Blog Posts

A Reading-Maker Book Festival

7/10/2019

Here I am, for the seventh time, at the annual Chappaqua Children's Book Festival. I'm holding a poster for my two newest books in a series called STEM Play. They are literately "hot-off-the-press" and this was my first view of the finished books. What a thrill! Chappaqua, in Westchester County, NY, is a town that values education and reading and attracts the same kind of crowd at their Festival. Last year we had 7,000 visitors, but there were more this year and it was a joy to meet so many families with the interest and money to invest in their children's education.

The public schools here are excellent and the students take the standardized tests. Even so it creates anxiety for good readers. At the end of the Festival, Alexandra Siy and I presented a program on "Slaying the Standardized Testing Dragon." We made a bookmark with the help of our pal Jan Adkins. And we prepared a handout with a strategy for creating life-long learners who love to read books. I'm hoping that you find this useful.

iNK Think Tank’s Strategy or “Secret Sauce”

*Go to www.nonfictionminute.org
*Scroll down the “Categories” on the right to find a topic that interests you.
*Choose a Nonfiction Minute to read. If you are not a strong reader, click on the arrow on the player when it is blue and listen to the author read his/her Minute aloud.
*Plan to keep reading Nonfiction Minutes on a regular basis.
*Click on the T2T icon to see what the Minutes can teach you.
*Make a list of the subjects you have to learn at school.
*Go to iNK Database and register. Use the database to search for lists of books on the subjects you have to learn about in school. http://inkthinktank.org/search/register.cfm
*Go to the library and take out books on those subjects. Read the first paragraph. If the book doesn’t grab you, don’t read it. Pick another.
*Only read books you like to read even if they seem hard at first.
TO BECOME A READER, YOU MUST READ WIDELY (NONFICTION MINUTES) AND DEEPLY (BOOKS ON SUBJECTS THAT INTEREST YOU).

Reading is the most intimate way to connect your mind to another person’s mind. In time, reading will become a life-long habit that you cannot live without. The standardized test will become easy. No sweat at all!!!

Why Education Should Always Be Nonprofit

21/9/2019

On a beautiful, early fall afternoon, I took some Dutch friends on a tour of a local attraction, the Rockefeller estate, call Kykuit (meaning "lookout" in Dutch) for its spectacular vistas of the Hudson River Valley. Now a National Trust attraction, this magnificent edifice, built in 1906, pioneered creature comforts that rival the way we live today ( e.g. it was fully electrified) and houses exquisite art at every turn. As our guide pointed out priceless furnishings, sculptures and paintings, he also kept emphasizing the philanthropy of the Rockefeller family, particularly in medicine and art.

The three generations of Rockefeller families who lived at Kykuit staffed the house with 10 servants and minions of grounds keepers. Everywhere you look in this magnificent estate you experience the product of loving care, artistry and comfort. The service staff brought the human touch to the daily activities that the family engaged in. Family members used their money to pay creative people. A highlight is the below ground art galleries of Nelson Rockefeller with their extraordinary Picasso tapestries. But the Rockefellers also paid their staff a living wage--Pocantico Village is where you'll find the modest but comfortable homes built for their employees. The wife of one of their gardeners worked for my parents for years as a housekeeper and later as a caregiver. She had nothing but good things to say about her husband's employer. She was an Irish immigrant who believed that there was dignity in service to others. We called her Mrs. Furphy.

Near the end of our tour, as we walked through the carriage house featuring their collection of horse-drawn and motor vehicles of the early 20th century, I couldn't resist from asking our guide a politically incorrect question: "It has been said that behind every great fortune there is a crime. What is your response to that?" Our guide was quick to answer: "John D. Rockefeller Senior committed no crimes because there were no laws restricting the ways he amassed his fortune basically by refining oil into kerosene for lighting homes. He called his company Standard Oil [ESSO became the company's brand by spelling out the initials] because of the reliably high quality of his product. However, many have said that his behavior could be considered unethical at times." Then he segued back to talking about the truly formidable force for good that the Rockefeller philanthropies have been for generations.

A brilliant economist and venture-capital friend of mine once told me, "If you create something of value, you should be able to make money from it." That is the capitalist system. J.D. Rockefeller refined oil to make the best kerosene on the market and bought out all his competitors offering cash or stocks in his company. And if that didn't work, he just lowered his prices and ran them out of business. (Those who took the stock all became multimillionaires.) Laws that stopped the practice of building a monopoly for a commodity were enacted after J.D. Rockefeller and his "robber baron" contemporaries, who shaped the beginning of the industrial revolution, had had their way.

