Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
Vicki Cobb's Blog
  • Vicki Cobb's Blog
  • About
  • Contact

The Lost Art of Conversaton

26/3/2019

 
Embed from Getty Images
I spent a few decades doing "stand-up" for kids at school visits. When I first started, I noticed that they listened well enough for me to teach them about the relationship between balance and one's center of gravity. Not an easy concept to grasp. It took more than one sentence. My success depended on a give-and-take oral response from them. It kept them engaged. It also required a lot of thought, rehearsal and energy on my part. And it got harder and harder as the years rolled by because the kids were less and less able to focus. Talking didn't seem to work as well as it used to.

A conversation is a social interaction that depends on listening to what someone says to you, acknowledging that you've heard them, and responding appropriately. In colonial days, before there was professional entertainment wired into your home and accessible at the push of a button, people had to provide their own entertainment. Wealthy young women learned the pianoforte and sang. Dinner parties depended on guests who were amusing and witty raconteurs. People sometimes even retired from the dinner table to engage in "parlor" (from the French word "to speak") games.

Recently a teacher friend put up an intriguing photo of human skin matched to Pantone swatches. She tried to start a conversion about the evolution of human skin color as serving different biological purposes, to no avail. The kids got themselves trapped in making silly remarks.
​

I've noticed many children don't make eye contact with me in one-on-one conversations. I have to request that they look at me when we're talking. My teenage granddaughter spent a lot of time on her phone texting her girl friends. When I was her age I spent, literally, hours talking with my girls friends on the phone. When I asked her why she communicated by text, "It's easier," was her terse reply. Yes, interacting with a complicated organism, another human being, is an important skill set that starts the moment you're born with smell and touch and eye contact among the most important interactions for a newborn and a parent. Children in orphanages who don't do these things as infants exhibit a "failure to bond" with others as adults.

Technology is teaching us new skills on how to be alone. Last Sunday's NY Times had an article about a man who spent the day with his cat avatar named Sox. It made him feel less lonely. There isa new game out to revive the art of conversation. When I watch news commentary shows with pundits, it's not just the content that interests me, it's the way they interact. They take turns and apologize when they "step on" or interrupt another speaker. The moderator develops skillful segues between speakers. They often cite one another when making a point. No one tries to dominate the discourse. I get very uncomfortable when two opposing commentators scream "talking points" over each other and I turn the show off. I just looked up talk show training on Google and there are more sites than I could count, most of them oriented on how to be a star talk show host. Good talker have the same problem as good writers:
  1. You have to have something to say. Content counts
  2. You need to know whom you're talking to. Is this person going to be interested in you?
  3. You need to speak so the other person "gets" it. You can tell if that happens by listening carefully to the response.
  4. You must make your response acknowledge what the other person has contributed. This may be in the form of asking a question and waiting for an answer.
  5. The exchange can be measured by the extent of the back-and-forth. Poor conversations just dwindle away and are forgotten quickly.
What have you observed about your own social verbal exchanges? Are you conscious about how you go about entering into a conversation? Do you like to talk to people? Why? or Why not?

Does this post make you want to talk to me? If so, please comment.






You Can't Make This Up!

18/3/2019

 
Picture
Dolphins have long captured our imagination because of their intelligence and their remoteness.  They are mammals that live mostly underwater.  Laurence Pringle, who knows how to make all forms of nature accessible and fascinating, has turned his attention to Dolphins as his latest offering in his popular Strange and Wonderful  series. This book is beautifully and accurately illustrated by Meryl Henderson.

There are many children who go through a dolphin phase much as they glom on to dinosaurs.  I had a granddaughter like this.  She carried a stuffed dolphin from the Chicago Aquarium everywhere she went for several years, while I fed her dolphin books.  There is a lot to marvel at when it comes to these denizens of the sea, whose lives and habitats are now threatened.

