Pendred Noyce: View from the Windowseat

Winding down in Taipei

2012-02-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

Since the end of the Taiwan book fair Monday, I've been able to be more of a tourist. One highlight was riding the Maokong gondola at the zoo, up over three mountains in the rain and fog. Through the clear floor of our "crystal" gondola, we could look down on the tropical foliage and tea plantations. Later we plunged down the steep slope in darkness toward the city lights.

Another day the Tumblehome team took the fast train to the industrial city of Hsinchu, where we visited the national space agency and Ritek, a manufacturer of industrial diamonds for use in the semiconductor industry and elsewhere,as mentioned in my upcoming book, The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip. Dr. James Sung, the brilliant Ritek founder, gave us a seminar on diamonds and graphene, their properties and their links to the origins of life. All fascinating stuff that I may write about more once I finish reading his book.

As for the space agency, with a small budget it has created a leading-edge system of six weather satellites circling the globe, measuring heat and density in the atmosphere to assist in the prediction of typhoons and other phenomena. In partnership with the US, Taiwan is now building twelve new, even more sophisticated satellites. In our informal visit we saw where the components are tested for stability in a vacuum and while undergoing rapid and violent temperature changes.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at Intel Taiwan, where I showed slides and told stories about my father, some of the other Intel founders, and my memories of Intel's earliest days. Actually I think the most popular part of the lecture was when I told them I had eaten the local specialty, stinky tofu. I also gave out a number of copies of Lost in Lexicon's first edition and Advance Reader Copies of Tumblehome Learning books left over from the book fair. The audience was warm and enthusiastic, with questions ranging from what we talked about over dinner in my childhood home to how to raise children to be adventurous yet safe. At the end, Rachel Liu from corporate relations presented me with a cute blue Intel robot-like figure in a bunny suit.

After Intel, Barnas took me to the Long Shan (Dragon Mountain) temple, quite an eclectic temple in the heart of the city. It has a fantastic curved roof, carved ceilings, a waterfall, and lantern figures around the edges of the courtyards. I didn't buy incense or pray to any of the deities, which may be why I got the following fortune when I drew a stick from a pot: "You have failed. Change your boss or change your ways." Since I'm my own boss, I think the message is pretty clear about where the problem lies.

From there we went on to a couple of night markets, ending up at a very authentic, drippy (it's still raining) local one in Houshanpi. There I ate more tso doufu (stinky tofu) and a kind of oyster omelet. However, I avoided chicken rump, large intestines, bin lanh (betel nut), turtle, frog, or snake. Maybe next time.

Taipei tidbits

2012-02-04T18:20:00.000-08:00

A few random observations from Taipei:

Somewhere near our booth is another group that starts every morning with a company cheer. I haven't been able to convince the Tumblehome Learning team to do the same.

One to two percent of people I see in any public place are wearing face masks - whether because they have colds or because they don't want to get colds I don't know.

There are lots of little cartoon characters everywhere - in windows, projected in lights on the sides of buildings, or walking down the street.

People tend to travel by taxi, subway, bus, or motorbike, so there aren't that many private cars on the road.

Wireless internet service is free all over Taipei - except in the Grand Hyatt, where it costs $9 a day.

The major intersections have diagonal crosswalks, so you don't have to cross one street and then wait to cross the other.

I've seen a couple of people pushing lap dogs around in special dog strollers. The dogs are wearing not only doggie sweaters but little doggie trousers.

When the temperature is in the fifties, people bundle up and complain about the cold.

When we applied for government ID numbers, there were multiple clerks, no lines, and no fees. After getting our numbers, we got to press a button to rate the level of service we received.

Two little Taiwanese boys, two or three years old, visited the Houghton Mifflin booth across from ours yesterday. Both wielded huge inflatable baseball bats decorated with the stars and stripes. Every couple of minutes they gave each other an enormous whack with the bats and immediately both fell down dead, sprawled completely flat on the floor. Then they got up and did it again.

Update from the Taiwan Book Fair

2012-02-03T13:48:00.000-08:00

Five hundred thousand people attend the Taiwan Book Fair. Although not all of them make it up the alleyway between Australia and Germany to Tumblehome Learning's booth at A-907, we've been busy enough that we haven't yet had time to wander the rest of Hall 1 (general and international books), much less Hall 2 (comics) or Hall 3 (children's books).

Visitors include publishers, authors, rights agents, teachers, librarians, and members of the general public who pay for the opportunity to come in and browse for bargains. Publishers with a registered business in Taiwan can sell directly to the public: that will be us by next year. With every purchase here in Taiwan, whether it's books, toothpaste, or a restaurant meal, the purchaser's receipt is also a lottery ticket. You could win 10 million NTD, which is $300,000. That would be a great boost to a young publishing company, so we assiduously save our receipts!

At the start of this fair, the Tumblehome team set ourselves a goal of obtaining twenty-five good leads from potential partners like foreign publishers, educators, e-book publishers, or Taiwan distributors. We've already exceeded those numbers, and we've met book people from Malaysia, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, and mainland China, along with many dedicated and entrepreneurial people from Taiwan. We've also set in motion the procedures for establishing our Taiwan branch business, and we've received valuable feedback and generous advice on our products and how best to place them.

As for life outside of work, there hasn't been much. People here work very hard, though they laugh a lot while doing so. Thursday night we met an educator in his office at 7 pm, and he gave us cake while explaining his business model and providing free advice for two hours. Last night we networked until 10 pm, and Saturday and Sunday will be the same.

The weather has been drizzly and cool, mostly in the high fifties. People huddle under umbrellas for rain so light it barely dampens the hair, and they keep apologizing for the cold. I tell them this is a welcome and warm vacation from wintry Boston. This week marks a festival where people will gather in the park and release lanterns into the sky. Already, huge colored lanterns of dragons and cartoon characters stand lit at night and waiting for release. I'll post pictures soon.

First day of the Taiwan Book Fair

2012-01-31T17:30:00.000-08:00

I am sitting in the Tumblehome Learning booth at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, listening to the sound of unpacking all around me - ripping out of staples, wrenching off of tape, exclamations, the crackle of books in plastic wrappers being rearranged on shelves.

This place has undergone a facelift since yesterday. Overnight the bare floor, which yesterday was littered with packing tape and chewed betel, has been carpeted in immaculate blue-gray. Chinese letters cut out in foam core stand proudly over the booths. The shelves bear books of every color and kind. Cartoon figures grin down from corners.

I've set up the information about the Lexicon series and the Museum of Science books we're displaying. Now here come my colleagues with our own Tumblehome Learning posters, advance book copies, and stand-up foam core characters of our characters Benson and Selectra Volt. We will set up and prepare as waltz music plays in the background.

Off to Taiwan for the TIBE

2012-01-28T08:04:00.000-08:00

The Taiwan International Book Exhibition is the largest book fair in Asia, with 500,000 visitors over the course of five days. Visitors include not just publishers, agents, and booksellers, but also teachers, parents, and kids who wander through the exhibition halls looking for fun and educational products.

Tumblehome Learning plans to operate on two continents from the start, with offices in Taiwan and the US. We're hoping to get a lot of cross-cultural enrichment, learning and sharing practices across both countries. Introducing ourselves at the TIBE is our way of starting that process.

I'll be leaving in the early hours of tomorrow morning for the 29-hour journey to Taipei, for a late Monday night arrival. (Taipei is thirteen hours ahead of Boston.) There I'll meet up with Tumblehome Learning's Taiwan staff, which currently includes our president, Barnas Monteith, and Yu-yi Ling, our Asian business manager.

We'll be there in Booth A907 in Hall 1, showing off the ARCs, Chinese and English, of our first books. We'll also display some engineering books from the Boston Museum of Science along with Lost in Lexicon and a teaser for The Ice Castle, which will be coming out in August.

We'll attend tea parties hosted by countries and publishers, and we'll meet with agents and publishing companies from other Asian countries to see if they have any interest in acquiring our products. We'll also talk to teachers and parents to get feedback on the idea of paired books and science activity kits as well as how the covers look, what font size to use in the final books, and other details.

In the second week I'll give a talk about a child's memories of the early days of Intel to Intel Taiwan employees, and Barnas and I will meet with education officials, science museum officials, printers, and leaders of technology. I'm really hoping to begin to understand the drive for excellence in science and technology that is so important in Taiwan. Maybe there are some things our own country can learn.

I'll post pictures and let you know how it goes!

Keep your kids interested in science and engineering

2012-01-26T15:30:00.000-08:00

Some elementary teachers love science and get their students involved in fantastic investigations of rocks, frogs, weather -- you name it. But some teachers are swamped by the demands of tested subjects like math and reading; others lack materials; still others are a little afraid of science and all they don't know. The truth is no kid can count on having a great science class every year. So how can parents keep those young minds fired up about the beauty and possibility of science?

Here's a blog post with ten suggestions. On the Tumblehome Learning website, we'll keep posting news, ideas, and opinions about inspiring kids in science and engineering.

Aaron Feuerstein and the story of Malden Mills

2012-01-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

In December, 1994, fire destroyed the Malden Mills factory and owner Aaron Feuerstein faced a costly choice. Located in struggling Lawrence, MA, Malden Mills manufactured polar fleece for jackets and blankets. The factory would take months to rebuild, and the sensible decision would have been to lay workers off until they could start producing again. But instead of cutting costs, Feuerstein elected to keep paying worker salaries.

He said,

I have a responsibility to the worker, both blue-collar and white-collar. I have an equal responsibility to the community. It would have been unconscionable to put 3,000 people on the streets and deliver a deathblow to the cities of Lawrence and Methuen. Maybe on paper our company is worthless to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more.

According to wikipedia, this decision cost Aaron Feuerstein $25,000,000. In 2001, he had to take the company through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Lenient creditors and government grants helped the company survive, though Feuerstein was forced to resign as CEO. Then in 2007 the company, under its new owners, filed for bankruptcy again and closed down. A new company, Polartec, bought its assets. Although Malden Mills had missed a $1.7 million payment to its pension plan, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation took over the pension plan and continued payments to retired workers.

So this story has a mixed ending. Doing the right thing doesn't lead inevitably to success in the marketplace. Hard times, market changes, competition, and unexpected disasters can lead to company failure, and company failure hurts workers, owners, and the community. In theend, Malden Mills failed.

For Feuerstein, the reward for doing the right thing was that three thousand people got eight months of pay they would otherwise have done without, and many of them stayed employed for another twelve years. A gradual winding-down instead of a catastrophic finish allowed workers time to plan for change. In the end, while Wall Street numbers determined the fate of the company, but one man's leadership helped determine the fate of the people who worked there.

Venture or vulture?

2012-01-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

Are venture capitalists vultures? A couple of days ago, WBUR aired a segment debating whether venture capitalists are good or bad for the economy and for employees. Listening made me think with pride of both my parents.

First, said the commentators, it's important to distinguish between venture capital and private equity. Venture capitalists fund start-ups. Private equity funds (like Bain Capital) buy existing companies, often struggling ones, and try to turn them around. Usually, private equity funds borrow a large portion of the money they use to buy the company. The company shoulders that new debt, which means that it must immediately cut costs or start making more money. Debt means the company has to tighten operations, which often means trimming the payroll. On some occasions, the "vultures" buy the company for its tangible assets and not because they expect the company to become profitable. In this case, the buyers may split the company, putting property and equipment in one half of the company which they then sell off, repaying themselves handsomely for their investment. The shell remainder of the company can then be left to fail, and its employees lose their jobs.

Venture capital grew up in the United States between 1957, when my father Robert Noyce and seven colleagues started Fairchild Semiconductor, and 1968, when he and Gordon Moore started Intel. Fairchild Semiconductor had to be started within, and be funded by, another company. By the time Intel started, potential investors beat on the doors asking to be let in on the deal. Venture capital allowed the electronics industry to burst forth as a major employer and engine for national growth in the sixties.

When he had the chance, my father sought to "restock the stream" that had nurtured him. Rather than joining a traditional venture capital firm, he became what's now called an "angel" investor, putting money into very early-stage startups that were often little more than a couple of bright young people with a great technical idea. He was devoted to the companies he invested in. In The Man Behind the Microchip, Leslie Berlin details how when one such company, Caere, came near to closing its doors, my father protested against a shutdown. "We have people," he said. "We need to keep it open. We have a responsibility to the employees and their families." To back up his words, he wrote a blank check and gave it to the CEO. "Don't make it out for more than a million dollars," he said. "That's all I have in that account." CAERE, a maker of barcode readers and later text readers, survived and eventually thrived.

That's good venture capital. But can you imagine the number-crunchers at Bain uttering sentimental words about responsibility to employees and their families? It's not that my father never laid people off to save a company, including Intel. He did. But first he stopped taking a salary himself. Laying people off was always an acutely painful last resort.

After my parents' divorce, my mother suddenly realized that she, too, had money to invest. She didn't become a venture capitalist, because she never shared my father's love of novelty and risk. But she did develop a philosophy that creating or preserving someone's job was the most effective form of philanthropy. At one point, Maine-based Nissen Bakery came up for sale. A decent family-owned business, Nissen badly needed major investment to upgrade its factory in order to stay competitive. Perhaps a private equity firm could have swooped in, borrowing enough to build a new Nissen factory, but such a firm might well have moved the company to some location with cheaper personnel or lower heating or transportation costs. My mother, instead, used her considerable wealth to buy the company outright with no outside financing. She invested enough that Nissen could build a state-of-the-art new factory right in Maine. After my mother died and the bulk of her estate went into the Libra Foundation, Nissen had to be sold. (A charitable corporation can't keep owning a business like that.) But by that time Nissen was thriving enough that the buyer moved more business into, rather than out of, Maine.

It's possible to invest money, take risks, and keep the interests of employees and the community in mind even when working to make a business efficient and profitable. The people who do so are real contributors to our society, and building for the future is what motivates them and makes their work fun. Maybe we should call them "adventure capitalists."

Parents first

2012-01-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

At a book signing at U Mass Worcester this afternoon for New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, three separate people came up and spoke to me about Lost in Lexicon. I was tickled when all three said essentially the same thing: they had bought the book for a child -- their own or someone else's -- but then the adult in the family started reading the book. The adult became so intrigued that the child had to wait until the parent finished reading the book first. This makes me happy, because I meant Lexicon to be a place that parents and kids could share.

What is Formative Assessment?

2012-01-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

When I tell non-educators I've edited a book on formative assessment, they look blank. Yes, I admit "formative assessment" sounds like education-speak.

Formative assessment is the practice of dipping in to find out what students understand and can do during the process of instruction instead of just at the end of a unit. The point is to try and figure out where the students are when there's still time to do something about it.

Of course, teachers check for understanding all the time by asking questions in class or just by glancing around to see who looks confused. Anyone who teaches one-on-one, say for example a parent teaching a child to read or do the multiplication tables, also constantly monitors what the child already knows. That way the parent can select the logical next step in instruction. Maybe formative assessment is one reason why one-on-one learning is so efficient.

Doing formative assessment with a whole class of students at once, though, is more difficult, and that's where the need for tools comes in. Tools can range from suggested in-class assignments and ways of scoring them to computer programs that track student moves in responding to a question placed right within a text. Teachers can find out who in the class is totally lost, who just needs a hint to get back on track, and who is ready to go on to something more challenging.

New Frontiers in Formative Assessment profiles ten ongoing projects that have worked to make formative assessment a thoughtful part of teaching in the content areas of mathematics, science, and language arts. The chapters address how to decide what to assess, how to assess during instruction instead of as an interruption, and perhaps most difficult, what moves a teacher should make as a result of what he or she finds out. It's meant to be helpful to teachers, curriculum developers, administrators and teacher educators. But I thought I'd at least explain the general notion to the rest of you.

Flatterland, a book review

2012-01-13T05:34:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays, I read Flatterland by Ian Stewart. Stewart is an English mathematician and contributor to a branch of geometry called "catastrophe theory." Sounds fun, eh?

The subtitle of Flatterland is "Like Flatland, only more so." Stewart wrote it as a sequel to and extension of Edwin Abbott's 1884 geometrical satire, Flatland. One hundred years after the events of the first book, Victoria Line, great-great-granddaughter of the original A. Square, reads her ancestor's book (against her father's express prohibition) and finds in it a code for summoning a visitor from Spaceland.

Instead of a Sphere, Victoria receives a visit from a Space Hopper, a creature who helps her visit not just many dimensions higher than the third, but a number of other strange geometric worlds. In one she sees fractals everywhere. In another, parallel lines converge. In another she can see herself in the distance. Her investigation into curved space leads into a discussion of quantum physics and relativity, a theory the Space Hopper insists is poorly named, since it's based on the one thing that isn't relative - the speed of light.

So how's the book to read? My 8th grade son read it before me, and he found it mind-twisting and thought provoking - hard, but worth it. For me, with a year of college physics and no math beyond calculus, it was surprisingly accessible. Yes, it's difficult to visualize the worlds Stewart describes, but he assures us it's difficult for mathematicians, too. And its's fun to toss these ideas around lightly like oddly-shaped objects to juggle. The format consists mostly of dialogue between the Space Hopper, who is a little bit self-satisfied, and Victoria, who is by turns a stubborn teenager, a dense student, an independent reasoner, and an inspired explorer of new intellectual landscapes.

I wish the discussion of fractional dimensions were more thorough: I felt I almost had it when the story moved on. I enjoyed Moo-bius the Cow and the Klein bottles. Topology was fun to dip into, as was the discussion of infinity and parallel lines. The section on quantum physics and relativity took me back to the weirdest, most fun parts of physics. As for the story itself, while the plot is not enthralling, it's sufficient to carry the exploration of mathematics.

Who would like this book? Anyone who would like his or her mind stretched in weird ways. I'd recommend it especially for kids in grades 8-10 who like math even if they don't like calculation; people who like visual puzzles; and people like me who want their ideas of math and science tickled by new ways of thinking about and trying to visualize shape and space.

More than anything, Flatterland is valuable because it shares with us the freaky, imaginative side of mathematics and demonstrates that math is not just a matter of plodding through more and more difficult algebra and calculus. Instead, mathematics can become a great playground for the imagination.

Does anyone have another playful or challenging melding of math and literature to recommend?

Tumblehome Learning Board Meeting

2012-01-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

Tumblehome Learning is now six months old. Friday we held our first official board meeting, with partners from Minneapolis and Taipei as well as Boston gathering here on the east coast. To kick off the meeting Thursday evening, our science kit guru Peter Wong organized us into three groups to compete in a series of scientific cooking challenges. These ranged from identifying different brands of cheese to designing foil devices that allowed us to pour black-and-tans while keeping the layers as separate as possible to estimating time to cook shrimp and beef with various cooking methods.

