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The Devils that Make Us Care

16/9/2019

 
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Cute little fella, isn't he?  In unfettered, expressive prose, Author Dorothy Hinshaw Patent explains how he got the name:

"The devil got its name in the early 1800s, when the first English settlers arrived.  Imagine being one of those settlers.  Darkness falls over your campsite and you are trying to sleep, when suddenly you hear mysterious, frightening sounds--unearthly screams and shrieks echoing through the forest.  The sounds alone frighten you, but then you see movement in the moonlight-- a black creature disappearing into the night.  You believe in the existence of the devil...." 

And so, the largest carnivore on the islands of Tasmania got a name it didn't deserve.  In recent years, it has developed a horrible disfiguring disease that it also didn't deserve called Devil Facial Tumor Disease or DFTD.  It was kind of a contagious cancer that almost destroyed some devil populations by as much as 95% in 2005,  almost twenty years after it was  first detected in 1996.  

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This was not a case of the "devil got his due."  This was an alarm bell to field scientists who understood that the Tasmanian devil was a keystone species.  Its loss would cause an overrun of all the animals it fed on thus destroying the balance of nature in its environment. Dorothy Patent was in the fortunate position to have a concerned scientist friend in Australia who offered her the chance to tell the story about saving the Tasmanian devil.  
As the latest addition to the terrific Scientist in the Field series, Saving the Tasmanian Devil: How Science Is Helping the World's Largest Marsupial Carnivore Survive,  Patent tells a riveting story of a race against time before a gruesome disease of a wild animal in a faraway land causes its extinction the face of this earth.  Coincidentally, we're also learning from this study information that may contribute to our knowledge of cancer in humans.

One of the great values of this book is how Patent learned to know what she needed to know to tell this story.  She and her husband went to Australia and Tasmania and met with the concerned scientists working on the problem.  It turns out that DFTD is a unique genetic disease with some quirky properties scientists had never seen before.  I loved her clear explanation of exactly how the genes  from the diseased devils were scrambled into a pattern where pieces of chromosomes became attached to other chromosomes in weird ways.  

Meanwhile the reader learns much about the devil and other marsupial mammals of this unique part of the world.  The photographs capture the wild beauty of a place barely colonized by humans. Saving the Tasmanian Devil is an epic story from a foreign landscape that catches the heart and inspires the mind. May it find its way into the hands of curious readers from middle school up.  






Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

11/3/2019

 
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Last week my post "The New Era of Children's Author-Driven Nonfiction" discussed children's nonfiction literature that is finally coming into its own. It had a HUGE response! 
​I was presenting it as something new but, I must confess, nonfiction children's trade books have been noticed for quite a long time.  Who, exactly, has discovered these wonderful books?  First, the creators of standardized tests.  They excerpt our writing for reading comprehension passages.   Second, educators of kids with learning challenges and the gifted.  My question is:  if these books are used by educators at each end of the learning spectrum, what are the great masses of "average or normal" kids in between compelled to read in school?  
  • Textbooks with worksheets, study questions, and quizzes​
  • Schoolbooks with worksheets, study questions and quizzes.
I put an illustration  above from Wikimedia commons to show you what these books look like.  Compare it to the picture I used last week.  (It's not far; scroll down.)

How come this is happening?
  • If we're going to give standardized tests to compete with the way kids perform in other parts of the world, we have to standardize education, right?
  • In order to standardize education we have to make it teacher proof.  We have to assume that teachers can't be trusted to seek out their own study materials to fit curricula.  We've stopped giving them creative autonomy. (Ask a public school teacher, " So, how's that working for you, lately?")

What happens when you give kids a taste of writing that is compelling, (not compelled)?  Let's experiment and find out.  

(Drum roll) Presenting the Nonfiction Minute --Short, self-contained essays written by award-winning children's book authors with an audio file so that the more challenged readers have access to content.  Make them multi-media by including art and video as appropriate plus information about the author so students can get books at the library by an author whose Minute has whetted their appetite for more.  

What are the results?
Five  million page views and counting.  Lots of letters and comments from teachers and students.  We've added a Transfer to Teaching for each Minute (T2Ts), giving suggestions for using the material with students. (Don't know if any real kids actually went to the library, maybe someone can fill me in.)

March is Standardized Test Month. It creates so much anxiety that teachers are given instructions on how to preserve test answer-sheets with vomit on them.  We hear our Minutes are used for test prep. That was not our intention.  






The New Era of  Children's Author-Driven Nonfiction

4/3/2019

 
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When it comes to awards, recognition, and a decent pay day, good children's fiction authors are rewarded by the system. Their names on the covers of their books become brands.  If a child enjoys a book and asks for "another one like this one," a librarian automatically delivers a book by the same author. 

For many years, children's nonfiction authors who write on topics where "nothing is made up,"  have been in the shadows.  First, our books are not cataloged and shelved by our names but by the topics we write about.  Thus, our books are scattered throughout the Dewey Decimal System. Second, the spaces on the nonfiction library shelves were traditionally filled by the yard with survey books-- collections of facts and information that had no particular conceptual architecture, thus there was often no narrative to make sense of the information.  Editors were trained to make these works as impersonal as possible, as if the material in the book had never interacted with a human mind.  Journalists had style sheets that told them never, never use the perpendicular pronoun "I".  If they had to impose themselves in a story as eyewitnesses they were to speak of themselves in the third personal as in"this reporter" or use the "editorial we." Mark Twain disdained this idea.   He said, " Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'"  My guess is that the thinking behind this stilted styling was that a work had less authority if it came from the mind of a person and had more authority if it seemed to come from God.  

Slowly, we are coming to understand that an author's point of view is part of the truth of nonfiction.   We don't do invented dialog without a disclaimer that lets the reader know that the author is imagining what happened. But if that doesn't happen, we categorize such a book as "historical fiction."  But often, in history, there are primary source documents where we know what a person actually said.  Currently, the best nonfiction authors write with point of view that has solid premises decorated with facts.   These books are not supposed to be read the same way one reads a novel.  They are often meant to be digested in small bites, so pithy are their concepts the reader can only grasp the big ideas by thinking about them and giving them time to sink in.  We write for the uninitiated so that they acquire the background knowledge that they will need later in their education.  

Recently, there was a segment on CBS This Morning on the "Golden Age" of Documentary Film Making.  I immediately saw the parallel to what is happening in my genre.  We are using techniques of fiction writing-- riveting narratives, foreshadowing, atmospherics, to bring to life our stories of the real world.  We connect our big ideas to everyday knowledge we assume children already have.  In science, I try and make them think extraordinary things about air, water, energy--the most common and almost forgotten aspects of our shared environment.  Each author has a distinctive voice that makes material accessible.  Even if the concepts are difficult, we know how to speak "child" so that leveled reading is not necessary. 

​ It is not as important  for our readers  to know the facts as it is for them to see how the facts relate to the big ideas that make meaning of our world and to help them create their individual conceptual frameworks to further understand how the world works. 


     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

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