Blog Archives

Uncovering the Truth in a Post-Truth Era

30/4/2018

Yesterday, there were a couple of opinion articles in the New York Times on the amount of lies foisted on the public. In 2016, Oxford Dictionary's new word of the year in 2016 was "post-truth." So I guess that means we're now living in the post-truth era. Daniel Effron wrote a piece Why Trump Supporters Don't Mind His Lies.. He claims that fabrications are acceptable to some people if they "could have been true." Michael Hayden's The End of Intelligence discusses the normalization of lying during presidential security briefings when facts don't seem to matter. The danger is that we are losing our moral compass as a "Nation of Lies" overshadows our cherished "Nation of Laws." The erosion of trust is ubiquitous. My email box is bombarded with requests to sign petitions, join rallies, give money. Who are all these people? I distrust them all! I even get phone calls from young men purporting to be my grandsons, some of them with foreign accents.

Truth is primary to those of us who write nonfiction for children. We take the word "nonfiction" seriously. It means, "nothing is made up." We don't even allow invented dialogue. We must cite our sources. I once figured that besides the fact checkers, an iNK manuscript was read by people with prior knowledge and critical thinking at least 18 times before publication, not counting that times it was reviewed by the author. We children's nonfiction authors DO NOT LIE! So I put out a message to my iNK colleagues of truth-tellers asking for help; where could we find instant fact-checkers. Laurie Thompson and Susan Schulman sent back the following sites so that you can ferret out a lie when you get suspicious:

Media Blast/Fact Check
“Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC News) is an independent online media outlet. MBFC News is dedicated to educating the public on media bias and deceptive news practices.
“MBFC News’ aim is to inspire action and a rejection of overtly biased media. We want to return to an era of straight forward news reporting.
“Funding for MBFC News comes from site advertising, individual donors, and the pockets of our bias checkers.”

Factcheck.org
We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels.

Politifact.com This Pulitzer Prize-winning site goes to great lengths to explain their process to root out facts from fiction.

Snopes.com focuses on smoking out rumors. They have a search box where you can insert something you’ve seen or heard from the media and they check it out.

Washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker If you trust traditional media, then the Washington Post is your source where reporters adhere to journalistic standards. Nothing is reported without three independent sources. They give out Pinocchio’s as a rating for falsehoods. Interestingly, one of our Board members, Karen Sterling is a school librarian. She was amused at the furor of “reply alls” as we sorted this out. Her take?

'What fun to see you all performing the librarian’s job of fact checker! We all suffer from the great malaise - confirmation bias. Someone needs to write about this...
Thanks for providing a bit of levity today - I really needed it! And thanks for the nice list of fact checking sites. I will share them with students tomorrow giving Laurie and Susan full credit.”
Yes, whenever we can, we should cite our sources.

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

25/4/2018

Wikimedia Commons

Now that teachers and students are almost through surviving this year's standardized testing, I thought you might be interested in a time when a standardized test was no big deal.

I started my career as a teacher in the early ‘60s. For most of you who are too young to remember, let me tell you what it was like. First, I had a very hard time finding a job. I was 22 years old, married, and armed with a Master’s degree in high school biology, chemistry and physics instruction. I had no experience, except for student teaching; yet, I had to be paid a higher starting salary because I had an advanced degree with no guarantee that I'd be any good. And I was married, which implied that I would get pregnant and create problems for a school to replace me. I was routinely asked at interviews what my intentions were for starting a family (now against the law). I was ultimately hired by an unmarried, careerist, public school, female principal to teach 7th and 8th grade science. She put her arm around me and said, “I think you have great potential as a teacher. Whatever time you give us, I’m grateful for.” I gave them 2 ½ years and was forced to quit in my sixth month of pregnancy because I “showed.”

Make no mistake. I LOVED teaching. The department chair handed me a textbook to teach from. I took one look at it, and decided I couldn’t inflict such dry, pedantic stuff on my students. I also noticed that my classroom door was closed and no one was watching me. So I went to the library and found exciting books on the same subjects I was required to teach. I used them to create my own materials. Perhaps I was an outlier. I had no idea with my colleagues were doing in their classrooms. One day, when Mr. Dinsmore, the militant, scowling, assistant principal unexpectedly dropped in to observe me, my students and I were in the middle of deriving the equation for the Doppler Effect (in 8th grade!). (The Doppler effect is the change in the pitch of a sound from a moving source--you've heard it from ambulance sirens and locomotive whistles as they approach and pass you.) They knew I was being evaluated and rose to the occasion. Every hand went up. Every kid was in lock step with me. They broke into applause when he left after an abbreviated time! That spring, my students took the assessment tests (after about three days of test prep); they did just fine.

Today’s public school teachers are not trusted with the kind of autonomy I had. They are burdened with paperwork and have all kinds of rubrics to worry about both for themselves and for their students. A friend of mine, who is a professor in a CUNY school of education, tells me that teachers in public schools advise her students NOT to become teachers.