We laughed a lot, and I'm proud to say that the red team (my team) tied for first place in the salad dressing competition. Peter is quite a chef, and he used to teach a one-unit cooking course in the engineering department at Tufts. I think it was called "Heat Transfer in the Kitchen," or something like that.

Friday we spent working on vision. We are a company that inspires kids to imagine themselves as scientists and engineers through hands-on activities supported by books and online materials. We intend to put the kids'experience of science at the center, rather than defining ourselves as a publisher with ancillary materials. Two of our kits are already designed, which meant we spent some time looking at package design. Four of our first seven books are already written and two more are mostly written. We debated product mix for 2013, when we hope to have up to twelve new books. The big news on the book front is that we will officially begin accepting submissions on January 15, a week from today.

The rest of the meeting was about financial projections and job plans. I won't bore you with those. But I will encourage any of you who happen to be in Taiwan the first week in February to stop in and visit our booth at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, Booth A907 in Hall 1. You'll recognize us by the big posters of Selectra Volt, Dudette from the Future, and the boy hero of The Furious Case of the Fraudulent Fossil standing on a T. Rex skull.

Update on past resolutions

2012-01-05T09:15:00.000-08:00

Back on October 30 I made two resolutions: to complete a draft of Do Something Wonderful by mid-November and to lose a pound a week until I sculpted off 30 pounds. Well, I haven't done so well on the first one. I ran into a mental roadblock at the beginning of November, and it took a while to work it through. Now I have. I've settled on a more personal, memoir-like approach to the biography of my father, and I've pretty much decided how to handle my parents' divorce in a book for children. Still, other events have intervened, and I'm only about two-thirds of the way through the draft. Nevertheless, we've created a partial ARC for the Taiwan Book Fair. It includes chapters 1-3 and 8-10 in English and Mandarin, and I think it provides a good flavor of the book.

As far as my weight-loss resolution, I am being remarkably successful. I've lost 15 pounds at a rate more like one and a half pounds per week, and I've done it without becoming crazily obsessive. I'm consciously eating more fruits and vegetables and smaller servings. By going to Costa Rica we managed to duck most of the traditional holiday excess. And since two stress tests and a cardiac catheterization (yes, my doctors were concerned about a possible old silent heart attack) gave me a clean bill of health, I've been really pushing up the exercise, too. I feel better than I have in at least a couple of years, even with all the blisters and bruises from our Costa Rican adventures.

So, I resolve to keep it up on the steady weight loss, and to finish the biography draft by the end of January. Both of these, I think, are realistic.

Work habits for writing

2012-01-04T12:47:00.000-08:00

My last post laid out the writing and publishing tasks I need to complete this year. These were more than goals, they're things that I've committed to make happen - with the exception of finishing The Beechwood Flute, which doesn't yet have a home. With so many concrete commitments, I was going to stay away from New Year's resolutions about writing. But then I read that making resolutions gives us a warm glow - just thinking about them, even if we never carry them out. So what's the harm in that?

I have to say that 2011 was a productive year for me despite pretty lousy writing habits. I didn't succeed in setting aside undistracted time. I didn't write at a certain time every day or reach a certain word count daily. Deadlines squirmed away from me. I frittered away a lot of time looking at online news and commentary.

So it's time for some resolutions.

First, I'm going to cut back on the time I spend surfing online news. For now, I'll get it down below half an hour a day, and none after 10 pm - I'll go to bed with a good book instead.

Second, I'll really try to write a little every day. Two major projects need work right now: my father's biography and the third Lexicon book. The first is midstream, and the second is only in the dreaming it all up stage. I ought to be able to do a couple of pages of one or some scribbled notes for the other every day. And once the bio is done I'll let myself turn back to the joy of editing Beechwood Flute.

I don't think I met my goal of reading 100 new books in 2011. I'm not sure, because I didn't keep a good count. This year I'll aim for 70 and better record-keeping. Moreover, I'll try to learn something as a writer from each book.

There, those seem manageable. No doubt I'll add more later, but for now these will be enough to work on. I'll let you know how it goes.

Writing and publishing in the new year

2012-01-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

In 2010, I self-published Lost in Lexicon. In 2011, Scarletta Press published a second edition of Lost in Lexicon and Harvard Education Press published a book I pulled together and co-edited, New Frontiers in Formative Assessment. So that means I should publish 3 books in 2012, right?

Yes. Coming by autumn 2012 will be my science-based mystery for upper elementary kids, The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip. Around the same time, I'll publish a kids' biography of my father called Do Something Wonderful. Meantime, in September, Scarletta Press will come out with The Ice Castle, which is a Lexicon sequel.

The Ice Castle is written, edited, copy-edited, etcetera. All that remains are illustrations and proofing, Advance Reader Copies, reviews, endorsements, and all that other time-consuming stuff. The Diamond Chip is written and edited, with illustrations underway. Go Off and Do Something Wonderful is about two-thirds written, though we'll be presenting a selection of chapters in English and Mandarin at the Taiwan International Book Fair. Science experiments to do at home will accompany the latter two books. Peter Wong, one of the Tumblehome Learning founding partners, has already designed the first set of experiments and will be working on the second soon.

What else? Well, I have a YA coming-of-age novel called The Beechwood Flute that needs a final draft before it can find a good home. I could spend a couple of months on that somewhere. And this year I also have to write the third Lexicon book. I can tell you the title - The Floating Islands - but not much more.

On the Lexicon front, 2012 will also see the completion of the Lost in Lexicon musical, which is going to be really exciting. I hope I'll be able to play one or two songs from the musical-under-construction at the the US Science and Engineering Festival Book Fair in DC at the end of April.

So you can see that this is going to be a very busy year of writing, publishing, and promotion for me. Not only that, but Tumblehome Learning is really taking off. Besides my own two books, we'll be publishing four to five others in 2012. We're working to establish a Taiwan office, and we're reaching out to potential partners in Korea, France, and Germany. This week we'll have our first face-to-face board meeting since our founding last July.

And for all you out there who love science and writing for young people, Tumblehome Learning will begin accepting manuscripts in mid-January. Take a look at our guidelines and give us a thought.

Rafting the Pacuare River

2011-12-31T07:39:00.000-08:00

For our final Costa Rica adventure, we took a two-day rafting trip down the Pacuare River with a smallish outfit called Ticos River Rafting. The trip started about an hour northeast of Turrialba, and we descended 330 meters over 45 kilometers over two days, with frequent stops for a short hike or swim. One guide rowed the oar boat with all the gear, while the other captained our paddle boat.

Rapids the first day were mostly class I or II, but plenty exciting, as we descended between wild plantation land on one side and an indigenous forest reserve on the other. Once in a while we passed under a cable with a wooden seat hanging from it-a device the indigenous people use to pull themselves hand over hand across the river. At one stopping point we climbed up a side stream to a series of water slides, and then the kids went still farther. Because I kept slipping in my water shoes and slamming against the rocks, the kids uninvited me from the extended climb.

We camped overnight at a "lodge" above the river that consisted of screened in two-person bungalows and a well-appointed kitchen area. We had sheets and blankets, running water and showers, far more luxury than we had expected. Darkness falls abruptly at six o'clock in the tropics, but there was enough light from solar batteries to play Jenga and cards (52 cards somehow patched together from four decks) with the guides and a group from Canada. Even after Leo and I went to bed, outbreaks of raucous laughter continued.

The second day's rafting was more rigorous, with class III and IV rapids. We saw aricari (of the toucan family) and even more vultures than the day before. Waterfalls tumbled down from either side of three canyons. Mario and Fabio, our enthusiastic and funny guides, had us jump out and float in the calmer sections. Through a couple of rapids, the paddlers on one side reversed direction, and then everyone paddled forward so we spun through the jolting waves. Fabio encouraged Leo and then Damian to be bullriders on the front of the raft, holding on by just one rope. Damian flipped overboard in one rapid, but we hauled him back into the raft none the worse for wear. Near the end if the trip, Mario, apparently impressed by Rhianon's spirit, asked her to come over and row the oar boat while he loafed in the bow, grinning.

In mid-afternoon, wet and tired, we approached a highway bridge and beached the rafts. Taxi brought us to the beautiful Rio Perlas Hotel in the Orosi Valley, where we swam in a hot pool to stretch tight muscles. From here, in an hour, we'll be starting home. BUt for anyone thinking of coming to Costa Rica, looking for a family adventure, healthy food, friendly people, and lots of time outdoors, I say, do it!

Night walk in the mangrove forest

2011-12-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

Going for a night walk in the mangrove forest at Drake Bay, we saw a different world. Gustavo, the guide, provided rubber boots and flashlights, and he instructed us to shine our lights around looking for the reflections of eyes. Almost immediately we found the first of many bullfrogs. As big as two fists held together, the bullfrog sat absolutely still, convinced we couldn't see it, though Gustav warned us that if we tried to grab it, it would cry loudly with the sound of a baby crocodile, perhaps in one last hope of scaring off a predator that might fear the mother crocodile was on her way.

Next we saw a tree ear fungus that appeared to be steaming in the darkness. Instead, Gustav told us, it was releasing spores.

So many animals appear to use freezing absolutely still as a defense at night that we were able to get very close to many, including the Jesus Christ lizard, or basilisk, which runs upright across water. We also came very close to a pretty yellow and white bird, a flycatcher. We saw a caiman across the water, and we picked up baby shrimp and even flounder hiding in the sand beneath the brackish swamp water.

We saw spiders - wolf spiders, jumping spiders, and very poisonous Bolivian wandering spiders, which cause necrosis where they bite. Then Gustav went in pursuit of the red-eyed tree frog, which more than anything seems to symbolize Costa Rica. He called to one high in the trees, and after sloshing through the mud he found one too high for us to see well. Using a long stick, he coaxed it off its branch and brought it down for us to see. It's a gracile frog with a white belly and bright green back, and its eyes are truly red.

Around that time I slipped and fell flat in the mud, which was only a little humiliating. We sloshed on. Our last new creature of the night was a marine toad, known as a cane toad in Cuba. It exudes poison from glands in back of its head, so predators don't do that well on it, and although it's a national hero in Cuba for eating the cane beetle, in Australia it has become an invasive nuisance.

We wrapped up our night walk looking through Gustav's telescope at Jupiter and five of its moons.We had probably walked only about a quarter of a mile in all, but all at once the jungle around us had come alive with a whole new layer of secretive fauna.

Launching baby turtles

2011-12-24T13:51:00.000-08:00

Kathia, the owner's wife at Lookout Lodge, participates in a local turtle conservation project. Guests who choose to rise at 5:30 am may accompany her in checking on the nests of the olive Ridley turtles that nest along the high water mark. In November and early December, she notes where turtles have come up the beach during the night to lay eggs. The mother turtles two distinctive parallel tracks up the beach, and the sand is slightly disturbed where they have dug. Kathia places an iron grill over the spot to protect it from marauding dogs or coatis.

Each nest contains about a hundred round, leathery eggs that are about 3 cm in diameter. Some weeks later, the eggs hatch. First the sand settles a little as the eggs crack open, and then during the night the baby turtles work their way out of the nest and struggle down to the water's edge. Some never hatch, and others get snapped up by hawks on the way to the water; others drown in the surf.

The last two mornings, I went with Kathia. She digs up nests where the eggs have successfully hatched during the night so she can take a census. In the first one we dug up, we found 97 empty egg shells and three that never hatched. Other times the whole nest is ruined. This morning David and Damian came along, and they found one nest where the strongest turtles had almost reached the air. We dug out 120 babies and carried them home along the beach in a hat and Kathia's purse. We kept them in a bucket during breakfast, letting them gain strength. Then the whole lodge traipsed down to the beach to see them off.

We upended the buckets and let the babies begin their long trek. One hundred twenty baby turtles, all the color of the dark volcanic sand, all the same size, managed to orient themselves toward the sea and paddle laboriously across the sand. At first, they paused to rest every three or four steps. Later, they walked longer. The little kids selected favorites and cheered them on. The babies passed the smooth sand and reached pebbles as big as they were. Tottering, sometimes falling upside down, they waved their flippers and struggled on.

Then, just when it seemed as if their journey was done, waves caught them and threw them tumbling back up the beach. Again and again they almost reached their goal only to be slapped back. Exhausted, they righted themselves and tried again.

By the time we left Lookout Inn, most of the turtles had somehow made it and disappeared into the waves. Only about twenty were still plowing onward, trying again, not giving up. What a metaphor for every kind of earthly endeavor!

Christmas on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

2011-12-23T07:42:00.003-08:00

The family is spending Christmas vacation in the beautiful Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, where the rainforest comes right down to the shore of the Pacific on one side and the Golfo Dulce on the other. We're staying at Lookout Inn, and right now Leo and I are enjoying sunshine and breeze on the outdoor deck of the lodge, watching scarlet macaws fly by and and white-faced capuchin monkeys come mooching for leftover fruit.

I'll try to write fast, because the solar-powered internet was supposed to be turned off ten minutes ago.

This is our third day here. The first two days began with yoga before breakfast - led once by our older daughter and once by a lady who started yoga centers all over this part of the forest. After breakfast comes a three-hour hike. The first day we climbed the "Stairway to Heaven," which continued so painfully long it could easily have another name. Then we walked along a ridge, slid down a muddy slope, crossed a stream, and followed a steep path up and many times across a river until we came to a series of three waterfalls. Feeling foolhardy, we climbed to the third waterfall and stood in it. Pulsating water pummeled my lower back, better than any massage.

The next day one of the staff led us to see the encampment of a family of gold miners along the edge of the Corcovado National Forest. There we met two little girls, ages eleven and thirteen, who took us to where some friends were panning for gold in the river. Their morning's take so far was about three grams. The girls offered to take us farther, to see their own parents and a waterfall. "How far?" I asked (in Spanish). "One minute," said one. "Half an hour, very slowly," said the older one. So we agreed, and they led us up an extremely steep and slippery trail of wet clay. The younger one led me by the hand half the time. We passed another lodge and came upon a group of four miners digging a deep hole in a pool at the top of a waterfall. They offered another demonstration, but we had to turn back for lunch. Our little girl guides kept promising us they would bring us back to the road very soon, but in fact they led us down, across, and through the river many times to show off all the small falls of the river. Finally we reached the collection of cabins with plastic sheeting for roofs where we had fist met them, and we parted ways with hugs and kisses.

Today, we dispensed with yoga and went straight for the guided hike into Corcovado, 22 km roundtrip, with a packed lunch. The path begins on a dirt road past the local airstrip, then for a mile or so along the beach to the park entrance, then into the rain forest on well-marked paths, crossing streams and small rivers and dipping onto the beach again. We saw scarlet macaws, a family of coatis digging for land crabs, a yellow and black poison dart frog, an iguana, a Jesus lizard, an anteater high in a tree, a pair of Great Crested Curacao, spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys, and the track of a baby puma. On the way home, the high tide had swollen one of the rivers to waist height, so after fording it we all gave in and went for a swim anyway, floating upstream and down as the waves flowed in and out.

Now I'm resting my feet, and the children, unbelievable as it seems to me, are down in a field near the beach, playing soccer with the staff and the new soccer ball that the owner's son got to open early for Christmas.

(I'll add photos to this post when we're in a place with faster internet.)

Tumblehome Learning Announces its Presence

2011-12-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

Tumblehome Learning has announced its presence to the publishing world. This week, Publishers Weekly online and Children's Bookshelf (scroll down) presented articles about publisher Ian Leask leaving his beloved Scarletta Press to devote more time to our startup, Tumblehome Learning. The announcement made us scramble to get our new website up several weeks ahead of schedule.

In the bold words of our president, Barnas Monteith,

Make no mistake -- Tumblehome Learning is not a publisher. It is a science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) education revolution. THL's product suite offers a continuous learning program from elementary through high school grades. Our reading materials feature exciting adventures and leading-edge "real world" science & engineering content along with self-paced hands-on activity lessons. A wide variety of different subject materials assure that there's something of interest for everyone.

Our goal is not just to make kids more successful in school, but to offer them an alternative pathway to opportunity and fulfillment throughout life--a pathway of genuine interest in subjects they learn to love and subsequently love to learn about. THL's innovative books, kits and other products inspire kids of all backgrounds and ages to become fascinated by the pursuit of scientific truth. At Tumblehome Learning, we believe that as fun proceeds, knowledge exceeds!

Tumblehome Learning began nine months ago with four friends talking about kids, science, books and experiments, and the idea of science playdates. Almost six months ago we incorporated. Since then we've been writing, searching for books, designing activities, editing, finding partners, working with suppliers and distributors, and generally having the time of our lives. We are operating out of Boston, Minneapolis, and Taipei, and our team has grown to ten. We plan to make a big splash in 2012 with the release of our first seven books.

Tumblehome Learning will showcase our products-in-process at our Asian launch at the Taipei International Book Exhibition in February and again at the USA Science and Engineering Festival Book Fair in Washington, DC, April 28-29. We will have our first books, including a graphic novel, plus plenty of activities for families to try. Not only that, I'm a featured author, speaking Sunday at 10 am. Come join us!

And for all you authors out there, in mid-January we will begin looking at book proposals and queries. Check under Submissions on our website.

Grand Challenges to Inspire Kids in Science

2011-12-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

How can we inspire kids to take on the grand scientific and engineering challenges of the 21st century? The Boston Museum of Science has published an article adapted from a talk I give on the subject. I write about how we need to find challenges that sound both hopeful and inspiring and that have analogs - activities, design challenges, and experiments - that kids can work on relatively early in their education.

Take a look at the article, and don't forget to visit two other sites. The Museum of Science hosts the National Center on Technology Literacy, which introduces kids to engineering, and the Scarletta Press site will tell you more about Lost in Lexicon and the other thoughtful and high-quality books Scarletta is bringing to the public.

Chinese article on Robert Noyce

2011-12-13T06:50:00.000-08:00

Just for fun, I thought I'd share the literal Google-translated version of the Chinese language Google article on Robert Noyce. I've inserted paragraph breaks to make it more readable, but other than that, this is straight from the mouth of Google.

Robert Noyce was born in December 1927, Intel co-founder, on June 3, 1990 death.

Robert Noyce - Overview
Name (in English) RobertNoyce institutions and functions of Intel co-founder
Date of birth December 12, 1927 was born
June 3, 1990 death of
country of birth, place of Burlington, Iowa, United States
Education in 1953, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) PhD
in 1949, by Greenwich School of Arts degree.