But lately I've been thinking, no! Not everything of value should feed the profit motive. Certainly not education. There should be funding available to pay for high quality public education for the public good but its financial health should not include ways to amass fortunes for the "owners." Who are the money-makers in charter schools and vouchers? The realtors who provide the buildings and the top executives who siphon off exorbitant salaries while paying young, inexperience teachers the least they can get away with while pressing them into services (sometimes custodial) that are not part of their high intensity, exhausting, and sometime profoundly rewarding profession. For-profit charter schools fight against teachers' unions that collectively bargain for a decent wages and working conditions for their members. Excellent teachers work for the love of teaching. That's why merit pay for teachers doesn't make them better teachers. The budget items for a rich educational experience for the students are what usually get cut by for-profit schools in exchange for computers that could bring a virtual tour of, say, Kykuit. Why do private schools command exorbitant tuition? Because they are, for the most part, prepared to create meaningful, non-virtual educational experiences for every student. This means that teachers have the support, both financially and professionally that they need to do their jobs successfully. And that's why excellent teachers will take jobs in private schools although they usually pay lower salaries than public schools.

Most people, who love their work, do not aspire to live like the Rockefellers. We need a middle class who has sufficient income for decent homes and food, health care, education for their children and yes, enough for vacations and recreation. I looked around Kykuit and imagined how much time must have been spent purchasing stuff with status, constantly adding to the collections in their home, changing clothes for every meal, calling a servant to serve tea or to perform some other menial task. Even the recreational facilities were on site. A private "Playhouse" housed a bowling alley and indoor swimming pool. And, of course, there were several outdoor swimming pools, a golf course and tennis courts on the property amidst the formal gardens.

Kykuit is a museum now. I am grateful that I have the education to appreciate its beauty and its history. As a National Trust, it is now a nonprofit for the public good. What do you think might be the take-away of public school students who took a field trip to this family home of obsolete grandeur, art, and splendid self-contained isolation?

I'll bet that they wouldn't trade it for their phones!

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

19/9/2019

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I wrote this post last year and normally don't republish any posts. But this one is an excellent reminder of the insanity of standardized testing as we begin a new year.

First, you have to read a paragraph: (Note, this is for a grade 6 test)

The modern wood pencil was created by Joseph Dixon, born in Massachusetts in 1799. When he was thirteen years old he made his first pencil in his mother's kitchen. His sea-going father would return from voyages with graphite in the hull of his ship, which was used simply as ballast, or weight, when there was no cargo to transport. This graphite was later dumped overboard to make room for shipments for export. Joseph Dixon got some of this excess graphite, pounded it into powder, mixed it with clay and rolled it into long strips that he baked in his mother's oven to make the "lead" for his pencil. This dried the "lead" and made it firm. He then put a strip of "lead" between two grooved sticks of cedar and glued them together to make a sandwich. He chose cedar because it is soft, can be easily sharpened, and is relatively free of knots. All you had to do was sharpen the pencil with a knife and it was ready to write.

Then you have to answer the following multiple choice questions:

1. You can tell from the passage that it was important for ships to be
a.) heavy enough b.) fast enough c.)wet enough d.) big enough

2. Dixon got some graphite that had been used to replace
a.)cargo b.)powder c.)clay d.) wood

3. What happened to the graphite that Dixon didn't use?
a.)It was thrown away b.)It was used for ballast c.)It was shipped as an export 4.) It was used to build houses

4. Why did Dixon heat the mixture of graphite and clay?
a) To harden it b.) To melt it c.)To turn it into a powder d) To make it dark.

5. Dixon chose cedar because it was
a.) easy to shape b.) firm c.) long d.) cheap

6. How did Dixon get the "lead" inside the pencil?
a.) He glued it between two pieces of wood. b.) He poured it in when it was melted c.) He slide it into a hole he had drilled.) He rolled it in a mixture of sawdust and glue

7. In this passage the word knots refers to
a.) hard spots in wood b.) difficult problems c.) a measure of the speed of ships d.) tying ropes

Now, here are some questions that might interest you about the test questions.
1. Where did I get this information? From a contract asking permission to use the passage from a book I wrote (The Secret Life of School Supplies.)
2. What are the chances that the students read the actual book in their test prep? Nil Ever? Close to nil.
3. Did the students find the passage riveting reading? Probably not. It was taken out of context.
4. Why is it important for students to regurgitate information from the passage in their responses? I have no idea. If they have no real interest in the invention of the pencil, if the story isn't interesting enough to repeat to someone else, it is a manufactured trap to give anxiety to students, parents and teachers. It's the previous paragraph in the book that describes the problem that the invention of Dixon's pencil solved that makes the test paragraph more interesting and memorable.