Education has made some progress since I left the profession. We now have a lot more resources and knowledge for teaching children with special needs. Technology and the availability of information are having an impact. When we look at Finland, which is successfully creating a knowledge-based economy, the teaching profession is the profession of choice for bright people. Each school faculty operates as a team to do whatever it takes to get students to learn. If you are not aware of how this works read this article from the Smithsonian Magazine. Finnish schools trust their teachers and give them the support they need to do their job. Contrast this with the current exodus of American teachers from the profession and the damage that has been done to public schools by the high stakes placed on the standardized test.

A few years ago, at an education conference, I interviewed Finnish Professor Jorma Routti, one of the founders of Finnish venture capital and one of Europe’s leading technology experts. “Education cannot be rushed,” says Professor Routti. “There are no short cuts, no magic bullets. It’s a law of nature. It takes nine months to make a baby and 30 years to make an engineer.”

How do we educate the powers-that-be to see the light? Testing will die a slow death. Problem is that there is too much money in it. Please comment.

Breaking News: Robot Author Creates a New Grimm Fairy Tale So That Children Remain Calm

20/4/2018

Illustration by Jan Adkins

Last week I received an email from an organization ironically named Calm: Take A Deep Breath announcing the publication of the “the first new Brothers Grimm fairy tale in 200 years “—a bedtime story created by an artificial intelligence robot (named Botnik) and asking me to“….report on this ….maybe as part of a larger trend of the rise of literary robots..” They believe that an AI fable in the voice of the Brothers Grimm, is ideal for bedtime, calming down children with brain Pablum before they fall asleep. So, I forwarded the email to the iNK Think Tank’s membership of about three dozen award-winning children’s nonfiction authors. I was NOT calm as I hit the “send” button, but I allowed the email speak for itself. By the way, this was the same day that the NY Times had a story on vending machines for short stories.

Jan Adkins, the most human of us all, wrote the following response. It was not created at the speed of light but arrived approximately an hour after I sent the message. It allows you to see how neurons connect in an active, creative, human brain:

“The thing that distinguishes us from machines and "artificial intelligence" is our tattered covers, the inimitable flaws life has stamped and tramped and scraped on us. Our long course of dings makes an illogical texture of faults that changes the way we perceive the world and informs the way we report the world. Unless we've lived in a test tube we're all bent and creased, spindled and perforated by a random world that has no mechanism for kindness or preservation of spirit. The randomness of life leaves us all illogically astigmatic. We're all neurotic in multiple directions, and the way we process life and recount it in the form of art (which we hold as the reflection of life) is flawed, warped, skewed in our particular fashion. Moreover, the particular voice with which we recite our version of life is even more personal – we hold forth as interlopers, victims, slyboots, grifters, or flies on the wall. What we produce as art, then, has little to do with logic, even when we're reporting facts, because our tales are sung in our own neurotic, skewed voices, and because most of us (being experienced casualties of life) have a sense of humor about the entire hoopdoodle.

"What apps and AI constructs and computer-generated tales can't offer is joy and love and laughter, because these things are not logical. We're not logical. Lucky us. We're battered by life into odd shapes that respond to data with unpredictable insights and perspectives. It's possible that a story-generation app could process a predefinition of "love" but not possible that the emotion, itself, will have any credence. We're powerful in our mistakes and flaws, and in our sense of illogical intangibles like pride and affection.

"This is not to say that Botnik & company isn't dangerous. If you've dealt with editors and publishers long enough, you'll acknowledge that they're eager to replace troublesome "artistes" with reliably logic content providers. Quarterly profits don't accommodate "quality" as a valid navigational tool. "Quantity" and "what the market will bear" are more profitable concepts. We're silly when we tout the quality of our product, because the bean counters that control our publishing masters are unconcerned about artistic innovation or depth of feeling. Look at a Disney Princess book. We may speak with the tongues of angels but if we can't add to the bottom line and promise sales bonanzas, we might as well catch the next ice floe out of town. “

Think Botnik can whip out stuff like Adkins? Is the handwriting (a very human activity) on the wall? Literature, defined as the single passionate voice, may be replaced by vending machines spitting out one-, two-, or five-minute stories unread by human eyes before reaching the market so that you can "calm yourself with our stories or perhaps our white noise recording" Of course, iNK's mission, as authors of nonfiction, is to wake students up. Hmmmmm.... Can this story be an alarm clock?

Making Amends for Human Environmental Damage

17/4/2018

What do whooping cranes, wolves, bald eagles, giant Galápagos tortoises, California condors, American alligators, and American bisons have in common? They have all been brought to the brink of extinction by human beings who hunted them, ate them, poisoned them with pesticides, lead, and micro trash, and destroyed their environments. That’s the bad news. They have also been rescued from extinction by legislation, caring naturalists, cooperative zoos and biologists.