Professional background was founded in 1968, Intel Corporation was founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, Silicon Valley heroes get together, but also a person in order to gain wealth, prestige and success, it is prohibitively difficult. Everywhere the distance, only about Robert Noyce is the trinity of saints. As the inventor of integrated circuit, Noyce has go down in history in the history of science. And he also co-founded with two other people in Silicon Valley, one of the greatest, the first is the cradle of the semiconductor industry - Fairchild (Fairchild) company, has become history; the second is still among the largest companies in the U.S. This is Intel Corporation.

Of course, Noyce is also a contradictory unity, this contradiction can only come from a Midwest pastor's son. Noyce's childhood seems to summarize the range of crazy ambition and entrepreneurial spirit of the time split between the conservative state.

Robert Noyce - experience
December 12, 1927, Noyes was born in Iowa, southeast of denmark (Durlington) town. Father was pastor of the church justice, but also takes him around the family migration. 12 years old, he and brother had a self-made hang glider, this huge kite almost given away the life of the brothers.

University life, versatile Noyce themselves, and reap the limelight. One bedroom party, open a South Pacific flavor banquet. The only drawback is the lack of a whole roasted pig. Noyce and another student were entrusted with the task: to steal the pig farm nearby. They do not live up, come up with a 25 pounds of pork, heroically triumph, banquet a great success. But next morning the case exposed, in Iowa, stealing pigs and stealing horses, on the gallows 50 years ago, is sin. Noyce saved his life, also escaped criminal charges, but schools can not escape punishment. After some transactions, penalties for non-weight: one semester suspension, made with fair Life Insurance Company of New York City to do the statistical work. Noyce stole the infamous pig face disgrace, but also about New York's fast-paced world.

In 1956, technical report at the meeting in Washington, Shockley was impressed by his report. "After one month, Shockley called and said he intends to open a West Coast company, to join with me to discuss matters of the company." Noyce without any hesitation, follow. Because Shockley's patriarchal style, tossing two years did not come up with any excuse, Noyce and seven other people with the collective resignation is "treason eight people to help." Noyce is the only 8 people who look a little leadership. So he picked first as managing director.

Noyce has no doubt was a charismatic figure, a man born to lead others, but he was not a great manager. He was too is true, even when there is no crisis in the company's ability to dismiss or demote people. He will maintain Fairchild nearly 10 years, the final because he lost control of the company leaving the company in crisis. Since then, the rebellion became the basic characteristics and the development of Silicon Valley an important way. In 1969, Senna Wa semiconductor industry bigwigs held a meeting with Nosey made calculations and found that among 400 participants, only 24 had not worked at Fairchild.

August 1968, Noyce and Gordon Moore of R & D and process development experts with the resignation of Andy Grove. The first three went to visit King Arthur Rock, venture capitalists. A total of only five minutes to raise enough venture capital 2.5 million U.S. dollars. Later, Rock recalls: "We already are very good friends ... ... ... official documents? Fact that it is. Noyce's reputation alone is enough, we sent only one half of a simple notification, But people see it before I go there early to raise money enough, if you try to finish this today, perhaps 5 cm thick file to write. "opened a new company, initially named the company" Moore - Noyce Electronics ", but always feel awkward, because in the English language, MooreNoyce sounds like morenoise (noisy), it is indecent tame. The new company will be renamed Intel (Intel).

The first product shipment, the company gathering congratulated 18 employees, three feet tied together on the plaster of the wounded, including Noyce, when he broke his leg skiing, another employee was ejected in the ankle or broken . From these injuries can be reflected in the company at that time vigor and vitality. Intel created the beginning of the Noyce played a key role in laying the corporate culture, creating a wall of the compartment is not a new pattern of office, the abolition of the management hierarchy.

The late 1970s, Noyce began separated from the company's daily operations, he became active in domestic and foreign stage. Moore and Grove began to dominate the company's management. Noyce nature free and easy, open-minded is true. His most adventurous, it seems dangerous and stimulation in order to alleviate some of the inner contradictions and pressures of life: skiing, paragliding, surfing, driving a Peugeot brand car or driving his amphibious aircraft. Whenever I hear the technical backbone of the new ideas, he was always bright eyes, full of curiosity, makes much infection and encouraged.

In June 1990, at a business meeting before the Noyce go swimming. The greatest figure in the semiconductor industry, died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 62 years. As a pastor's grandson and son, family background shaped his pure and honest soul. But came to California, he stopped going to church, and began to smoke, drink alcohol and sometimes also (which is most important to teach the rules, the evil one). And he and the wife married and divorced, and with a much younger woman than he remarried. However, in view of his achievements, God will forgive him. Semiconductor industry pioneer, from 1967 to 1991 led the National Semiconductor, a chip industry's most important manufacturers, and leading Silicon Valley companies with fierce Japanese progress, won the semiconductor war.

What more can I say about my father? This article says it all.

New Frontiers in Formative Assessment

2011-12-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

Formative assessment is an ongoing process of checking students' understanding and then adjusting instruction to best respond to student needs. This process of checking and meeting students where they are takes more teacher skill and flexibility than just marching through a pre-set curriculum, but it should lead to greater learning.

Today is the official release date for New Frontiers in Formative Assessment from Harvard Education Press. Almost two years ago the Noyce Foundation asked me to help share some of the best assessment work of our staff and grantees. I thought a book bringing together interesting work in the field might do the trick, so I put together a proposal, convinced the Harvard folks, and found a co-editor, Dan Hickey, who is an expert on assessment.

Together we solicited authors for twelve chapters on assessment projects and practices. Half the chapters describe the use of technology to aid assessment, often building it right into a learning program. Six more use simple paper and pencil tools to get at students' thinking.

The chapters are evenly divided among math, literacy, and science. It's our contention that different subjects require different approaches to assessment, and we provide plenty of real examples from the projects our authors have run. One chapter discusses techniques for teaching science vocabulary to young English language learners. Another examines how students can label and share graphs among networked computers in a classroom, and another describes a process for preparing teachers to look collaboratively and with diagnostic acumen at students' work in mathematics.

Lorrie Shepard of the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote an insightful foreword, discussing how testing can harm learning and how the chapters of the book provide an alternative. And Dylan Wiliam, assessment maven, gave us this blurb:

This is an extraordinary book. The chapters cover practical applications of formative assessment in mathematics, science, and language arts, including the roles of technology and teachers professional learning. I found my own thinking about formative assessment constantly being stretched and challenged. Anyone who is involved in education will find something of value in this book

.
Working with the authors of these chapters was a privilege, and I'm proud of the book that resulted. I hope that teachers, curriculum developers, and other educators will find it useful. In coming posts I'll give short summaries of selected chapters.

Birthday Google Doodle for Robert Noyce

2011-12-11T13:05:00.000-08:00

For December 12, Robert Noyce's birthday, Google decided to honor the inventor of the integrated circuit with a Google doodle of his own. Since it's already December 12 in China, it's already showing there, and my friend Barnas sent me a sneak peek:

As Barnas points out, this is a pretty advanced integrated circuit. I like it, and I like the subtlety of the Google logo.

I wish my father were here to see it, but even without that, this is a tribute that means a lot to me.

Addendum: Here is a very sweet note that came to the Noyce Foundation from Turkey:

(first my english is not good but ı think god thiks about
Robert Noyce
)

good night..

I from Turkey.. I like elektronic machines .. Micro is very succesfull object for every elektronic machines..

ı thinks if microprocessor doesnot live our life, we will use nothing in ours life, about cars, computers, tv,music players and etc..

because every electronic machine use microprocessor ... thank you Robers NOYSE ... you find microprocessor..

good sleep Mr. Noyce in your garden of Eden...

Bob Tinker, playful physicist and education innovator

2011-12-11T06:47:00.000-08:00

Today is Bob Tinker's 70th birthday. Bob is a low-temperature physicist who early in his career moved to Alabama to teach in a black college and march in Civil Rights marches. Later he led TERC in Cambridge, MA, and pioneered the use of probeware to allow students and adults to participate in citizen science. He helped develop Global Lab and the National Geographic Kids Network, alllowing kids all over the world to collaborate on environmental projects.

I met Bob shortly after he founded the Concord Consortium in 1994. At Concord he launched the first Virtual High School, which continues to stand out for its collaborative model and the quality of its courses. Although Bob officially retired as president of the Concord Consortium a few years ago, he continues to consult and collaborate on projects ranging from modeling the behavior of atoms to building "smart graphs" that teach students about what graphs tell us and how they're made.

Yesterday the Concord Consortium folks had a birthday party for Bob in the MIT Museum, a perfect location to reflect his innovative spirit and dedication to advancing the common good. As guests entered, they were greeted by a full-size cutout model of Bob that looked startlingly real. When Bob and his wife Barbara showed up, the resemblance seemed even closer: Bob was wearing the same clothes as his cutout.

Old friends ate hors-d'oeuvres and caught up, and then a few reminisced. They talked about Bob's unfailing optimism and good cheer, his encouraging ways as a mentor, and the spirit of play that constantly animates him. They saluted his skills as a writer and his unfailing willingness to write yet one more well-crafted, exciting grant application to the National Science Foundation. They paid tribute to the energizing work environment he creates around him.

So, Bob, Happy Birthday, and may you keep on playing!

Ice Castle copy editing is finished

2011-12-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

Today I received a copy-edited draft of The Ice Castle, an Adventure in Music, which is the sequel to Lost in Lexicon. Here's the blurb:

Their return to Lexicon is not all that Ivan and Daphne imagined. For one thing, Aunt Adelaide is deathly ill. For another, their musical younger cousin, Lila, has stumbled into their secret land. Instead of rejoining old friends in the Land of Morning, Ivan and Daphne find themselves tracing Lila through a wintery landscape where what matters most is how well a person sings.

Sorted by musical talent and consigned to different lives, the cousins face cold, illness, and attempted murder. Slave, servant or fine lady, each has to escape a kind of imprisonment before they can find one another, foment a revolution and restore spring to the Land of Winter.

We have a beautiful draft cover with Ivan and Daphne in swirling blue and green cloaks and the Ice Castle in the distance, but I'm not allowed to show that yet.

To my delight, the copy editor used a light hand. I'm always happy to learn if a compound word is really one word, two words, or a hyphenated word. (The word "copy-editor," for example: I'm not really certain.) Copy editors pick up double periods or places where I've used a word twice in one sentence. Apparently we no longer put commas before "too," as in, "He insisted he was coming too." When I was in grade school, that had to be "He insisted he was coming, too." So I always learn a few things, like whether to put spaces between the dots in ellipses. But I'm happy to say the copy editor did not make many changes that affected meaning, so I won't have to fight back much. I will argue some wording.

Meantime, Joan Charles is converting sketches into fully realized drawings. She really brings out feeling, detail, and texture in her final drawings. I just sent Scarletta Press a sketch of the layout of one of the towns the cousins visit. We think we'll use an aerial view of that town as a frontispiece. The book is a fun, exciting one, and I'm thrilled to see it taking shape.

Festival of Trees at the Mass. Horticultural Society

2011-12-05T15:53:00.000-08:00

Visiting the Festival of Trees at Elm Bank has become a tradition in the Noyce/Liu household. (That's because we only have to do something twice to consider it a tradition.) Each year, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society fills an old converted carriage house at Elm Bank Reservation with a myriad of decorated (artificial) trees. Businesses, volunteers, and non-profits all stretch their imaginations to create the most fanciful tree.

This year the trees included an all-pink "princess tree," a tree decorated with peacock feathers, a couple of trees decorated with seashells, an Audubon tree covered in artificial birds, and many more. A standing green kayak served as a tree, as did several pyramids of potted cyclamen. Someone had built a tepee frame of unpeeled logs and hung strings of red and golden balls within it. Someone else had built an "engineering tree" out of K'nex pieces. It didn't look like a tree at all, but it did power a K'nex ferris wheel.

Visitors pay an entrance fee, and they can also buy tickets to enter drawings for different trees. A sheet of 26 tickets is $8, which we split among the four of us. In front of each tree is a post with a slot in the top where you can spend your tickets. Leo and Damian pooled tickets to bid on a tree with a purple and silver theme. I spent a couple on a "Serengeti Christmas"--a sculpture of a giraffe grazing on an acacia tree. David split his tickets between the giraffe and the tepee sculpture. If we win, we'll hear next Saturday and bring our tree prize home.

Outside the hall, real trees decorated in ordinary lights were scattered across the lawn, and a bonfire burned in an iron dish. We commented to each other that what with the warm weather and avoiding the malls, this was definitely the most Christmasy we've felt yet this year.

Tolkien, Eragon, and Twilight

2011-12-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

High fantasy fiction began with Tolkien and continues strong in such YA favorites as Christopher Paolini's Eragon books and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, writes Adam Gopnik in a great article in the December 5 New Yorker. Gopnik explores what a strange creature high fantasy is:archetypes battling in a vaguely medieval world with a vast imagined history and culture. Sometimes, especially for boys, learning the details of that history and geography can be as important as the story itself. (I can attest to this: when Damian was little, he derived great pleasure from mastering the confusing, semi-Polynesian cultural history of the Bionicle series of books and toys put out by Lego.)

Gopnik suggests that in Tolkien, the sense of mythic history and loss (gone are the days of Numenor) substitutes for the psychological subtlety and ambivalence we expect in modern realist literature. Tolkien's modern descendants bring back ordinary psychology, but they still ride on the mythic. Gopnik doesn't have much good to say about either Meyer's ("awkward") or Paolini's ("tedious") writing, so he looks elsewhere for the source of their power to delight their readers.

He comes back to an explanation that I've seen used also for why dystopias are so popular in current teen fiction: it's just a heightening of how kids experience their real lives. High school is an arbitrary, cruel social system that suppresses freedom and converts good people into outcasts: there's your dystopia. Similarly, Gopnik says, young girls are often "torn between the cool, sensitive boy from the strange, affluent family and the dishy athletic boy from across the tracks." The Twilight series is real life ennobled by scary symbols. As for Eragon, the series represents life as a series of ordeals and tests. The books are not about a boy becoming a man so much as they are about a boy learning to ride dragons and do other cool stuff, navigating among helpers and hostile impediments. This, Gopnik says, sounds like high school.

My handicap in responding to this analysis is that I haven't read either the Twilight or the Eragon books. (Masterful writing is part of what I need to keep turning hundreds of pages.) But there's food for thought here. One project I have simmering on a not-very-far-back burner is a book called The Beechwood Flute that comes close to being a fantasy of this type. There are no elves or dwarves or wizards - I really think there's very little new to be done with those tropes - but there is an invented history and culture at little more than a medieval level of development. And the hero, Kiran, does undergo a series of ordeals, all arising in the natural course of his life. The ordeals as a way of exploring courage and how a boy's conception of courage develops as he becomes a man. I want to bring the best of psychology and mythic echoes together in The Beechwood Flute, and I want to do it with writing that is neither tedious nor awkward but a pleasure to read. Polishing that book is one of my goals for 2012. I'll let you know how it goes.

Is this a thesaurus?

2011-12-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

This animal is only a little larger than William in Lost in Lexicon. Although you can't see his lips move, he is whispering helpful word choices in my ear.

The observers are the 4th and 5th grade Cool Girls club of Boulder, CO, and Mary Golden took the photo.

Raising daVincis with STEAM

2011-12-02T09:49:00.000-08:00

We should be integrating the arts more into STEM education--that's the argument explored in an intriguing new article from EdWeek. STEM should become STEAM, because engineering design and invention require some of the same creativity and ability to think outside the box as does artistic exploration.

The article offers some fascinating tidbits and models. For example, there's the tantalizing fact that Nobel scientists are 22 times more likely than other scientists to be involved in the performing arts. There's a description of the biodegradable water bottle that one this year's ArtScience prize. Here's a video from the Wolf Trap Foundation showing how the performing arts can help young children "feel" mathematics in their bodies.

Of course, as Noyce Foundation trustee Alan Friedman points out in the article, there are big differences between art and science as ways of knowing. Think, for example, of how a piece of work in evaluated. In both art and science, boldness of vision and originality may be important. But in the end, a piece of scientific work is evaluated by whether it can be reproduced, whether it proves to be true. Though Keats says, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," the two are different.

I tend not to think of myself as artistic, but people remind me writing is an art form. In college I read poetry in the cell biology lab and then went off to my creative writing class to write stories about the adventure of scientific discovery. And to my surprise, Lost in Lexicon's playful approach to mathled to my selection as a featured author at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in April. During my talk I plan to play a Lexicon song titled "Girls Can't Do Math," which comes from the village of Tessellate--more arts integration.

Teachers of Lost in Lexicon have integrated the arts with the book as well. One teacher asked kids to paint scenes from the book as they read. Dotty Corbiere challenges kids and adults to represent mathematical ideas from the book in Lego sculptures. And I'll take the integration of science and art further in the second Lexicon book, The Ice Castle, an Adventure in Music.

Bringing art into STEM will motivate more kids to give STEM a try. It will help kids think about science and mathematics in new ways. Even if they don't all grow up to be Leonardo da Vinci or even Steve Jobs, that's a good thing.

Useful math

2011-11-30T18:25:00.000-08:00

To many people it seems obvious: mathematicians should determine the math curriculum. After all, they're the ones who really understand the subject. Part of the reason for a backlash against "reform math" in the 1990s and early 2000s was the complaint that the reformers were math educators, not "real" mathematicians. They might be undercutting important topics because they didn't truly understand where all this math was heading.

But mathematicians are a rarefied breed. Outside of higher education, the number of jobs for mathematicians in the US is approximately 2900. In ten years the number is expected to be approximately 3600. That's a large percentage growth, but a small absolute number. Even when you throw in jobs opening in higher education, there are not enough to accommodate the number of mathematics PhD's being produced. There just aren't that many professional mathematician slots - and certainly not pure research mathematician slots - for students to grow up and fill.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs appearing for computer programmers, modelers, economists, accountants, businessmen, actuaries, engineers, statisticians, and people who use sophisticated mathematics to understand fundamental physics, how the genome is organized, potential damage from earthquakes, the workings of the derivatives market, or the geometry of antiviral drugs. That is, there are plenty of positions for people who graduate with strong mathematical understanding and the ability to apply it well.

When it comes to deciding what math is really important for people to know, perhaps the viewpoint of those who use advanced mathematics to accomplish practical goals is as important of those who love and study math only for its intrinsic beauty. By all means, let the mathematicians weigh in about what our children should learn - but include the applied mathematicians. And include practical mathematics. Here's an article by a friend of mine arguing about what that practical mathematics might look like.