There are quite a few different kinds of dolphins--33 species--but we know the bottlenose the best.   One of the most distinctive features of this dolphin is its bulging forehead.  Called a "melon" [It]"contains fat that helps to focus sounds produced in air tubes and sacs just behind, enabling dolphins to make clicks, chirps, buzzes, whistles, and other sounds.  All  of these sounds are emitted directly from dolphin heads, not through their mouths." (Wow! I didn't know that!)

Here's another strange and wonderful attribute:  "As you read these words, you don't need to think about breathing.  It happens automatically.  A dolphin, on the other hand, decides when to breathe.  But how can it sleep and still keep breathing?  The answer: One side of its brain rests while the other stays awake.  Half-asleep, the dolphin rises to the surface to breathe." (Hmmmm...how does one think with half a brain?)

Like a bat, a dolphin uses echolocation to find food. And, like wolves, they work together as a team to catch prey.  They talk to each other in their own mysterious language.  They are playful as they leap above the water, often doing so to communicate to us.  (I saw this happen from a boat  off the coast of Alaska.  They put on quite a show!)

In Dolphins! Strange and Wonderful, Laurence Pringle feeds the appetite for knowledge while sustaining curiosity to know more.  If this is the fist book a child reads about dolphins, there's a good chance it will not be the last.  



Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

11/3/2019

 
Picture
Picture
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

 
Picture
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.  

    RSS Feed

    ​​​​Archives

    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018

    ​Categories

    All
    Abuse
    Achievement Gap
    Adkins Jan
    Albee Sarah
    Anti Bullying
    Anti-bullying
    Art
    Author Driven Nonfiction
    Author-driven Nonfiction
    Authors On Call
    Biology
    Birds
    Black History
    BLC2018
    Book Review
    Child Abuse
    Children As Political Pawns
    Children's Nonfiction
    Citizenship
    Civics
    Civil Rights
    Class ACTS
    Climate Change
    Clinton Chelsea
    Collard III Sneed B.
    Common Core State Standards
    Conversation
    Coronavirus
    Costaldo Nancy F.
    Covid-19
    Critical Thinking
    Data-driven
    Definition
    Democracy
    Dewey John
    Dogs
    Dunphy Madeleine
    Ecology
    Education
    Educational Standards
    Electron Microscope
    Empowerment For Children
    Endangered Species
    Excellence
    Extinction
    Fact-checking
    Fleming Candace
    "flow"
    Galileo
    Girls' Education
    Global Warming
    Greenberg Jan
    Grit
    Gun Violence
    History
    History Of "school Reform"
    Home Libraries
    Hurricanes
    INK Database
    INK Database Of Books
    Insects
    Interactive Video Conferencing
    Isaac Sally
    Jeopardy Winner
    Learning
    Lesser Carolyn
    Leveled Reading
    Levinson Cynthia
    Lexiles
    Listening
    Literacy
    Literature
    Liu Eric
    March For Our Lives
    McClafferty Carla
    Mentor Texts
    Montgomery Heather L.
    Montgomery Sy
    Motivated Reasoning
    Motivation
    Munro Roxie
    Nathan Amy
    Nonfiction
    Nonfiction Minute
    Nonprofit And Education
    Opening Schools
    Patent Dorothy Hinshaw
    Pedagogy
    Picture Books
    Podcasts
    Primary Source
    Pringle Laurence
    Pundits Of The Pandemic
    Rap Music
    Reading
    Rules
    Rusch Elizabeth
    School Choice
    SchoolTube
    School Visits
    Science Experiments You Can Eat
    Science Teaching
    Semple Heidi E.Y.
    Social Skills
    Socrates
    Speaking
    Spring Fling
    Standardized Testing
    STEM
    Studies On Education
    Swanson Jennifer
    Teaching
    Technology And Children
    Thomas Peggy
    Trump
    Truth
    Voting
    Warren Andrea
    Washington George
    Weatherford Carole Boston
    Webinars
    Work With Us
    World War II
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Links

The Nonfiction Minute
​

​iNK Think Tank website

​Vicki Cobb's Kids' Fun Page

We Dare You Videos


Company

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

Contact

vicki@inkthinktank.org
​

© 2019


© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.