Back From the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction, by Nancy F. Castaldo, tells the moving stories behind all of these rescues. Whooping cranes were hunted almost to extinction for their giant white feathers to decorate the hats of fashionable women. And they weren’t the only birds killed for their plumes. Bet you didn’t know that two women, Minna Hall and Harriet Hemenway, goaded the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) that lead to the beginning of their salvation.

In story after story of these creatures brought back from the ultimate death of their species, I was impressed not only by the amazing details of Castaldo’s research but I was also envious of her adventures in collecting them. She didn’t just read books and interview experts. She traveled to the locations in California, the Florida Everglades, the Galápagos Islands, and her home State of New York to experience first-hand the animals and their preservationists. This book was an adventure to write and that comes through to the reader.

I found myself angry at human greed, injustice and carelessness that afflicted each species. I marveled at the Herculean efforts of individuals that went into each campaign to save them. Castaldo is tells moving success stories. At times I was in tears. But she also hints at the many stories of tremendous losses she hasn't told. How dare we destroy our fellow inhabitants of our planet!

We cannot lose touch with our planet and the need to preserve as much as possible of its diversity of life before it’s too late. Nancy Castaldo’s Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction contributes to opening the eyes of the next generation.

The Empowerment of Children

15/4/2018

What happens when you take a group of minority kids after school and give them the resources to tell a story through video and their own music (hip-hop) about a problem that they and children and teenagers live with everyday, everywhere? This is the question Ray Thomas Jr. and his Xposure Foundation have been working on for the past nine years. Unfettered by test prep, standards, and curriculum goals, Xposure's programs give kids a voice and the tools to address issues that impact them the most. One of their latest products is a 51 minute film "Dear Bully: The Tables Have Been Turned," which was premiered at a local Multiplex yesterday here in the town of Greenburgh, NY, where I live. Note, Xposure has received 5 NY Emmy nominations for earlier films.

It is not without irony that I viewed this insightful film by and about children and teens addressing this problem while the oval office is currently occupied by a bully, whose bully pulpit is Twitter and television; reality media that expose his total lack of empathy.

"Dear Bully" works on many levels. First there is humor. A music video of "Big Bad Butch the Bully Johnson" is a cartoon depicting a hulking monster with an evil eye who is so bad "that when he looks in the mirror he scares himself."

"JUST HOW BAD IS BUTCH THE BULLY JOHNSON?" is the question asked and answered in this over-the-top poke-in-the-eye catchy rap.

Live action shows the many deeds bullies do: tripping, shoving, knocking books out of their victims' hands, helping themselves to lunch money. The camera focuses on the victims while the audience sees the backs of the bullies, their faces obscured for the most part, slightly dehumanizing them. The hero of the story, "Ace" is so authentically played by Malcolm Small, now in high school, that they have footage of him when he actually was in grade school in a flashback showing his apprehension as he entered his new school (at the urging of his mother) anticipating an unwelcoming response from his classmates as the "NEW KID, " a common target of bullies.

Ace is a leader and he organizes other victims to figure out how to fight bullies. He encourages the others to give vent to their anger and their natural desire to hit them back harder. But Ace tells them that "violence begets violence" so they must find another way. Since Ace is a good student, he is bullied into revealing his test paper for the bullies to copy. His vengeance is sweet and satisfying (no spoiler from me!)

In his dreams, Ace becomes president of the US and is about to sign an anti-bullying bill, having grasped the concept that when it comes to bullies vs. victims "we have the numbers." I couldn't help but think of the post I wrote last week, Putting Citizenship Back into the Curriculum where Dr. David Liu spoke of the enormous surge of civic engagement as a reaction to our Bully-in-Chief. Xposure kids are manifestly in the spirit of the times.

The live action is interspersed with fully-rendered music videos that are at times poignant, at times joyously uninhibited, and always full of youthful energy. Ray Thomas's fingerprints are all over every part of this production so it has the personal integrity that connects with humanity at large. The film's anti-bullying law requires that victims write their bullies a letter, which bullies are required to read before they enter mandatory "empathy training for bullies." Here's a sample of the verse:

My take-away of "Dear Bully" is pure empowerment: "If they don't like you for being yourself, be yourself even more," so say the students of BeYou High. This is must-see for kids everywhere; it is a non-polemic, non-didactic, non-preachy communication that is guaranteed to transmit its potent message to a rapt audience.

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Uncovering the Truth in a Post-Truth Era

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

Breaking News: Robot Author Creates a New Grimm Fairy Tale So That Children Remain Calm

Making Amends for Human Environmental Damage

The Empowerment of Children

Vicki Cobb

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Uncovering the Truth in a Post-Truth Era

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

Breaking News: Robot Author Creates a New Grimm Fairy Tale So That Children Remain Calm

Making Amends for Human Environmental Damage

The Empowerment of Children

Vicki Cobb

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​Categories

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Company

Contact

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