Learning to be a doctor: the physical exam

2011-11-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Over Thanksgiving, our daughter was home from her first three months of medical school. She's had an intense schedule: 7 weeks of anatomy followed by 1-2 weeks each of biochemistry, cell biology, metabolism, pharmacology, and genetics. When Leo and I were in medical school, each of these was a sedate course that met daily for a quarter, a semester, or a year. That allowed a chance to review, connect, and ponder. This sounds like a mad sprint of memorization, unlikely to linger in memory. We tell our daughter that's okay, because anything you really need to know in medicine you'll learn a few more times before you're done.

Much more exciting is the fact that she has begun to learn physical diagnosis. For us, examining patients didn't come until the second year of medical school. Carrying the tools of the trade--ophthalmoscope, otoscope, little rubber hammer, vibration fork, little Snellen eye chart, and most of all, the iconic stethoscope--that's when you really begin to feel like a doctor, or at least a legitimate apprentice in the guild of medicine.

Rhianon spent all weekend practicing elements of the physical exam. I can assure you that my mental status is good and stable, since she checked it daily. Apparently my peripheral vision is a little blurrier than she feels it should be, because I could never tell how many fingers she held up. (I think she held her fingers too far to the side.)

On Monday, we finally got replacement parts for one of our old ophthalmoscopes so we could examine each other's retinas. Rhianon has trouble with this because she's not good at closing just her right eye. (I never knew about this disability during her childhood. Neglectful mother, I noticed that she could wink without ever remarking that she could do so only on one side. It is not sophisticated to have to cover your eye with one hand.)

Whichever eye she used, Rhianon had difficulty seeing the blood vessels at the back of the eye. I tried to walk her through it, but it's like describing how to ride a bicycle. First of all, it comes so naturally that it's hard to break down the steps. Second, words can be a pretty inefficient way of explaining movement. Showing is so much better.

By dinnertime, not only Rhianon and I but also my husband and son were seeing yellow and purple spots on our washed-out retinas. Rhianon was beginning to get the hang of it. We just told her there's plenty of time and hundreds of hours of practice ahead of her before doing a physical exam becomes a flexible, natural activity that can help her understand a patient's story.

Thanksgiving update

2011-11-24T08:49:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving! Everyone in the family is home and cooking. Damian is making maple baked beans (he got up at 5:30 with me as I started the turkey); Sabrina made stuffing and is working on roast vegetables; Rhianon is making pumpkin corn bread and mashed potatoes; Leo made soup; David's helping everywhere; Owen is making "squash cigars"; and my nephew Peter is coming over to make green bean casserole. Our neighbors are coming over later with pies the kids helped make yesterday. What a blessing to have grown-up children who like to cook! I got to go back to bed and sleep in.

This has been an extremely productive period for me. I went on a long book tour/trip to Boulder, CO, which I still have to blog about. There I was hosted by Mary Golden of Cool Girls, a science and art club for girls in grades 1-5. I talked to Noyce Scholars from all over Colorado, ran a Lexicon Villages event in the Crestview School, visited two Cool Girls club sessions, and spoke at the Boulder Bookstore. Mary and I also attended a session of the Boulder Writers' Group, heard the Bioharmonics sing in a cafe, hiked a little, and visited a number of people working on getting more girls into science and computers. A very rich time at the edge of the mountains, mostly in the bright sunshine. I even learned about lenticular clouds.

There was even quiet time to write. I turned in the second draft of The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip, which will be the first book in Tumblehome Learning's Galactic Academy of Science series. It's a mystery adventure about electronics, featuring science history and time travel. We're currently in a rush to get a galley of that book ready (and translated into Chinese!) in time for the Taiwan International Book Fair February 1st. We also expect to have two or three more books lined up for the fair, and we're planning to publish six books in 2012, including two science biographies, three science mysteries, and one science fiction graphic novel, all accompanied by hands-on activities. This is progress much faster than I originally expected. There are now eleven of us working on Tumblehome Learning in various capacities.

Since coming home, I've been working on a children's adaptation of The Man Behind the Microchip, Leslie Berlin's excellent biography of my father. Leslie and I will be working on this project together. Immersing myself in this has been an emotional experience, helping me get to know my father better even as I relive memories of my childhood.

Meanwhile, my work with various nonprofits has continued. Soon I hope to be posting pieces on the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the Coastal School for Girls, the Concord Consortium, and others. But for now it's back to Thanksgiving dinner preparations.

NAGC Convention in New Orleans

2011-11-05T04:44:00.000-07:00

Thursday afternoon, Dotty Corbiere and I flew down to New Orleans to make a presentation at the convention of the National Association for Gifted Children. Dotty is the elementary math coordinator at my son's school, the Meadowbrook School in Weston. Last year, Dotty joined with English teacher Liz Pritchett to teach Lost in Lexicon to the sixth grade honors English class. They planned a five-week unit for the book, but it stretched to nearly eight weeks because they kept thinking of new creative, high-level projects for the kids to do.

Dotty and Liz really enjoyed working together. Liz taught the book from a literature perspective four days every week, exploring themes and character and setting and having the kids try their hands at metaphor and poetry. Once a week, for the Friday 90-minute block, Dotty came in and taught math enrichment. The class was heterogeneous in math skills, and only a minority identified themselves as "math kids," but they loved the explorations she gave them. They researched different ways to multiply, measured circumference and diameter of widely different circles to find pi, created Venn diagrams to use in logic and in classifying kinds of numbers, investigated the properties of tessellating shapes, and researched what's special about the number 1729.

In one project they plotted points on the Cartesian plane, connected them, took them through transformations (rotation, reflection and translation) as directed, and found they had created letters that led them to a secret message. In an ongoing project they used pattern blocks to create an image for each village of Lexicon, and toward the end of the unit they built representations of each village with Legos and had to explain the choices they had made.

For their final projects, the kids had to select a concept from the book in either English or math and carry it further, creating a lesson to teach to some other class, either younger or older. Most of the kids chose math projects, and they created powerpoints, wikis, podcasts, and interactive lessons.

This was the experience Dotty talked about at our crowded session. To illustrate, we handed out lists of some of the math and ELA concepts explored in the book. We asked teachers to pair up, select a concept from each list (or others of their choosing) and use a small collection of Legos to illustrate the integration of math and literature. The teachers plunged in with good will, and in ten minutes came up with creative answers. They compared punctuating complex sentences to building number sentences and equations. They built a balance and compared a balanced equation to an effective simile. They built a gear with two radii to illustrate the area of a circle and used the same gear to show how metaphors connect. They built a structure of mathematics and placed a person with the magic wand of storytelling on top.

The workshop was the highlight of our visit, but we also had an early-morning walk along the river and an evening visit to Bourbon Street. New Orleans was cool and breezy and clear, perfect weather for being outside. For me, it was truly fun to spend time with Dotty, who is such a creative, dedicated teacher.

October Snowstorm

2011-10-31T19:58:00.000-07:00

Saturday night we had the first snow of the season, a thick, wet snow that clung in clumps to the branches and unfallen leaves. We lost power in the evening, and our usually reliable generator didn't come on, so we used candles and flashlights. Through the night we periodically woke to the "whu-ump" of slabs of snow sliding down the roof and thunking to the ground.

Such a brief, gentle-seeming storm--fat flakes drifting slowly down--but in the morning we found a surprising amount of damage. The heavy snow tore limbs off pine trees, and in the pasture one thirty-foot tree toppled completely. All over the yard, bushes tipped to one side and the boughs of trees bent to the ground where they were trapped in the snow.

We went out with brooms and rakes to beat the snow off the branches. When we unweighted them, the branches sprung up, seeming joyful at their release and shaking off the last of their snowy burdens. A couple of tall lilacs had bent so far they had pulled their root balls from the ground. These we seized and pushed upright, propping up their trunks with rocks and logs until their roots poked back into the ground.

All over the neighborhood, branches or whole trees had fallen on power lines. School was canceled Monday because most of the town was still without power. Luckily, Leo fixed our generator Sunday, and we had lights and heat in the core of the house. Our neighbors were too independent to come shelter here, but a number of them went to stay with relatives. We took milk and meat from the warming refrigerator and set them outside in the melting snow. Then this afternoon, the lights came on, followed a few hours later by the phones and the internet.

The interlude reminded me of California thunderstorms where we lost power when I was a child. We made a fire in the fireplace and cooked hot dogs for supper and crept off to bed in the real dark. It was an adventure, always short, and in California serious cold was never a problem we had to worry about. We just snuggled deeper in our blankets.

Here in Massachusetts once when the kids were young and we were facing a third winter night without heat, we checked into a nearby hotel. In the dining room that evening we looked around and saw all our neighbors. I think that was when we decided our next house would have a generator. With a generator, losing power is not quite such an adventure, but at least it's warm.

Resolutions

2011-10-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

Dear readers, I want to inform you of two resolutions, because publicly committing to doing certain things increases our chances of actually achieving them.

First, I plan to finish a draft of "Go Off and Do Something Wonderful," a children's biography of my father, by mid-November. November is traditionally a frantic month for writing, because its officially NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Writers and aspiring writers all over the country and beyond commit to writing 50,000 unedited words of a new novel during the month. That comes to approximately 1,6667 words per day.

I won't have to write quite that much, because I'm already 3200 words into a book that I don't think will be more than 20,000 words. (For those who know my father's story, I'm at the pig episode.) To finish in time, I'll only have to do about 1000 words a day, which Steven King says is the minimum a person should be writing daily anyway.

The second resolution is to lose at least one pound a week until I've lost thirty pounds. I'm inspired by the fatty liver that showed up on my ultrasound last week. I've made a mutual commitment with a friend I'll call Dave. We have devised carrots and sticks to see us through the weeks. If one loses in a given week and the other doesn't, the non-loser has to come give the loser a head and shoulder rub while repeating exaggerated praise. There are other dire punishments as well. For me, one of them will be having to admit here that I didn't pull it off.

Really, to tackle both of these commitments together, it would be best if I went back to my treadmill desk.

Fear of Science

2011-10-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

Do Americans fear science? Not just having to study it, but science as an enterprise? The October 26 episode of Jon Stewart's Daily Show gives a hilarious, chilling view of one population segment's attitude toward science. Watch it.

The truth is, a large segment of the American population distrusts scientists and, like the woman in the interview, would rather trust their gut than scientific evidence. It's telling that of all the Republican candidates for president, only one, Jon Huntsman, has spoken up in defense of science. To quote him,

Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I'm saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can't run from science.

Most of the other candidates seem to have decided that running from science is good campaign strategy. Even Mitt Romney, who knows better, has been shifting rightward on the question of climate change. In his 2010 book No Apology, he wrote, "I believe that climate change is occurring. ... I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor." In June, 2011, he said that the US should "reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors." Now he says, "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us." This is not just a change in Romney's preferred policies, it's a stated change in his beliefs -- all of a sudden, even as the scientific consensus becomes clearer and clearer, Romney doesn't know what's causing climate change. He's embraced the campaign strategy of fleeing science.

The point that Jon Stewarts show makes is that some of us distrust science because we think it's something only scientists can understand and evaluate. So who's to say the scientists aren't all ganging up together to fool us and keep grant money coming? This is a new twist on America's bent toward anti-intellectualism. All of a sudden, there's a group of us not ashamed to say, "Look, I'm not educated enough or smart enough to understand this, so I don't trust the people who do."

Come to think of it, that's kind of the way I used to feel about car mechanics. They know about my car, and I don't, so they can tell me I need to buy something, and I don't know how to evaluate the recommendation. Of course, I can always take the car to another mechanic.

What many people don't understand about science is that it's always automatically being taken to another mechanic. That's the process of peer review and of replicating experiments. Sure, there are cases of scientific fraud. But the system uncovers them automatically, without the need for government wiretaps, and a lot faster than it took Bernie Madoff's fraud to unravel and expose itself. Science is a self-correcting way of getting at new knowledge. That's what's wonderful about it. What to do with that knowledge is a legitimate political question. But running away from that knowledge because it feels uncomfortable is succumbing to our most craven instincts. It's sort of like saying, "Well, I know my cholesterol can't be that high because I feel fine." Gut feelings don't prevent heart attacks.

Anaplasmosis

2011-10-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

It turns out it wasn't flu at all. My smart and competent internist, Erica Johnson, made the diagnosis with an antibody test. I had anaplasmosis, a rare tick-borne intracellular bacterium that causes myriad vague symptoms, some of which can be very serious.

Anaplasmosis causes chills, fever, headache, muscle aches, nausea, malaise, and confusion, all of which I had, plus cough, which I didn't have. It can also cause low white count, low platelet count, inflamed liver, and swollen spleen, all of which I had.

Anaplasmosis infects about one in a million people in the US each year. Mortality is under one percent, but some people have internal hemorrhage or respiratory failure. Not me, luckily. My lungs were if anything better than their asthmatic usual during this illness.

Best of all, anaplasmosis is easily treatable with a member of the tetracycline family. Ten days of doxycycline, and the infection will be crushed. Already my liver is almost back to normal, and I can eat and sleep and all those things I missed while sick.

As for ticks... well, we have a lot of them around here. When I go for a walk through the woods I find myself picking off tiny ticks for hours afterward. I haven't worried too much, because ticks can't pass on Lyme Disease until they've been attached for 24-48 hours. As for anaplasmosis, I don't know. Maybe it's faster.

The final thing Erica Johnson said when she called me with the news is that Anaplasmosis sounds like a character in Lexicon. I'll have to remember that. Maybe I can use it in Book Four.

How Not to Go on Book Tour

2011-10-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'll keep this simple: Don't go on book tour with the flu.

To be fair, I didn't start off with the flu. In fact, I even got a flu shot before I set off, so I'd be protected from germy strangers. Moreover, I still don't know for certain if it was influenza or some other vicious and potent virus.

In Minneapolis I woke in the middle of the night with shaking chills and sweats, but in the morning I was able to carry on. It went on like that. For each event, I pulled myself together, smiled, and did a good job. I washed my hands a lot and took Tylenol and didn't sneeze on anybody, and I don't think I spread pestilence in my wake. But nausea, weakness, sweats, chills, and disturbed sleep got worse every night, and finally, in Palo Alto, California, I turned myself in. I had my son take me to a clinic and I ended up spending the night in the hospital, complete with blood cultures, abdominal ultrasound, cardiac echo, and a lot of other stuff you don't want to hear about. I missed my final event, and guess what, they survived without me.

In retrospect, I probably should have turned tail for home at the first shiver. I could have spent the week in bed sipping chicken soup and ginger ale and sleeping and not looking at my Amazon rank.

I'm home now, recuperating. Next big book event is tomorrow.

So just to rephrase: If you're on tour, and you think you have the flu, go home.

A Visit to the College of St. Catherine

2011-10-13T15:41:00.000-07:00

This morning I had a chance to talk to Kate Kelly's children's literature class for prospective teachers at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN. We spent some time discussing the media-saturated world our kids live in and what books still have to offer in building the vocabulary, knowledge base, and imagination of children. Then I talked about how I came to write Lost in Lexicon and what I was trying to accomplish in doing so.

Interspersed throughout, we played games. Here are some of the anagrams the students solved:

MARANGA
OIVDE
YEOHN
ILDRENCH
BRIANLIAR
SPOOTERHAP

We had to leave that word up a while, because even I had forgotten what it was. A student, though, figured it out. (Hint: it appears on pages 36 and 42 of the book.)

We also did activities and games with word roos, Tangrams, and the Flora activity from the Lexicon Villages event, which consists of building sentences (flowers) from words with different parts of speech printed on different colored petals.

We didn't have time for an activity involving the square root of two I wanted to try. Maybe next time.

I really like talking to teachers and student teachers, so if anyone has a group they'd like to visit, drop me a line. And here's a special cheer for BreeAnn, anagram champ, and Glamorous Amaris, who won a copy of Lost in Lexicon...plus all their classmates.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T05:13:00.000-07:00

I met Steve Jobs only once. I was in medical school, and my father and Ann invited me to dinner. Ann, my father's second wife, was Apple's first human resources director, and the two of them acted in some ways as mentors to Steve. We were the same age, and they thought we might connect on some level.

One of the first things a person noticed about Steve was his physical grace. It was something he held onto during all the years of cancer and illness later in life-= the long, lithe body and the ease of moving. After dinner he folded himself into a cross-legged position on the floor and talked about how he would like to live a Zen-like life with no clutter and very few possessions.

His physical grace was accompanied by a restless, probing mind. I could almost see him breathing knowledge and ideas from the air around him. He gobbled up ideas. He hardly talked to me at all. It was my father and Ann he focused on and their knowledge of business and life he wanted.

Somehow, through the keenness of his aesthetic eye and his insistence on user-friendliness, Steve brought that sense of grace and ease to Apple users everywhere. When Apple shouldered him aside inn1985, its vision sagged. Then Steve came back and brought out the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. All of these carried so much of Steve's sensibility--his genius for style==that people all over the world are feeling they lost a brother today.

Lexicon and Tumblehome Learning

2011-10-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have neglected this blog for a couple of weeks, for which I apologize. I've been caught up in a whirlwind (why is a whirlwind good and a tornado bad?) of book and writing related activity. A second launch for Lost in Lexicon (the 2nd edition), a new company that I'm ready to start mentioning, and progress on two or three other books. Here are some highlights:

* Lost in Lexicon just won a Mother's Choice Gold Award, which will lead to promotion at book fairs and on the Barnes & Noble website.

* I attended the Midwest Booksellers' Association last week in Minneapolis, great fun in a beautiful old depot, and a chance to interact with lots of independent bookstore owners, who bravely uphold adventurous literature and opportunity for small presses.

* This week I finished proofing the galleys of New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, the educational book I pulled together from multiple authors and edited this past year. The book will come out from Harvard Education Press in December. It's been an adventure and will, I think, make a concrete contribution to the field.

* In July, three friends and I founded a new venture, Tumblehome Learning, which will produce science-based mysteries, adventure stories, and biographies for kids ages 8-18, each accompanied by a science kit, a set of activities, and/or electronic apps. We are based in Boston, Minneapolis, and Taipei. This is a great new adventure. We'll be rolling out our first set of three books, maybe more, at the US Science and Engineering Fair in DC and April. As anybody associated with the publishing business can attest, this is breakneck speed.