I would hope that the passages selected by the test creators would be stand-alone attention grabbers. But apparently two paragraphs would be too long. FYI, The pencil happened to be an extremely useful invention for land surveyors. They had to be able to write outside with a permanent dry writing instrument, since at that time, most writing was done with quill and ink, which wasn't suited to noting down critical information in the wind and the rain.

Do you think preparing to answer this kind of question is a good use of your time or your students? I can tell you it's not one of my better paragraphs. Maybe, if they had read more of the book, they wouldn't need test prep to get the answers right.

One other thought. I wonder how well I and my colleague authors who have also had excerpts from their books used as reading passages would perform on such a test. Would we ace it? Somehow I think not.

The Devils that Make Us Care

16/9/2019

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.

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.

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

10/9/2019

What happens to behavior when living beings dwell in paradise? Where everything an individual could possible want is at hand? Plenty to eat and drink. It's not too hot, not too cold. Lethal danger is at a distance. I saw it for myself when I visited the Masai Mara in Kenya many years ago. Kenya is on the equator but the Masai plains of Kenya are elevated so the average temperature is 75 degrees every day. There are no seasons. Both night and day are 12 hours long. Nature provided this part of the world enough space and food and water for the largest land-dwelling mammals to evolve. For elephants, hippos, water buffaloes, giraffes life exists in a serene landscape that is interrupted every so often with a scurry of activity when a predator gets hungry. But for the most part, it is a peaceable kingdom. Beasts wander through their day, not moving too fast, sleeping when they feel like it. A Kenyan professor told me that there is little or no incentive for the human population in this environment to become inventive or technological. A subsistence life-style is not difficult. People who live in the moderate latitudes were motivated to invent ways to make life more comfortable. That's why those places are the source for innovation and technology.

When I was young, I heard a lecture by Nicholas Negroponte, a futurist and co-founder of what is now the MIT Media Lab. He described a future where people would never have to leave their homes-- everything they needed could come to them with the push of a button. (It was before we knew about the click of a mouse). The only reason to leave home, he stated emphatically, would be to find a mate or get buried. Many skills by which people currently made a living would become obsolete. The picture he painted horrified me. But, I reasoned, people would still need to know how to read.

That, too, is on the decline. Note the graph on the left.   Except for the reading of cell phones, which is definitely on the upswing. Note the graph on the right.  In 2017 the average adult spend 2 hours and 51 minutes per day on a mobile phone.

Reading for pleasure, to fill up the day, has been pre-empted by a plethora of entertaining activities that require little else than watching. It seems as if the human race is devolving into doing the minimum to exist. As per Negroponte's prediction, we are getting fat and lazy. Negroponte went on to found a movement One Laptop per Child, hoping to reach all children including those who live in the third world. It failed for a variety of reasons, mainly because his manufactured product was poorly designed. In recent years, Negroponte has shifted focus and now says: "If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop."

I'm not sure that's true. I think that the problem in education stems from the lack of reading and thinking regardless of the device. Reading is the only way to get into the minds of educated people who know how to write well and think clearly. Learning to read takes practice. It should not be separated from thinking. That is why my tribe of award-winning authors of nonfiction for children have created the Nonfiction Minute. . We don't just write a readable essay, we also speak it aloud. This exposes less fluent readers the magic of content. The Minutes just happen to be the same length as the reading passages on the standardized tests. But each Minute is a self-contained essay with a beginning, a middle and an end not an excerpt from a larger work taken out of context for the test-taker to struggle with. Our Minutes are not leveled because leveling makes text flat and eliminates voice, the humanity that makes the content come alive. But the Nonfiction Minute is not enough to produce readers and thinkers. They need to tackle fuller works.

For this reason, iNK has opened a bookstore, iNK Books & Media Store. The categories that the books cover are illustrated above. Most of our books are interdisciplinary. They are also beautifully illustrated, carefully designed and edited to make them into learning experiences with the real world. We will be adding books all year. Pick a topic from the icons above that you're required to teach. Help your students discover the pleasure of learning from a good book. Let them build self esteem by doing something that requires effort and perseverance that is also a pleasure. Let them experience the work of people who have spent a lifetime thinking and perfecting their craft of putting words together to make meaning.

Otherwise, writers who think and care about educating children will also go the way of the typewriter manufacturers.

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A Reading-Maker Book Festival

Why Education Should Always Be Nonprofit

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

The Devils that Make Us Care

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

Vicki Cobb

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A Reading-Maker Book Festival

Why Education Should Always Be Nonprofit

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

The Devils that Make Us Care

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

Vicki Cobb

​Archives

​Categories

Links

Company

Contact

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