule fosters conformity instead of creativity. It erodes trust between people and discourages collaborative partnerships. Instead of creating positive feelings about learning with students, school becomes onerous — a place to escape from. It is not empowering. It shows little respect for individuality and humanity. Energy that could be used for good is diverted toward constant enforcement. And yet it persists in far too many educational settings. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Why is that notion so entrenched in our society?
Perhaps it has to do with the institutions we’ve inherited. The military has a chain of command and an authoritarian structure — many corporations are modeled on it. School organizations have often followed a business model. Excuse me for saying this, but these institutions are from a very masculine culture. In her groundbreaking book, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Deborah Tannen states that, by and large, when men speak they are being competitive — creating status for themselves. It’s a zero-sum game, “I’m up, and you’re down.” When women speak they try to create community and understanding. They share information to empathize and empower. In the woman’s culture, authority comes from the quality of the wisdom she imparts, not from her hierarchical position. And it can be delivered with humor, pathos, compassion; not just from a sterile, dispassionate point of view. (Think of how awkwardly astronauts spoke when they tried to express their feelings about walking on the moon.) Women’s culture is more democratic, more human.
Before the woman’s movement, teaching was the chosen profession for bright, educated women. They had autonomy in their own classrooms and brought their considerable creative energies to their students. If you doubt their influence, ask today’s high achievers to name their favorite teacher; they were memorable! Such teachers would not survive today in an authoritarian environment that prescribed what and how they were to teach. One prominent educator once told me that the woman’s movement ruined education because it created a “brain drain” as bright women chose more lucrative professions instead of teaching.
I’m not a public policy expert but it seems to me that the decrees from on high, from Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” to Obama’s “Race to the Top” have severely damaged what goes on in classrooms. Administrators have become autocrats as they search for rules that will guarantee their schools a high performance on the assessment tests. Teachers are teaching from fear. Can you see how this erodes our stated values of freedom and democracy in our educational systems? What do all those skill and drill test-preparation lessons teach our kids about learning and life? Expect life to be dull and restrictive? How can we produce creative problem solvers if creativity and problem solving are not present in the classroom? The most powerful gift of a great teacher is her humanity — how she connects with and inspires her students. Formulaic, authoritarian rule sucks the joy out of education. This much I can state with certainty: The young Egyptians and Libyans who rebel did not learn how in school.
I learned a new word the other day: “logorrhea” – which means “excessive talkativeness, especially when the words are uncontrolled or incoherent, as is seen in certain psychiatric illnesses.” It was used to describe blogging on the web. These days, almost everyone I know (and I know a lot of writers) has a personal blog in addition to contributing to a group blog or two. I tried to research the number of bloggers and I found that the latest answer to this question comes from BlogPulse, which currently tracks almost 150 million Web sites identified as blogs. But they admit that this is only an estimate that increases daily. The level playing field has now descended to the grass roots. Anyone can be published. It seems that just about everyone is.
In the old days, in order to get published, you had to meet the standards of the gatekeepers, namely editors who were highly educated, well-read people, who had seen enough writing to be able to discriminate the good from the not-so-hot. They knew how to spot the coming stars; the fresh voice, the vivid portrayer that made the page come alive, the insightful commentator. Often, these new writers needed help to hone their expressive skills, and the best editors knew just how to do this. It was only when a writer passed the first gatekeeper and got published that they were exposed to the next level, the critics, who gave out grades in public that the writer (and editor) could take to heart. After this group came the award committees who gave prizes to the best work, which served as yet another guide for the consumer and increased the revenues of the publisher. As painful as this system was (some editors were truly brutally frank), it tended to make the good writers even better. It was enough to make some of us “turn pro.”
The process was not unlike the experience of a baseball player in the farm system. Only the most talented young players are selected at entry level. Coaches mentor them, and the better players move up to more competitive farm teams in the organization. Ultimately, if a player is diligent and works hard and, most importantly, performs well on the field, he is moved up to the major league club. At this point, it’s a whole new ballgame. The rookie has the potential to grow into the job, but he still has a lot to learn. If he’s up to it, the major leagues will raise the level of his game.
So now that there’s a level playing field for writers, how can one find a voice and a readership?
How do I know if I’ve got any talent for the game?
One indication for amateurs comes from their number of followers on social media. But you shouldn’t confuse “popularity” with critical acclaim. In the children’s book world, a kiss of death for any aspiring author is to tell an editor, “I read it to my daughter and she LOVED it.” Peer review from other aspiring writers is a place to start but you’ll never get any better unless you seek mentoring from a professional editor. You’re doomed to always be a club player.
How do you get a game?
A professional writer knows that one’s feelings about one’s own work is always suspect. Love it or hate it, it takes a lot of experience before you can coolly evaluate yourself. You must get coaching — a professional editor — to give you feedback. It’s only after you’ve reached a higher level that you can realize what you’ve learned. The lesser can’t perceive the higher. That’s why so many wanna-be writers rail against criticism and stay stuck. I’m not sure that writing just for the blogosphere and collecting comments is enough to sharpen one’s skills. But perhaps I’m wrong. The Internet is certainly a game-changer. Maybe a new set of standards are now being set by digital natives (both readers and writers) that will create a whole new genre of written communication.
And if you’ve been in the game for a while, how do you raise your level of play?
Start writing for the people who need to hear you but aren’t listening. Be prepared for pain.