* I've written a draft of the first Tumblehome Learning book, and the first book in our elementary Galactic Academy of Sciences series. The book is called The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip, and it features two sixth graders traveling through time to consult with giants in the development of electronics to help them find out who has stolen a diamond-based integrated circuit that will change the face of computing.

* I turned in a penultimate draft of the second Lexicon book, The Ice Castle, which will appear next fall, a more ordinary amount of lead time in the publishing world.
Last week in Minneapolis, the publisher and I consulted with our artist, Joan Charles, on the cover design. It's going to be great.

That's mostly it on the work front, though right now I'm at a Noyce Foundation board meeting in Los Angeles. Next week is Maine, then Boulder, CO, Portland, OR, and back to Northern California. I'll try to find some time to blog.

Lost in Lexicon's Path to Publication. X. Scarletta

2011-09-09T16:03:00.000-07:00

I've decided not to make this series of blog posts as long as Lexicon's actual path to publication was. I'll just mention a few more efforts I made in marketing and publicity.

First I signed onwith a publicist, who had me write a couple of short articles peripherally related to the book (one on video gaming and one on family games at Thanksgiving) to place in newspapers around the country. The byline mentioned the book. The publicist also pitched radio shows, leading to about seven interviews. What struck me most was how smoothly radio hosts swing in and out of interviews. To succeed as an interviewee, you should have a few points you want to get across, but in a natural, relaxed way. You have to think fast, not say "um" too often, and sound friendly and confident. Pretty tough to do on the phone with someone you've never spoken to before.

At this point I made contact with Ian Leask, who had been a writing teacher in Minnesota when I was a medical resident there. He now had a radio show called Write On radio on KFAI in Minneapolis. When I sent Ian the book, he agreed to have his colleague Charlotte interview me.

Ian was also publisher of a small press called Scarletta, but unfortunately it didn't publish children's books. Still, I asked his advice. Ian told me that to get a book picked up by a commercial publisher, I needed good reviews and decent sales, maybe two or three thousand. Winning a couple of prizes or awards wouldn't hurt.

Oddly, the hardest of these to get was reviews. I sent the book to a number of reviewers, but most of them wanted books months before publication and didn't review self-published books anyway. I went after Amazon reviews, searching through the top 100 reviewers for those who reviewed children's books. One of these, who received an advance copy, sent a great review and told us to let him know when the book officially came out. Unfortunately, we could never reach him again! Still, the number of Amazon reviews gradually rose. I also offered the book to a number of bloggers, some of whom wrote full-length reviews. Others basically used the book to promote their own sites, offering a book giveaway raffle to people who signed on as followers to their blog. Finally, I did solicit and pay for a review from Foreword magazine.

As for prizes and awards, Rebecca had researched a list, and we went through it making a schedule of what to apply for when. However, our first pleasant surprise was something we hadn't applied for: a recommendation in the winter edition of the independent booksellers' Kids Next paper, which readers can pick up in stores. Then the book won a number of awards: an IPBA silver medal for juvenile fiction, an IBPA first place for interior design, a Mother's Choice recommendation, a Parents' choice recommendation, a Foreword recommendation, etc.

By this time, even with less than two thousand books sold, Ian had decided he wanted to acquire the book and use it to establish a new children's line. Scarletta is a small press, and some friends urged me to hold out for something better; but here was an editor I liked and a publisher I trusted, so I decided to jump. In August, Scarletta reissued Lost in Lexicon with a new, more active cover in brighter colors. The one drawback is that meant almost a year's delay in issuing the second book in the series, The Ice Castle.

Some things changed immediately. Since publishing with a "real" publisher, I now have great reviews from School Library Journal, Midwest Book Review, Squeaky Clean Reads, Minneapolis Books Examiner, and Open Letters Monthly. Scarletta's publicist sends me leads and ideas all the time. Suddenly my autumn is jammed full with travel and events: Boulder, Minneapolis, Providence, New Orleans, Portland, OR, and Hillsborough, CA.

So here at the end of the series, what advice would I give to someone preparing to self-publish in hope of finding a "real" publisher some day?

1. Decide if you're publishing for your own satisfaction and to share your work with family or friends, or whether you want to build a writing career.

2. If you're building a career, be sure your book is the best it can be: those awards and reviews count for a lot. Get proper editing and copy editing.

3. To get the quality you want, you may have to spend more than you want. Consider what you can afford to invest in your career, and think of it that way. It's a long term investment, not a way to get rich quick.

4. Be innovative, clever, and persistent in your marketing efforts. Think of where you can find potential readers and how you can entice them to notice your book.

5. Do what you can to get good, honest reviews.

6. Write your next book.

Most of all, enjoy the chance to be creative and connect with readers, who tend to be wonderful people.

Irene in Maine

2011-08-29T18:18:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Irene has passed, dropping devastating floods in Vermont and parts of upstate New York; She only brushed against midcoast Maine. People here were prepared for tropical storm force winds and a downpour. By Friday, six or eight lobster boats had steamed at high tide into the Mill Pond, a quiet pool beyond a small inlet at the very most inland point of the bay. Normally the Mill Pond is known mainly for its clam flats, and the lobstermen beached their boats at high tide and presumably walked away through the marsh grass.

We decided to keep our two boats, a lobster boat and a fourteen foot sailboat, on their moorings. We brought the canoe up under the deck, hid the swim ladder under a small rowboat turned upside down and lashed down on the dock, and carriedin all the chairs from the terrace.

Saturday night it rained hard, and the wind rose, forming whitecaps on the bay. Sunday morning broke foggy but not raining. The wind roared in from the east, a most unusual direction. A large island protects us to the east, but the short still built up a chop. Over the course of the day, the wind slowly mounted as it veered from east to southeast to south.

Still no rain fell. High tide arrived at 10 pm. It was a moon tide, already the highest tide of the month; and on top of that came the two-foot remnant of the storm surge and the driving wind. Waves broke at the edge of the lawn. Spray flew over the top of the pier. The ramp leading down from the stone pier to the float, which varies between about a ten percent grade and a forty percent grade as the tide rises and falls, was now almost flat. In the middle of the ramp, a juvenile herring gull huddled against the wind, looking at us, too exhausted to fly away as we approached. Another hovered about six feet off the dock, unmoving in mid air, like an aerodynamic airplane hull passing standard in a wind tunnel.

The night passed, and the tide fell. Today dawned as bright and glittering as only a late summer day on the coast can be. A short chop and a long swell still agitated the water, while driftwood and rafts of rockweed littered the surface. Nobody seemed to be out lobstering. One of our floats and one of our moorings had shifted several feet downwind, and the lawn was covered with oak leaves--no birch, pine, maple, or beech leaves, only oak leaves.

Irene is gone, but if predictions of climate change are right, as the ocean warms, we will have more extreme weather events, as unexpected as a hurricane in Vermont. Fifty years from now, the ocean may lap the edges of the lawn at every high tide, and the trees that now line the shore may well have washed away, not just here, but all over the world. It's a sobering thought.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. IX. Marketing through Activities and Events

2011-08-26T04:37:00.000-07:00

I wanted to hold a Lexicon launch event that would benefit an educational charity. Among several candidates, I chose two. The first was Raising Readers, a charitable program established by the Libra Foundation in Maine. Raising Readers gives twelve books to every child born in Maine over the course of the child's first five years. Books go home with the baby from the hospital, and at every well-child visit, the pediatrician hands out a new book with a parental prescription to read aloud to the child.

My second chosen non-profit was Breakthrough Cambridge, which involves high school and college kids in providing intensive academic programming for middle school students to prepare them for a rigorous college-prep high school program. I had been a member of the program's first advisory board when it launched seventeen years earlier. I began working with the Breakthrough staff to find a time and a place for a launch event.

Meanwhile, I met with the Raising Readers team, including Kirsten Cappy, who designs book events through a company called Curious City. Very soon, Kirsten and I were designing a full book event with multiple stations of activities parents and kids could do together. Kirsten is a master of organization and of collecting needed items cheaply. Together we thought up the activities; Kirsten made sure they were child-friendly and located necessary materials. (The most expensive item was a full-sized mockup sign of Emily the Thesaurus, made in four pieces. She can be pulled apart for suitcase travel and then Velcroed back together when she reaches her destination.) We collaborated on the storyline of the event, which we began to call a "Lexicon Villages event."

In the end, we held the launch party, a benefit for Breakthrough Cambridge, at the Weston Community Center. (I had wanted to hold it in Cambridge, so kids from the program could attend. But we couldn't find a venue, and Breakthrough staff told us that with sports and other commitments, children's attendance would be low.) So family and friends helped me lay out a huge spread of Lexicon Villages activities. More friends and family came, and we raised over $650 for Breakthrough.

Only some months later, in spring, did I manage to arrange a benefit for Raising Readers. Kirsten and her volunteers staffed a great room in the Portland Public Library. Alas, it was a beautiful day, the first in months, and despite great publicity ahead of time, only a handful of visitors turned up. The rest, think, were playing outside. Raising Readers ende up making virtually nothing despite their hard work.

Nevertheless, as I have refined the Lexicon Villages event, it has proved flexible and always popular. Each time I hold an event, people approach me about trying it somewhere else, and although some of these leads fizzle out, I've managed to keep up a steady stream of events at schools, libraries, and special gatherings. For example, I just got an invitation to do a modified Lexicon Villages event at the Rain Taxi book festival in Minneapolis in October. This will be a great opportunity to be seen by book-loving parents and their children.

The very last step in putting together the Lexicon Villages events was uploading all the needed materials for a Do-It-Yourself Lexicon event on the website. This finally happened last week; here it is. Though a bit intimidating, the DIY guide should really allow a dedicated group to run their own event. If any of you try it, please let me know!

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path VIII. Publication Day

2011-08-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

I've talked about writing, editing, illustration, and creating a web presence. Now comes actually creating the book. Here, Karen suggested I bring in a wonderful designer, Jeanne Abboud. A book designer chooses the font, the spacing, and the "look" of a book. I don't know about you, but when I pick up a book that's completely unknown to me (based, yes, I admit it, on the cover, I flip through the first pages. If I don't like the font or spacing -- if it looks too crowded, for example, with tiny margins to save printing costs -- I'm a lot less likely to buy it.

Because Lost in Lexicon had so many "spot" illustrations that appear partway down a page or in a corner, the text also had to be arranged precisely to wrap around the pictures. That meant that every copy edit required adjustment by Jeanne.

Finally, the book was edited, illustrated, designed, and ready to print. I had researched inexpensive printers in the US and abroad, making a huge spreadsheet comparing prices; but Jeanne insisted on working with a local printer, one where she could go on site and keep an eye on the quality of the printing. We selected a good, thick, cream-colored paper that wouldn't allow the heavy ink of the illustrations to show through.

The price difference between this printer and the others I had researched was on the order of a dollar a book; it meant that on books I sold through Greenleaf, I would come a few cents shy of covering my costs. That hurt. But in the end I gave in. I remembered that at this stage of my career, the goal was not profit but quality and reputation. Besides, I could make the money back on books I sold through my website.

The next big question was how many books to print. The printer urged me to go high, say 5000 books. Per-book price drops with larger printing runs. On the other hand, I was aware that even the average traditionally published book sells fewer than 2000 copies. I wavered, and finally I settled on 3000 copies.(Now, with the first edition out of print, I have close to 300 left.)

Finally, the day came. The printer personally delivered the books in the back of his car, and Leo and I unloaded them into the office. The books were beautiful: cover art, paper, illustrations, layout.
Months later, Jeanne Abboud's work was recognized when Lost in Lexicon won a Ben Franklin Award for best two-color interior design.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. VII. Marketing with Social Media

2011-08-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

Marketing Lost in Lexicon began with the website but went much further. Rebecca and I took the book's release as an opportunity to learn about the world of online and traditional marketing. We talked to publicists, read whatever we could, and consulted a small design and marketing firm called Nectar Creative Group, whose principals, Patrick and Sarah, patiently educated us. Basically, we decided to try a little of everything. Here's some of what we learned.

First, of course, came blogging. I really didn't see why I should have to blog, and I was very reluctant to give up the author's cloak of mystery and anonymity to do it. But everyone says authors have to blog. I tried to weasel out of it by offering to blog in my characters' voices. Daphne blogs about cool words, and Ivan blogs about interesting math problems. I thought the topics would draw in potential readers and teachers, but the truth is, those blogs have only a couple of visitors a day. (Come on, someone, follow them! They're lonely, and it's not a big commitment: they only post about once a week.) Finally I agreed to try blogging in my own name, with the following guidelines:
-- Blog several times a week: write some blogs in advance before you start so you'll have a backlog.
-- Tag your blog posts with possible search words, so people can find them.
-- Most posts should be about 500-700 words, substantial but easy to gulp down in one sitting.
-- Once you have a number of meaty posts up, you can afford to put in a fluffy one once in a while (I don't really do this).
-- Don't constantly be asking for something in your blog; offer something at least four times as often as you ask, advertise, or push.
-- Visuals help (I really fall down here).

Other advice, which I haven't taken, is to specialize enough that your blog will stand out. I tend to mix all my areas of interest and expertise in one blog.

To my surprise, I've really come to enjoy blogging. I like coming up with topics. I try to be careful and respectful when I review books or comment on current events. One way I've learned to increase page views is to send a link to particular organizations that might be interested in the topic of a particular post -- say, 4H or the Association of Science and Technology Centers.

Sarah and Patrick also insisted I join Facebook and Linked In. Linked In is not just good when you're looking for a job: you can find colleagues in your field. They advised me to join lots of Linke In groups, so I belong to groups on writing (there are lots), publishing, math and science education, gifted education, graduates of the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, etc. Here again, the idea is to start conversations and offer insights to other group members, with a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio of helpfulness to self-promotion. (Not everyone on the forums follows those guidelines.) The point is not so much to sell books directly as to increase the number of references to your website or blog and to establish standing among your peers. Besides, you'll hear good ideas and often learn something. Just don't spend too much time there.

Everyone knows Facebook. It's useful to have a fan site where you can post pictures and events and sometimes look to reassure yourself that you do have fans. I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook. For one thing, I don't want to spook my children and their friends by lurking in the shadows of their world. Still, Facebook has led to some renewed friendships and opportunities.

Finally, there's Twitter. A year ago authors were being told they had to be on Twitter. I created an account and have never opened it. I'm sure Twitter is a great thing: after a talk I gave in South Carolina, one audience member told me she had madly tweeted little pearls from it to friends as I spoke. That sounds like a nice way to increase the reach of whatever you have to say. But I fight with distraction enough as it is. I don't think I could absorb any more small snippets of input from people everywhere. Interestingly, this year at the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference, there was much less of a push toward Twitter. It's as if editors, agents, and publishers all recognize that every social media outlet drains time from somewhere, and probably from writing time. Now the advice seems to be to choose judiciously and reach out from your areas of strength.

Right now, social media probably requires about four hours a week from me. That's a lot, and it grows if I spend too much time browsing. Is the time worthwhile? That's hard to say. There's no direct line between blog posts written and books sold, that's for sure. But I do find I speak and write with increasing confidence. I've found another way to have a voice in the world.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. VI. Distribution

2011-08-18T03:21:00.000-07:00

Now we come to the independent publisher's nemesis: distribution. Is there any way to get the book into bookstores? Bookstores cannot possibly deal one by one with every individual publisher: they work through distributors, who represent large companies or large conglomerations of small ones. Getting a distributor can be almost as difficult as getting an agent or publisher. As with everyone else in the publishing world, traditional distributors make money on any given book only if it generates a large volume of sales.

One way around this problem is not to worry about bookstores. An independent publisher can sell through Amazon or through the author's own website. If the book is an e-book only, the question of physical distribution never arises. For adult books, the e-book only route may make the most sense. After all, close to half of all adult books sold are now sold as e-books, and it's relatively cheap and easy to format a manuscript (or have someone else do it) for the Kindle and competing e-readers. After that, it's all profit (though the e-book companies take a good share).

For the children's market, however, e-books comprise only 4% of all books sold. This may change, and is certainly already changing for YA books (books written for teens). My experience may be informative here. Of the roughly 2000 books I sold in ten months, I sold around 900 myself, through my website and various events, including 120 to one school and 160 to be given to attendees at a math and science education conference where I was keynote speaker. Of the 1090 ultimately sold through Greenleaf (the distributor), 74 were e-books, 306 sold through Amazon, and 182 sold to libraries. Something over 500 sold through a mix of chain and independent bookstores.

So how does one get a distributor? One option is to publish through an entity like Lightning Source, which has a direct connection with Ingram, one of the largest distributors. This is a rapidly changing landscape, with Google, Amazon, and some literary agencies developing their own imprints, so rather than try to summarize the field I'd just recommend that any author think hard about distribution and investigate the options with a lot of internet research before making any deals.

I chose to approach Greenleaf, which works with independent publishers of all sizes. Greenleaf is selective, and it also prints under a couple of imprints of its own, like Emerald Book Group. An author can submit either a manuscript or a book that is much further along the production path. Either way, Greenleaf will charge for its services; even if you are seeking only distribution, you will be asked to submit a marketing plan and commit upfront to significant spending on marketing and promotion.

The truth is that like most self-publishing operations, Greenleaf makes its money from charging authors for services, not from its share of sales revenue. That's why it can afford to open its doors to a wide range of books and authors. Still, I have found them honest, responsive, professional, and pleasant to work with. Greenleaf designed and placed great banner ads for online sites like Publisher's Weekly; they fulfilled orders promptly; they kept me informed about sales and always answered within a day when I had a question.

So the final message here is Think about distribution. Sometimes we authors are so fixated on seeing our books in print that we forget to wonder how anyone other than our own friends and family will ever see them. There are lots of great options now, but all of them need deliberate thought.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. V. Website

2011-08-17T04:14:00.000-07:00

Books and authors these days need websites. That's the conventional wisdom, and children's book publishers have certainly embraced it. So Rebecca and I set out to figure out what our website needed. We brought on board David Lanni, who had created a website for Rebecca in a previous catalog business.

The three of us, along with family members, explored websites that we thought were attractive, exciting, or inviting, like the websites for the Percy Jackson books or the Mysterious Benedict Society books. We brainstormed colors and features, and Dave began to sketch out some possibilities.

At this point, we decided to include a focus group of kids. Damian nominated schoolmates in grades 4-7 who he thought would like the book (we later added a couple of brilliant third graders). We gave them bound copies of the manuscript and arranged for them to meet in two groups, younger and older, one Saturday. We provided cookies and thanked them with gift certificates to Barnes and Noble. In order to free them to be frank, I did not attend the meetings. Rebecca led them with a psychologist friend, and Rebecca's daughter Meredith took notes.

The nicest thing was that the kids were all enthusiastic about the book. We asked about color schemes for the web, their favorite characters, what they like to see on a website, and whether they would participate in contests. The answers: they didn't like our colors; the young ones liked Emily best, while the older ones identified with Daphne or Ivan; they like games on a website (and cookie recipes); and they would never, never identify themselves by writing in to a site, which meant no contests. (This latter made me appreciate the internet safety training they're getting at school.)

Armed with our new knowledge, we went back to the drawing board. I looked for ways to get games on the website, but soon convinced myself that anything but the lamest games were going to be prohibitively expensive. I got estimates of $25,000 for a simple active game. On the other hand, there were foreign game programmers willing to make ridiculously cheap bids online, but I had no idea what they would actually create. Then Rebecca found Scott Hamlin of Games in a Flash, who had a menu of simple games that could be adapted to any business or website. Scott was affordable and accommodating, but terribly overcommitted. I worked with him to get a series of games that were perfectly adapted to Lexicon. I'm proudest of "Rival Flowers," where I thought of the more-than-two compartment stages and Scott developed them.

For the website, we drew on artwork from the book, but we also commissioned Joan Charles to create new artwork, whether it was coloring existing illustrations or drawing new ones. We added features as we could, and when the programming got too complex for David (who has a day job), we asked Nectar Creative Group to take over the website.

We also looked into search engine optimization, brainstorming a list of keywords (search words that we'd like to lead people to our website) and hiring a specialist to create "hidden" pages that used those words in a way that would attract search engine "spiders" that crawl the web for content. This piece remains a bit mysterious to me: I ought to be able to continue it myself, but my techie knowledge doesn't extend to working on hidden pages.

I learned a few things about creating a dynamic website. It takes a lot longer than you think it's going to. There are always complications. Any shortcuts you take in the programming will limit what you can change later. (And change is key: new content is what keeps those spiders coming, and noticing, and making your website show up on the first page of Google searches.) Websites need copy editing as much as other text does.

Still, creating the website, making it fun and engaging, has been a blast. There's always more I could add, so it's always there as an outlet for more ideas. Has it paid off? I've sold a couple of hundred books through the website, but it's also brought in interest from readers who have bought on Amazon, and it's been a great reference point when I'm trying to convince bookstores or schools that I have something to offer. It has helped create that all-important entity, a platform that shows I have an audience and know what I'm doing.

On taxing the wealthy

2011-08-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Warren Buffett wrote a great, patriotic op-ed piece in the New York Times a couple of days ago. In it, he explained that he pays a lower tax rate than any of the less wealthy people in his office, and that the tax rate on the super-rich has fallen from 29% to 22% since 1992.

If tax rates rose back to 1992 levels for the 400 highest-income individuals, who reported an aggregate $90 billion in income in 2008, we could raise an additional $6.3 billion in taxes each year. Over ten years, that would mean $63 billion in deficit reduction. Now, that's only 4 percent of the $1.5 billion in reductions the congressional super committee need to find, but it's not pocket change. (And that's only the top 400: Buffett actually advocates increasing tax rates for anyone earning over $1 million a year, and he doesn't say how many taxpayers that includes.)

The advantages of Buffett's proposal is that it would demonstrate that "shared sacrifice" does not exempt the wealthiest. His is also one way of cutting the deficit that will have essentially no negative effect on growth. As Buffett points out, the super-rich don't decide to hold back on investment because of slightly higher tax rates. They have to put the money somewhere.

The major problem with Buffett's proposal is that it doesn't delve far enough into the ranks of the wealthy. I'm not in Buffett's million-a-year category, but I know I could afford to pay more in taxes, and I'm willing to do so. After all, I've been very fortunate. My father started Intel, and though both he and my mother elected to leave the vast majority of their wealth to charitable foundations, they left plenty for their kids and grandkids. (My father also recognized, as some self-made individuals do not, that luck and good timing, not only merit, played a role in his success.) My husband and I can pay for healthcare, for our children's college educations, for a nice house, a lovely vacation house, and travel. We have the freedom to choose work that is meaningful without much regard to how well it pays. As a result, we've chosen to invest in building new enterprises--a biotech company that is seeking a treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) and now a company, Tumblehome Learning, dedicated to creating science-related adventure books, biographies, and hands-on kits for children. Some years, as a result of our entrepreneurial efforts and market vagaries, we have negative income. Most years we fall into the category of the high income individuals who have benefited most from the Bush tax cuts.

I'm with Warren Buffett. I wouldn't stop doing the work I love, generating ideas, investing in those ideas, and hiring people to help carry them out, even if capital gains taxes were higher. My "lifestyle" doesn't require more money: I don't fly first class or stay in the fanciest hotels; my wardrobe is a little ragged; I don't drink fine wines. I've been privileged to grow up among the benefits of a strong national economy: good public schools and roads, top research universities partially supported by government grants; talented classmates enriching my life because they could get government loans; medical research pushing advances against the asthma that would otherwise have killed me; regulations providing ever cleaner air, safe water and food... The list goes on.

When we kids became young adult, my father asked his good friend, banker Paul Hwoschinsky, to mentor us about the uses of money. Money, Paul told us, is a battery. You can charge it up, and then you should use it for something good. Don't just let the charge leak away. A battery can power toys, but it can also power machines that make good things.

Sure, most of us would rather use money for what we ourselves decide are the most important good things, not necessarily what Congress or federal bureaucracies decide are good things. (Once you start running a foundation, though, you find out that giving money away responsibly is no simple matter.) But most of those who have been fortunate also recognize that we have a duty to give back, to help support the infrastructure and social compact that has made this a great country in which to live, build enterprises, and earn money. I'm willing to pay more taxes, and paying more taxes isn't going to kill any jobs that I would otherwise provide.

Ever since 2001, there has been a large group of us willing to make sacrifices to help build and protect the country we love. But we've never been asked to sacrifice. Instead we've been pandered to and, yes, coddled, as though if anyone asked us to help we would take all our toys and go home. We won't. Try us.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. IV. Editing

2011-08-16T05:29:00.000-07:00

One question my current publisher asked when I asked him to look at Lost in Lexicon was whether it had been properly edited. He meant had it been line edited, looked over closely by an experienced editor to make it tighter, cleaner, more effective, and to watch out for any inconsistencies, dropped details, or glitches of plot.

The truth is, I didn't hire anyone to do that job specifically. By the time I turned to self-publishing, I had run the whole book, chapter by chapter, through the online groups at Critique Circle, and a couple of experienced writer friends had combed through the entire manuscript. In addition, both my agent and Karen Klockner, the art director I was working with, had been editors of children's books at Little, Brown. I asked them what they thought needed work, and with two exceptions, they thought the book was ready to go.

When I first submitted the book to her, my agent asked for some extension to the ending, a little more emotional and intellectual wrap-up to bring the themes of the book to closure. I let that suggestion sit for a few days until it really seemed right to me, and then I wrote the additional couple of pages.

Karen's concern was harder for me. She wanted me to cut down the opening pages and start more quickly. She thought the first few pages didn't represent the rest of the book well. By this time, I had already reworked those opening pages for my critique group about twenty times. I had compressed the start as much as I thought I could, but I still wanted to establish Daphne and Ivan as characters and establish their everyday reactions to the world before I set them out on their adventure.

Karen suggested I cut the first two or three pages. Instead, I kept replacing them with ever tighter writing. "No," she said, "I think you can just cut them." She told me where to start, and finally, I understood. Those labored over, sweated over, first few pages finally hit the wastebasket.

Beyond that, Karen read very carefully through the book multiple times and made line edits. Then came the fierce copy editor, Joan Giurdanella. I thought copy editors fixed grammar and semicolons; I never realized the extent to which they insist on internal consistency, on proper pronoun antecedents, and on paragraphs that don't repeat the same word multiple times. Joan wanted to know whether each stop in Lexicon was a town or a village, and she wanted me to be consistent. She didn't like paragraphs beginning with pronouns. Her use of commas was much more traditional than mine. I learned a lot by responding to her corrections and suggestions one by one.

Neither Joan nor Karen, though, offered to check or edit the math sections, so I compulsively checked the numbers and explanations. I asked a couple of math teachers and curriculum developers to read it, too, to make sure I hadn't said anything incorrect or stupid. I checked and refined all the figures.

We had another round of copy editing after the manuscript was fully formatted, and even then, Karen and I continued to find errors that had somehow crept back into the text. One thing I learned from this experience is that you can never have too much copy editing. Nothing screams "amateur" more than a book riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors. In the end, Lost in Lexicon's first edition had one glaring typo: a missing word. That was one word out of 68,000. Not bad.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. III. Illustrations

2011-08-12T05:42:00.000-07:00

Working with an illustrator was one of the most absorbing parts of publishing my own book. Karen and I agreed that Lexicon's rather challenging academic content would be lightened and leavened by illustrations to help carry the emotional thread of the story. We decided to create a short list of potential artists.

While I spent hours poring over collections of online portfolios, Karen approached her contacts in the industry. I looked for an artist that could portray both playfulness and menace in a black-and-white style with a distinctive personality. Karen sought in addition someone with professional experience, a reputation for on-time delivery, and an open enough calendar to accommodate us.

My list was lengthy, and my family and friends all had different opinions, but eventually I whittled the list down to five. Karen suggested a few more, and then she investigated availability and reputation. Finally we narrowed our list to three. We commissioned each author to do three sample drawings for the book. Each had its own flair, but the characters I fell in love with were those drawn by Joan Charles. She had included a witty picture of Mr. Garrulity holding forth at the Ivan and Daphne's welcome dinner in Lexicon and an inviting color picture of the Mistress of Metaphor ringing her bell to clear away the fog as Ivan and Daphne climb her hill.

Working with an illustrator is a multi-stage process. Karen, Joan, and I all made our own lists of scenes that might be illustrated. We included a mix of full-page, half-page, and spot illustrations. Karen and Joan discussed the ideas and setup in detail. Then Joan produced sketches, and we went back and forth trying to perfect the look of the main characters. Most challenging was finding the right look for Emily the Thesaurus, with her alpaca-like face, her tufted ankles, and her horse tail. I loved having input into the "look," though I know some of the back and forth drove Joan crazy.

For me, working with a talented artist helped me see my book and my characters more clearly. In truth, I'm not a terribly visual person. For example, I seldom what people wear. Sometimes in the past I've thought in despair my lack of instinctive attention to how things look meant I wasn't qualified to be an author. Now I work hard in second drafts to pay attention to visual detail that will bring the story alive. But what I found with Joan's illustrations was that she helped the vision spring more fully into my head. "So that's what I meant," I found myself thinking. "So that's how it looks." And on those few occasions when I felt the opposite, we worked it through.

After the sketches came detailed drawings and eventually final drawings. Here I did pay attention to detail. As a child, I always hated it when an illustration hinted that the artist hadn't actually read the book -- when a character's hair was drawn as blond and straight when it was supposed to be dark and curly, for example. Joan had read carefully and more than once, but illustrations still need proofreading. We were careful.

There remained a few technical illustrations that Joan didn't feel comfortable doing. I sketched an algebraic compass for her, and I also sketched the layout of Aunt Adelaide's farm and the frontispiece map. For the map, I used a technique suggested by author Tamora Pierce at an SCBWI conference a few years ago. I chose a random piece of the world from an atlas and traced its boundaries, skipping to other countries and coastlines whenever I pleased. That gave a natural-seeming but completely unrecognizable shape to the land of Lexicon.

For the more mathematical drawings found in chapter 12, I got in touch with a designer who works at COMAP, a company producing math textbooks. George Ward was able to draw the little diagrams with elegant clarity.

One of my concerns when Scarletta picked up Lost in Lexicon was whether I would be able to keep the same artist for the next three books in the series. Scarletta was willing, bless them. Joan Charles, on the other hand, wasn't sure she could survive another such intense, huge, illustration job. In the end, we decided on a much more reasonable number of illustrations for The Ice Castle: twenty-five full-page illustrations instead of 160 of all sizes. To my relief, Joan has promised to stay the course through all the four-book series, and she's already finished the Ice Castle sketches, even though the book won't appear for another year.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. II. Starting Tumblehome Press.

2011-08-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Once I decided to self-publish, I looked around for help. A friend introduced me to the creative team at FableVision, a wonderful multimedia storytelling company located above the Children's Museum in the Boston. I had a vague notion that like The Number Devil, Lexicon could support accompanying activities, and perhaps an entire computer game. (Of course, the whole notion was ironic, because of the underlying theme in the book that too much screen time is robbing our children of childhood, but I set that concern momentarily aside.)

The FableVision staff were excited by the book, and we met for a half-day team brainstorming about how we could make it into something big and exciting, with games, music, art, and even perhaps a couple of chapters in graphic novel form. In the end, though, the price tag was too high, and we couldn't really come up with a marketing plan to support it.

FableVision's ideas had kindled dreams, and I knew I wasn't going to be satisfied with simply handing my manuscript over to an outfit like Lulu or CreateSpace (reputable and perfectly respectable though they are). I wanted high quality art and design and a printing job that would look like a trade publisher's. I had only the vaguest idea of what a reasonable budget might be, but I read about Brunonia Barry's $50,000 investment in producing her book The Lace Reader which subsequently sold for high dollars to Harper Collins. That seemed like a good benchmark.

My husband, the founder of a small biotech company, certainly thought so. "In biotech, that's nothing," he said. With his unflagging support, that was how I thought of the project: it was a start-up. Biotech companies don't make money until years and millions of dollars have been invested, and most of them fail, though a few make it big. But Leo was trying to discover a treatment for Lou Gehrig's disease: it was worth the expense and the risk. I was trying to create fun, intellectually stimulating fiction for kids. He urged me not to look at the much smaller expense as a barrier.

At this point, my friend Rebecca Raibley stepped in. She has a strong business background and a talent for organization, and she wanted to learn more about online and viral marketing. She signed on as my voluntary business partner, working for free on top of her regular high-power job. We consulted with my agent about what members we would need for our virtual team: a project manager/art director, an artist, a designer, a copy editor, and a printer. We sketched out a budget, including printing and publicity.

My agent introduced me to her friend and colleague, an experienced editor and art director, now working freelance, named Karen Klockner. I sent Karen the book and went to meet her at the Cornell Club the next time I had to be in New York. In the hushed and paneled dining room, where one is not supposed to do any business, Karen taught me more about the steps we would need to go through and the timeline required to produce a book. Meanwhile, I incorporated my new publishing company, the Tumblehome Press, named after my mother's boat.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. I. The Decision to Self-Publish

2011-08-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I described how I came to write Lost in Lexicon. Today I will begin to describe the book's road through self-publishing to yesterday's 2nd edition launch by Scarletta Press.

As I finished the third draft, I began looking for an agent. I developed a query letter, had my colleagues critique it, and sent it out. Responses were very slow to come. Eventually I called and left a message for my agent from 15 years earlier. He didn't call back. Finally I stumbled across the name of the former editor of Little, Brown who had wanted to buy my adult manuscript so many years ago. Shortly after we knew each other, she had left publishing to start her own agency. I took a deep breath and dialed the phone. "Hello," I said. "This is Penny Noyce."

And she, bless her, said after fifteen years, "Penny! I was just thinking of you!"

I sent her the book, and she loved it. Although she primarily represents adult books, she was once a children's editor herself and still had friends in the industry, so she agreed to take on the book. Her only editorial suggestion was that I extend the ending by a couple of pages to give a fuller sense of conclusion. I thought it through, agreed, and did so. My agent developed a list of editors she thought would like be enchanted by Lexicon (as it was then called) and began to send it out.

Then came the long days of waiting. It's summer; nothing much is happening. It's holiday season (November through January); nothing much is happening. Every three weeks, as we had agree, I called my agent to follow up. Eventually rejections began to accumulate. There was a pattern to them, which we're told usually means the writer should pay attention. The book wasn't edgy or modern enough. Though the editors enjoyed language play, the book was perhaps a bit too academic. There was a lot of... math. Plot outweighed character development. The book was too didactic.

I wondered if I should cut out chapter 12, the math-iest chapter. My agent said no; we should keep trying. I worried about the depth of my characters, but the book was primarily a funny and peripatetic adventure, with a rich range of minor characters, and Ivan and Daphne do grow; I resolved we'd delve deeper into them in the next book, which I was beginning to visualize. As for the didacticism (the book is in part an allegory about how total immersion in an electronic world threatens to draw us away from childhood, family, thinking and imagination), I thought kids would find it more subtle than adults did... and in fact no kid has yet complained.

After a year and more than ten rejections, my agent told me with regret that she had tried all her best contacts, and that she feared she no longer understood the juvenile market. "I think your problem, Penny, is... you have no vampires." She asked me what I was going to do.

"I'm going to publish it myself," I said. The knowledge that if nobody snatched up the book I could always publish it myself had sustained me during the writing, the revision, and the long months of waiting for editors to respond. I wasn't gong to be passive this time and let the project die. I knew the book was of high quality and that it had something different, something that a certain swath of kids would respond to-- strong readers who needed intellectual stimulation without the emotional weight of books written for much older teens.

Still, quality is a huge question for anyone contemplating self-publishing. We have to be sure we're not deluding ourselves. Sure, we can hire an editor to help improve a manuscript and to rid it of embarrassing mistakes. But I don't think we should put our work out there for public examination until you have some good objective reason to believe it is on par with the better books being published in its genre. Having an agent who believed in me was an important piece of evidence that the book was good. So were the responses of a range of readers, from my online critique partners to all the kids I gave the book to. There was only one child of the twenty or so I tried who really couldn't summon the interest to get through it.

So I resolved to self-publish, and I decided to do it as professionally as possible. My goal was to create a fine enough product and achieve enough sales that either Lost in Lexicon itself or the next book in the series would be picked up by a trade publisher. I knew it would take a considerable investment of time and money, but I was lucky enough to have an adequate amount of both.

Launch Day: Lost in Lexicon rises again

2011-08-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

Today is a great day, the culmination of a lot of hard work by many people: the Scarletta Press launch day for the second edition of Lost in Lexicon: An Adventure in Words and Numbers.

What has it taken to get here? I began writing Lexicon in November, 2006, a little less than five years ago. It was time to start writing again. My three older children were heading off to college, threatening to leave a gaping gulf behind. David would be following in another year. The time had come for a different expression of a link to the world of childhood. I set myself the goal of finishing a book in time to give it as a Christmas present to my youngest son son, Damian. For the first time since the days of my own childhood, the fiction poured forth. I knew I wanted to delight Damian with math and language; I knew I wanted my characters to visit a magical land; I looked out the window and saw the soaring cupola of our own big red barn. The rest I discovered on the way.

I finished the book in time for Christmas, but I wanted to format and bind it for Damian, and there wasn't time, so I set my new aim for his ninth birthday, February 7, 2007. That gave me time to revise the book as well. After the birthday I set out on another round of revision by joining Critique Circle, an online critique group, and submitting a chapter a week. To all my friends and faithful critters there, especially Marva Dasef and Shana Silver, thanks for all your help. I revised to make the book more kid-friendly, to sharpen descriptions and remove adverbs, to make things a little funnier, and to shorten sentences and plunge into the story more quickly.

Then followed a long foray into seeking publication, a tortuous route most debut writers encounter. The trek wasn't entirely foreign to me: twenty years ago, with a book called Tulku that still remains and forever will remain unpublished, I had found an agent who submitted it for more than a year. We got very close at Little, Brown--I spent six months revising under the guidance of an editor who wanted to acquire it-- but in the end the sales folk at the editorial conference were unconvinced, and there was no deal. That final turndown led my agent to give up on the book, a double whammy of news that arrived days after my father's sudden and untimely death. Although I tried to keep writing for a while, even attending a writer's conference with Jane Smiley in Aspen that summer, I didn't feel the dream anymore. Instead, in memory of my father, I turned to work in education with the Noyce Foundation.

Well, that was a digression. Just as well. I want to tell the story of publishing Lost in Lexicon, the roundabout route from attempts at traditional publishing, through the side road of creating my own company for a self-publishing adventure, to finding a home with Scarletta. I learned a huge amount along the way that may be of use to others. The world of publishing is changing rapidly, and authors need and deserve to find a way to take more of their careers into their own hands.

Illustrating Lexicon: Joan Charles and The Ice Castle

2011-08-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

Last night I met Joan Charles, the wonderful illustrator of my Lexicon books, for the second time. Meeting with her is one of the main delights of coming to the annual Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators in Los Angeles, because Joan lives nearby. Last year we met for a brief drink. Joan was in the throes of finishing the artwork for Lost in Lexicon, and she confessed she had hardly poked her nose outside in weeks. She was pale.

This year, we're ahead of schedule. The Ice Castle will come out about a year from now, and Joan negotiated for a much more reasonable number of illustrations this time. She has completed sketches based on the book's second draft, and I've just sent both her and my Scarletta editor, Ian, the third draft, which has no plot changes substantial enough to require changing the artwork. That left us free to bond and converse.

We talked about the book, what happens emotionally with each of the kids, and what their individual growth arcs are. We discussed atmosphere (menacing? magical?)and clothing. Often I defer to Joan's visual sense. If she thinks a uniform would bring out the character more, we add a uniform. If she thinks a certain seating arrangement of characters around the dinner table would create more tension, I make sure not to contradict that in the text. On the other hand, I will sometimes tell her that I see a certain character as more imposing, funny-looking, or noble.

What made me really happy is that Joan feels this new draft is deeper and sharper than the first one, which she already loved. She sees the characters growing, and she's truly excited about creating their world. She confessed to me that she was doodling at a conference when she suddenly realized she had created one of the characters, Fort. The world of the book has invaded her subconscious, so she's in that wonderful creative state where she's working on it even when she doesn't mean to.

Reviewing children's books

2011-08-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

How can a writer get started reviewing children's books, and why do it anyway? Leonard Marcus, who has reviewed for the New York Times, Parenting Magazine, and Horn Book, offered some suggestions at the SCBWI conference in LA this afternoon.

Don't write reviews to get rich. You won't. If you love children's literature, write reviews to support it and in particular to help others distinguish what's good. If you're a writer, review as a way to get to know the field and better understand your own niche within it. Before long, publishers will be sending you free books, and some editors will even begin to know your name.

Suppose you already write reviews on Amazon and maybe Goodreads. How do you rise to the next level? Marcus suggests offering to write reviews for your local paper, your school, library, church, or synagogue. Build a portfolio of reviews that you can then take to a larger paper or magazine.

These days, of course, you can also write reviews for blogs, your own or others'. I've moved on from that to writing reviews for the New York Journal of Books, an online book review journal that doesn't pay but does publicize its reviewers' own books.

As to how to write a good review, Marcus suggests aiming for 500 to 700 words. Try to internalize the book; read it more than once, and try to see how it's constructed. For him, a review is a way to explain to himself why he reacted to a book the way he did. Wordsmith with as much care and conviction as you use in your own writing.

With the plethora of books being published in every sort of medium, parents, teachers, and librarians can use the help of good, careful reviewers to find books that are authentic, sparkling, or moving. And because reviewing requires close reading and analysis of what worked and why, it can really help authors improve their own writing. I recommend it.

Grammar Checker Quirks - MS Word

2011-08-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

I just finished grammar checking the third draft of The Ice Castle before sending it off to Scarletta, my publisher. Doing so is helpful for finding out where I skipped a period or repeated a word. As far as grammar advice, however, the program is often ludicrously awful.

For example, if the programs flags an its or it's and tells me to use the other, it's unfailingly wrong. People make careless mistakes, but for a computer program to be wrong this often suggests to me that someone has mis-programmed it. That programmer also occasionally confuses there and they're or who's and whose, and regularly confuses lay and lie (again, wrong in both directions). For example, the grammar checker recommends ...to see in which way his sympathies might lay. Nice rhyme.

Sometimes the errors are understandable but funny all the same. For example, the program suggested I change Amidst the four seated judges to Amidst the four-seated judges I imagine the judges sitting there with incredibly broad laps, each with four large colleagues seated on his knees.

The grammar checker has a virulent dislike for reflexive verbs. To She examined herself in the mirror it would prefer, She examined her in the mirror. Meaning be damned. (That last sentence would undoubtedly be condemned as a fragment.)

The program gets nervous when it thinks it sees a double negative. For example, it suggested I change She saw nothing: no mountains, no trees... to She saw nothing: no mountains, any trees...

Most distressing to me, because I suspect it's the reason I see so much random use of semi-colons in online critique groups, is the grammar checker's irrational approach to this useful piece of punctuation. The rule of thumb seems to be that when a sentence reaches a certain length, the program wants semi-colons to replace at least one comma. Here are some examples of the sentences it wants:

"And her?" He gestured at Daphne without looking at her; something Ivan knew would make her furious.

Afraid she'd knock Daphne down; Ivan intercepted her.

When she was gone, Lila poked her head out from under the bed; her eyes and mouth round with excitement.

Ivan knelt among the other workers; pressing sprouts into the earth.

Daphne sat at Lila's feet; making vicious stabs at the lower-class sewing the shop owner had given her.

None of these sentences meet the requirements for using a semicolon; not one contains either a long list whose individual elements include commas or a pair of independent clauses--each a complete sentence in its own right--attached by a semi-colon to show a relationship between them.

Trope or Cliché?

2011-07-31T20:08:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times Book Review has a fascinating article on using computers to analyze what words and phrases turn up most often in different kinds of text. Ben Zimmer, author of the article, argues that the fact that phrases like "bolt upright" appear eight times more frequently in fiction than in magazines, newspapers, or spoken speech means that we still have a "literary style" that is different from other kinds of written and spoken communication.

Well, of course. But doesn't the frequent appearance of "bolt upright" suggest that we may also be talking about a cliché? Where did "bolt upright" come from? What's "bolt" got to do with sitting? Do we use the phrase so much because we're too lazy or unimaginative to find another way of describing someone sitting straight? Or is this a legitimate shorthand, no different, really, from saying "sandwich" instead of "two slices of bread with something tasty in between"?

The article raises other questions. It notes that fiction uses many more verbs of facial expression (such as "grimaced," "scowled," and "grunted") than other forms of writing. the article states,

Creative writers are clearly drawn to descriptive idioms that allow their characters to register emotional responses through telling bits of physical action....The conventions of modern storytelling dictate that fictional characters react to their worlds in certain stock ways and that the storytellers use stock expressions to describe those reactions. Readers might not think of such idioms as literary clichés....

My editor and I have heated discussions about the issue of when something is an acceptable trope, a bit of figurative shorthand, and when it's a cliché that should be purged even from children's literature. I picked one of the purged expression and decided to investigate it using the Corpus of Contemporary English database referenced in the article.

My offending phrase was "burst into tears." It appears 391 times per 100 million words of fiction--more often even than "bolt upright." Hmm. Sounds like it might be a cliché. Not surprisingly, "she" bursts into tears four times as often as "he" does. Apparently, however, in the past twenty years people have "dissolved into tears" much less often than they've burst into tears, and dissolving occurs primarily in magazines.

More gender-related findings: Fictional women bite their lips more than twice as often as men. (They're probably trying to keep from bursting into tears.) In the past twenty years, fictional men gritted their teeth only slightly more often than women, but they ground their teeth more than three times as often. Perhaps the men are suppressing outbursts of anger while their womenfolk suppress tears.

I'm not sure the corpus can answer my question about when a trope slips into a cliché, but it does raise an issue I think about sometimes: the tyranny of "Show, don't tell." Purists of this dictum argue that instead of labeling our characters emotions', we should always and only show them. So instead of saying "I was frightened", we say "my breath caught in my throat." According to the corpus, "caught" and "breath" show up nearby each other pretty darn often in fiction. Instead of saying, "There was something about his face I didn't trust," we write of narrow eyes or a unibrow or a curl to the lip--something the reader will recognize as an accepted trope, which means in fact that it's a convention, a cliché instead of a fresh observation. In the real world, what makes me mistrust a face may be something very subtle, hard to put my finger on, and in fact not a feature others would necessarily know to react to in the same way. Thus the stricture against telling may lead to weary conventions and stereotypes.

The boundary between convenient trope and stereotype is subtle, and so is the right place to set the balance between showing and telling. We are not, after all, creatures only of facial expression and bodily sensations: we don't spend all our time with our hearts pounding, feeling the blood rush to our faces, gulping, shuddering, grimacing, fidgeting, clenching our fists and biting our lips. Sometimes we reflect on the world, label emotions, or recognize others' intentions from cues too subtle to name. Sometimes our characters should, too.

Music in Lexicon

2011-07-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

A Lost in Lexicon musical? Yes. Believe it or not, I'm working with a very talented musician and composer, Todd Bearson, who also happens to have been Damian's sixth grade math teacher, on creating a musical based on Daphne's and Ivan's adventures in Lexicon.

When I say we're "working together," I mean he's working and I'm admiring. If you've read my last post on the extent of my musical talents, you'll know why. Last week Todd came over and Damian, after getting past the utter weirdness of seeing a teacher in summer, and worse, in our house, listened with me to renditions of the first two songs he's written. The first is a nostalgic piece sung by Aunt Adelaide as she ushers the children out the door to a world of adventure. The second, entitled "Girls Can't Do Math," set in the town of Tessellate, and is very funny. Especially funny was the spectacle of Damian's math teacher singing Daphne's retort in high falsetto.

Given competing demands on Todd's time (family, school, other musical plans), this project is going to take a while, but I'm going to enjoy it all the way.

Tin ear confession

2011-07-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

My parents both sang well, and my father conducted a small madrigal group for many years. The summer I was six, my brother and I spent seven weeks with our maternal grandparents, and for our bedtime story my grandfather, who sat down to practice piano every day after work, sang and explained all the parts in The Pirates of Penzance and H.M.S. Pinafore to us. I remember learning from him what "fiftyfold" and "keelhauling" meant. My grandparents even arranged for my brother and me to start piano lessons with Mrs. Curry, who was plump with curly yellow hair and who drew pictures of plump curved fingers at the top of our assignment pages every week.

But I was terrible at music. Back in California, Mrs. Curry was succeeded by the timid and trembling Miss Perkoe, a pale young lady with long, straight, dark hair and large round glasses. Her fingers were long and slim and cool, and I loved the way they felt when she placed my fingers on the keys. I learned to play a gypsy dance for Miss Perkoe, but she couldn't make me musical. I was tone deaf. If I wasn't looking, I couldn't tell which of two notes was higher when my father played them on the piano. The music teacher at school asked me to sing very softly for school assemblies. My school singing career was further complicated by the fact that any time we sang "Puff, the Magic Dragon," no matter how I fought it, I started to cry. ( I couldn't stand how lonely Puff became when his lifelong friend outgrew and abandoned him.)

In high school I tried again. My cousin played the clarinet; during the summer I had blown though it, and I liked the way it sounded. I joined B band, beginner's band, which had seven students and a cute pale young male conductor, Mr. Dnelson. (My schedule said DNELSON, and even after I learned that his name was Don Nelson, I still thought of him as Mr. Dnelson, a variant of Nelson that went along with how special he was to me.) By the second year, I had graduated to last seat among the third clarinets in the A band. I never progressed further, and I never learned to carry a tune.

That's an exaggeration. One long ski trip, I spent every chairlift ride with my sister Polly (who could sing) practicing a two-part rendition of "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." By the end of the trip, I could hold up my part, and I remember how that impressed everyone in the family.

In college, my friend John Rosenberg let me sing Faure's Requiem as part of his North House chorus. We decided I was a tenor, and he gave me special tutoring sessions by the piano. He told me that if I listened well to the voices around me, I could match their tones. His kindness gave me my first real sense of the joy of singing in a group.

Still, though, I can't sing, and my husband is just as bad. All five of our children have sung successfully in choruses, and singing is especially important to the three boys. They sing a capella or in choirs. Meanwhile, my own voice, affected by years of asthma and inhaled steroids, has grown more limited and unreliable than ever. I envy my children their ability to hear key changes, to pick out songs from memory, and most of all to be part of groups that get such joy from singing together. I listen, knowing it's like listening to a foreign language where I have a fair vocabulary and have studied the rules of grammar but miss the nuances.

Those are some of the reasons that the second adventure in Lexicon, The Ice Castle, is subtitled An Adventure in Music.

Wiscasset: most annoying village in Maine

2011-07-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

Wiscasset calls itself "the prettiest village in Maine." The motto is emblazoned on a sign you encounter when entering the town along Route One. By the time you see it, however, you have already waited in stop-and-go traffic that stretches back along the highway three and a half miles. You're hot, bored, and annoyed as you creep down the hill through the two blocks of downtown.

And there you see it, the reason for your delay. Traffic immediately stops for every pedestrian who wants to cross the street. At high traffic times, there is one traffic cop at each of the two blocks, stopping miles of traffic to let a tourist walk twenty feet.

At least two thirds of these pedestrians are crossing the street to wait in line at Red's Eats, a lobster shack that has somehow acquired the reputation of having the best lobster rolls on the coast. The New York Times touts it for its lobster rolls and local color. People cross the street to wait in long lines at Red's even though there's another, somewhat larger lobster roll place on the other side.

What this demonstrates to me is that people who go to Red's Eats don't mind waiting in line. In fact, they seem to like it. Therefore, why not let them wait on the sidewalk until several groups have aggregated before stopping the traffic to let them pass?

When Route One was being constructed, the option was raised of having a bypass around Wiscasset. But according to the story I've heard, Wiscasset merchants didn't want a bypass. They wanted people to drive past their stores. And drive past they do, far too annoyed to stop. This is in contrast to the tactic followed by Damariscotta and Newcastle. The main highway bypasses them, but a loop called Business Route One passes through the two towns, which now have thriving businesses and crowded parking lots and restaurants. Local traffic passes through the towns, taking five minutes tops.

Sitting in traffic south of Wiscasset this afternoon, I had time to do a little math. Say that on average, for ten hours a day in high season, north-going traffic stretches back three miles from Wiscasset. I counted, and there are probably about 150 cars per mile. Because they're vacationers rather than commuters, let's conservatively assign two passengers per car. It takes half an hour for a car to move the three miles. That means that each day, Wiscasset annoys 18,000 people trying to drive north.

Ah, but what about the people who stop in the prettiest village and get to cross the street without ever having to wait for a WALK signal? How many of them are there each day?

Making a lobster roll probably takes thirty seconds, and Red's Eats isn't big enough to have too many sandwich makers. Plus there are drinks, making change, passing out napkins... So let's generously say 200 people per hour are delighted by the charm and deliciousness of the lobster roll experience. And let's double that for the fifty percent of visitors who may cross the street for other reasons. In a ten hour day, that means 4000 people are happy about Wiscasset's policy.

Now let's imagine that Wiscasset decides to implement a new policy, where traffic cops wait for three separate parties to gather on the sidewalk ready to cross the street before they raise their hands and stop the miles of traffic. A little thought convinces me that such a move would reduce the length of the traffic backup by two thirds. Instead of waiting thirty minutes to make it through the prettiest village in Maine, drivers would have to wait only ten minutes. 18,000 people a day would be twenty minutes happier, while 4000 people a day might be two minutes unhappier. The happiness advantage of the new policy comes out to 28,000 people-minutes. That's a lot of happiness.

Of course, maybe Wiscasset doesn't care about the happiness of those driving through. But it should care. Some of those drivers are people who stop and shop in places they like. Some are taxpayers. Some are philanthropists. Some are legislators. What village, no matter how pretty, can afford to annoy them all?

The joys of revision

2011-07-13T05:11:00.000-07:00

I am spending this week alone in Maine for two reasons: because I have a number of events and meetings here, and because I want to take advantage of the solitude to concentrate on revising the second Lexicon book, The Ice Castle. I'm making my way through about three chapters a day.

The story itself is in good shape. I'm not looking at major plot changes; I moved action around and eliminated a chapter last time through. What I'm doing this time is tightening and brightening.

For example, I'm making sure there are no dropped details. If Ivan puts leaves in his pocket in one chapter, he needs to use them in some later chapter. If he leans snowshoes against a wall, that better be where someone finds them later.

I'm tightening dialogue, checking to make sure that my kids sound like kids and the minor characters have distinct and consistent voices. In a similar way, I'm trying to give the minor characters names and brief descriptions that will make them stand out and stick in memory.

Point of view presents challenges of its own. Lost in Lexicon is told in two points of view, Ivan's and Daphne's. Ice Castle adds the point of view of their young cousin Lila. Juggling three points of view is more complex for both reader and writer. I need to make sure that every chapter starts with a strong indication of which character's eyes we're currently looking through. When I change POV mid-chapter, I have to do so for good reason, mark off the change with dingbats, plunge directly into the new viewpoint, and maintain it for at least a scene.

Next are the descriptions of place. What are the details that will make a reader feel s/he is actually within the scene? These details have to be strong but few. Kids have no love for long descriptions. Finding the right sensory details, details that are unique but convincing, is a challenge.

I'm also on the lookout for cliches either of language or of situation. Luckily, my editor is ruthless on this score. He won't let anything get by him that smacks of authorial laziness. He demands that I "unpack" each cliche: figure out what I really mean to say, figure out if it's genuine, and then find a better, more precise way to say it. It drives me crazy, but I think it makes the text stronger.

Closely related to cliches are gestures. I have to make sure I don't use the same ones over and over again. If Daphne bites her lip when she's thinking, I can't have Ivan and Lila doing the same. I need to make sure gestures are characteristic and genuine, not just padding to help me through a passage.

Finally, I look at words and sentences. Words can't repeat too often in close proximity. Unintentional rhymes and excessive alliteration have to be eliminated. Sentences need to flow. When this revision is done I'll read it aloud to one or more family members, making sure the words run smoothly and don't get caught on too many hidden snags.

Some authors hate revising. I like it. Sure, there are times when I get frustrated and take a break to go down to the dock and watch the cormorants swimming so low in the water they look about to sink. But then I go back. I have a story, I care about my characters, and I want to touch up, highlight, and polish until readers can experience the story I see in my mind.

1st edition of Lost in Lexicon out of print - 2nd edition on the launch pad

2011-07-09T05:05:00.000-07:00

Officially, the first edition of Lost in Lexicon went out of print June 1. On that day, at the request of the distributor of the second edition, which is to be released August 9, the distributor of the first edition stopped sending out books and asked bookstores to pull the first edition from the shelves. The reason was to avoid confusion among retailers seeking to order copies of the new edition.

Since the official OP day, sales have, according to BookScan, slowly drifted down. For a while, Amazon seemed to be able to magically replenish its stock, but today, finally, I notice that on Amazon Lost in Lexicon is only "available from other suppliers." Meanwhile, Kindle sales (and I presume other e-book sales) have trended upward.

What nobody appears to be doing is pre-ordering copies of the second edition. The Amazon rank of that book is a truly impressive (in a negative way) 3.3 million. I'm curious to see how much that rank will change when somebody actually pre-orders a book. Anyone?

Damian is home from South Africa

2011-06-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

Damian is home from sixteen days in South Africa with a small school group. Among the highlights of his trip were meeting his penpal Bheki in the Kliptown Youth Project in Soweto; finding a fossil primate tooth, seeing all of the "Big Five" including two leopards in a game reserve; climbing Table Mountain in Capetown, visiting Capetown's Malay quarter, and seeing rock hyraxes.

Damian's the one standing on the chair in this picture. This is a day they spent painting houses; Bheki is in the green shirt beside Damian. The lady holding the chair is the house owner.

Here's a leopard the group saw on a night drive. These animals are shy and usually really hard to find.

Alas, somewhere in the game park, near the border with Botswana, Damian lost our camera. This is the same camera that leapt from my pocket into a stream when my horse bucked in Botswana last year. I discovered the loss half a mile farther on. A week later the guide retrieved the camera and sent it back to me. Not only did it still work, the pictures I had taken looked great. But now the camera has won. Apparently it really, really wants to live among wild animals in southern Africa.

From ALA in New Orleans

2011-06-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

The American Library Association convention is running for a week in steamy, colorful New Orleans. I'm here just for the weekend, and I'm enjoying it. After various plane delays I arrived at 2:15 Saturday morning, and the taxi crept through a French quarter still packed with revelers. The sounds of music and laughter rising from the street had no effect on a most welcome sleep thereafter.

Saturday afternoon, out of a field of fourteen finalists, Lost in Lexicon was awarded Honorable Mention for juvenile fiction by ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Awards. Can one say "another feather in its cap" about a book? No, certainly not.

Last night I drankmy first Hurricane, ate the best crab cake I've ever encountered, and took a warm and breezy stroll along the Mississippi.

Today marked the coming out party for the second edition, with its colorful cover and new endorsements. I signed 93 books for eager librarians to give to their schools, libraries, or relatives, or to read themselves. We charged a whopping dollar per book, which all seemed to appreciate. Visitors referred one another to our booth.

Finally, Scarletta Press took nine librarians, all recruited by our distributor PGW, to lunch at Grand Isle restaurant. Most of us dined on some version of seafood salad. Ian (Scarletta's publisher) and I both gave brief remarks and then chatted at length with the librarians, who came from states all over the Union. They asked how and why I wrote the book, how I met Ian, what he's like as a writing teacher, and whether I miss medicine. We asked their advice on everything from audio books to cover design. They were a friendly, astute audience, and we left all very good friends.

One thing the past couple of days have shown me is the value of a distributor (and publisher) who truly support your book and hope for great things from it. The PGW folks have been helpful, organized, enthusiastic and only slightly harried as they manage their traveling circus of small independent presses. They are pleased that advance orders from bookstores are going well, and we are all eagerly awaiting the second edition's official launch day August 9.

Online learning that works for science teachers

2011-06-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

The online SciPacks tool of the National Science Teachers Association helps teachers and their students learn more science. That's the conclusion of a just-released independent evaluation by Edvantia, Inc, and it's good news. For several years, ever since writing an Ed Week article on how difficult it is to find evidence that professional development "works," I've been on the lookout for studies like this one.

Sure, there are plenty of evaluations that show that teachers liked their professional development, found it useful, and report they learned from it or even changed their practices as a result. There are relatively few studies that actually pre- and post-test teachers to measure their learning gains. Even more rare are studies showing that professional development for teachers led to greater learning among those teachers' students. But isn't that what we really care about? We work with teachers so students will learn more.

This was a good study. New Houston middle school science teachers or fifth grade teachers with at least a year of teaching experience were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Each group was then given access to one of the two SciPacks (online ten-hour mini-courses) under study, and the two groups served as controls for each other. One group studied the Earth's Changing Surface while the other studied Force and Motion. During the learning window, teachers logged into each of the two units an average of 15 times. Teachers filled out surveys about their science teaching practices and took tests of their content knowledge before and after using the SciPacks.

Following use of the SciPacks, teachers showed a gain of half a standard deviation in their confidence in teaching the topic covered. "Treated" teachers also showed a gain in content knowledge for the topic studied of about 17 percentile points, as compared to gains of 5 to 12 percentile points for the control teachers. Even more interesting were the student results. Fifth graders who had teachers in the treatment group gained 17 percentile points from pre- to post-test on earth science concepts, and 6th and 8th graders gained 10 percentile points on force and motion concepts, compared to 12 and 3 point gains for students who studied the same material but whose teachers had not had the professional development.

That's a very respectable linkage. Teachers who underwent online, self-paced and self-monitored professional development gained knowledge and confidence, and their students learned more than the students of teachers who did not have the same experience. NSTA deserves praise for its careful work in creating and testing these modules. So far there are 22 SciPacks available, covering topics in all major areas of science, some geared to elementary school teachers and some to middle or high school teachers. And these are only one piece of the many tools available in the NSTA Learning Center. Let's hope they see wide use.

Merchants of Doubt, a book review

2011-06-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway is an important and eye-opening book. Many of us may have a vague, nagging feeling that there's still something wrong with the science on global warming or acid rain, or an idea that Rachel Carson's attack on DDT was somehow sloppy or overly emotional. It turns out that the reason these doubts play on our mind is that a small group of Cold War physicists and their associates have vigorously campaigned to promote these doubts. Tightly argued and copiously referenced, Merchants of Doubt shows how for this group of scientists, opposition to Communism became opposition to environmentalism because of their conviction that environmentalism would lead to socialist attacks on the free market and therefore on freedom itself.

A handful of scientists and a small but powerful network of funders and think tanks, from Phillip Morris to Exxon to the Competitive Enterprise and Cato Institutes, have orchestrated campaigns of doubt against emerging scientific consensus on a series of issues from the harms of smoking (and second hand smoke) to the ineffectiveness of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to depletion of the ozone layer to acid rain to global warming. Oddly, they have even tried belatedly to undermine Rachel Carson's work on the harmfulness of DDT, charging Carson with responsibility for the malaria deaths of a million African children -- ignoring the fact that insect resistance had already undermined the effectiveness of DDT before Carson wrote Silent Spring.

Oreskes and Conway demonstrate the common strategies used by these scientific contrarians. They begin by focusing on questions and controversies within the scientific community. They call for more research before any precipitate action. They meet with journalists and editorial boards and urge them to "report both sides" of an issue even if one side carries the weight of scientific consensus while the other side is supported only by a handful of professional doubters. They write articles for non-peer-reviewed (often industry-sponsored) publications and then quote these reports in the popular press as if they had equal weight with original peer-reviewed research or massive reports of scientific consensus. When necessary, they launch vicious attacks on the personal integrity of scientists they see as representing the wrong side.

This is scary stuff. It's important to read this book carefully, to keep an eye open for evidence of bias or exaggeration by the authors. At times they may state some conclusion a bit too strongly. At times they attribute motives to the sowers of doubt without real knowledge of what their motives are. But all in all, this is an important, disturbing book that shows how we can allow ourselves to be deceived by our own intellectual laziness and our preference for believing things aren't so bad that we have to change how we live. Too often we've allowed ourselves to be lulled into complacency by so-called experts wearing ideological blinders. Too often these experts are working for the benefit of those who have the most money to lose if the truth about negative environmental effects of certain industries becomes widely known.

This is a dense book, with hundreds of names, a good index, and 64 pages of notes. But it reads quickly, if not quite like a thriller. The science is well explained, although I might have wished for more detail in places. For me there was a bit too much repetitive writing about the nature of science - but maybe that's important for readers who have spent less time following scientific controversies over time. Fortify yourself against false doubt: read this book.

Korea shortens its school week, and what about us?

2011-06-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

The South Korean government is recommending that all primary and secondary schools cut the length of the school week to just five days. That will mean eliminating the Saturday classes that currently occur twice a month. The school year will fall from 205 days to 190 days, compared to the 180 to 185 that are common in the U.S.

An interesting piece of the story is that this decrease in school hours is meant to accompany a decrease in the Korean work week to forty hours. (Not many of the American adults who would like to see kids work longer hours in school are also asking to work more than forty hours themselves.) The widest concern expressed by the Korean public is that a shorter school week means that students who are poor or behind will have less chance to catch up. Although the express purpose of the change is "to foster a healthy leisure culture in which parents and children enjoy (time) together," one common assumption is that well-off families will send their kids to tutoring at private academies in the extra time, while poor families will not have that opportunity.

On order to accommodate the arts and sports that used to happen on those extra Saturdays, Korea has revamped its curriculum to allow space for such "enrichment" during the regular school week. Meanwhile, we in the US are moving from the other direction. Since passage of the No Child Left Behind bill, advocates of the arts have complained that they have been squeezed out of the curriculum, especially in high-poverty or low-performing school districts. Poor children, argue these advocates, are being shortchanged of the very experiences that will keep them emotionally connected to school and will offer them a doorway to culture and self-expression.

Mass 2020, which advocates for expanded learning time in Massachusetts and nationwide, starts with the premise that children of poverty deserve the same learning experiences that their middle class peers get outside of school. Founder Chris Gabrieli argues that despite what they say, middle class parents believe in extended learning time and provide it for their children in the form of tennis lessons, music lessons, Cub Scouts, gymnastics, and science clubs, not to mention visits to libraries, bookstores, and museums. Children from poor neighborhoods are only going to get these experiences in school, and schools will only be able to fit in such a well-rounded program by expanding students' time in school.

Mass 2020 pressed for legislation in Massachusetts allowing schools to apply for extra funding to become expanded time schools. They had to submit a plan for extending school time by at least 300 hours a year, and for restructuring the school day to build a seamless program incorporating whatever enrichment or extension the school deems most important. Often the expansion includes the arts, homework help, more concentrated time on core academics, more hands-on science, and more electives. Currently, 19 expanded learning time schools serve 10,000 Massachusetts students, and schools with strong planning and several years of implementation have been able to show impressive gains in student learning.

My one disappointment in looking at the expanded learning time initiative is that none of the schools have opted to expand time into the summer. It's in summer that we see significant learning loss that often amounts to more than two months' backsliding in both math (for all schoolkids) and reading (only for poor schoolkids). I'd love to see a few schools try, say, four weeks of inspiring summer programming in science and art with great books to read and some daily use of mathematics. Maybe with such a midsummer boost, kids would start the new school year tuned up and ready to go, bypassing the need for teachers to spend the first couple of months reviewing last year's work and trying to figure out what the kids remember.

Three kids in transition - graduation highlights

2011-06-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

This has been a season of graduations and transitions. Sabrina and her cousin Peter graduated from Tufts three weeks ago, and Sabrina got a job in a psychology lab the next day. (Peter already had a job). Sabrina's twin Owen graduated from Stanford Sunday. And Rhianon, our eldest, who graduated from Stanford two years ago, is leaving her job with a Stanford pediatrician (where she was working on research about maternal/child health in world areas of conflict) to move on to medical school at Johns Hopkins.

Here are some highlights of the last four days:

1. The Wacky Walk. Stanford graduations are held in the football stadium, and by tradition the undergraduates dress up in silly costumes and parade all around the stadium before they settle into their chairs and presumably their adult lives. Two years ago Rhianon and her friends, with a hundred colorful balloons, went as the movie Up. Owen and his friends dressed up as characters from Mario Kart. Other groups marched as a Rubik's Cube, iPhones, a giant squid, boxers in a moving ring, billiard balls, and many more. One carried a sign saying "My name is David. Hire me," with a phone number. We ran into him later and asked if he'd had any offers. "Nothing legal," he answered ruefully. But aside from him and a few others, the costumes had no deep inner meaning. They represent just one last chance to be childishly creative.

2. The Talisman concert. For all four years, Owen has sung in Talisman, a coeda capella group that sings multicultural songs, mostly from the African diaspora. They sing in Xhosa, Zulu, English, Swahili, and occasionally Korean, Chinese, or a a Native American language. Talisman sang at the baccalaureate service in the quad, and afterward they retired to the arcades in the next quad over. There they sang again, just for the families this time, though passersby gathered, including a tour group of young Asian kids who listened entranced. We stood very close to the performers in an atmosphere of joy and spontaneous celebration that made me feel what it must be like on their South Africa tours.

3. A visit to Jasper Ridge. Yesterday Owen took us up to see Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Over a hundred years ago, what is now Jasper Ridge was the site of the logging town of Searsville, until Leland Stanford moved the people out and dammed the San Francisquito Creek to make Searsville Lake to supply water for his new university. For the past two quarters, Owen has taken the docent course there, and he took us on a hike from oak meadow through riparian woodland and up into the chaparral. We passed the field where researchers are doing experiments on the effects of global atmospheric change. We passed the carcass of a deer killed by a mountain lion, and we looked down on the creek where Owen snorkeled to catalog fish species.. We walked across the dam where the Stanford women's diving team used to practice before they were allowed to use the pool with the men.

Owen will be back at Stanford next year getting his master's and serving as head TA in the freshman Earth Systems course. It was fun to see him in his element, outdoors, leading and explaining and telling stories.

This morning the three kids set out to drive Rhianon's car across the country. They have to hurry to get back to Boston so Sabrina can return to her job by Monday. I know they're going to have a great time. I just hope they drive carefully.

Two myths about asthma

2011-06-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

My parents told me two things about asthma that weren't true, though both were reassuring. I clung to these beliefs for many years, and they helped me get through some breathless times.

The first untrue thing they told me was that having asthma was a sign of intelligence. Smart people were more likely to have asthma, and people with asthma were usually smart. I don't really know how they came up with this one, but I do know it was a comfort to an unathletic girl like me (my worst grades were in P.E.) who was always chosen last for any sports team.

The second reassuring thing they told me--and this came straight from my mother, who had asthma herself, and should obviously know--was that no one ever died of asthma. No matter how short of breath I felt, no matter how frightened, I was safe. Asthma meant discomfort, not danger. I clung to that certainty throughout my teen years, a lot longer than I should have and in the face of some pretty strong evidence pointing the other way.

I first wheezed when I was four years old, and I remember being oddly proud of myself. It was Thanksgiving evening, and all our relatives had gone home. I felt breathless, and my chest started started squeaking just like my mother's. There was a fuss. My father carried me up to bed and my mother tucked me in. Talking in low voices, they concluded it was probably the shrimp at dinner that had caused it. Because I liked the tiny pinky orange commas of shrimp nestled in mayonnaise in the wooden salad bowls,I was sorry I wouldn't get to eat them anymore, but otherwise I didn't feel too bad. It was nice to be fussed over and tucked in.

What I didn't realize at the time was that I had just acquired a new identity, one that would follow me all my life. Instead of being just Penny, from now on I was Penny-has-asthma. For a child, there were advantages. Sometimes instead of going out to school sports, I got to stay inside and read. Sometimes I got to stay home from school altogether and spend a lazy day with my mother. The price for that was word games. At some point during the day, my mother set up a game of Jotto or Scrabble or Boggle, and she was merciless.

Other times were not so great. I'd be hunched over, heaving for breath, and my mother would take me to see our general practitioner. Dr. Ahmann had a crewcut and talked slowly in a gravelly voice. He filled a glass syringe with clear liquid and mopped my arm with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol. The shot of epinephrine burned as it went in. I squeezed my eyes shut and didn't cry. Within minutes my airways opened. I coughed my lungs clear, and I felt a lot better, except for my jittery stomach and the way my hands shook.

When I wasn't bad enough for a shot, my mother shook her own inhaler for me and held it in front of my open mouth, depressing the plunger just as I took a deep breath. One inhaler tasted horribly bitter, and I only wanted to take it if I really needed it. The other tasted sicky-sweet, which was much worse: just the thought of using it made me shudder with disgust. The inhalers helped, but like the shots, they made me shake. My mother called it "shaky medicine," and once, just after I had taken a huge puff on the inhaler, a small earthquake shivered the house. "Wow, that WAS shaky medicine!" I told my mother in awe.

Ten percent of American children are now being diagnosed with asthma. The treatments get better all the time, but there are still kids struggling with asthma that can't easily be controlled. Kids with asthma are sometimes frightened or feel alone. For them and their parents, I've decided to write an occasional post on asthma. You others - you who breathe with minimal friction - please feel free to skip these posts.

The dark side of teen literature

2011-06-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

Last week's Wall Street Journal presents a debate about the current state of young adult literature, which means books directed at ages 12-18. In an opinion piece called "Darkness Too Visible," Meghan Cox Gurdon laments today's fashion for dark, lurid, violent tales for teen readers. Gurdon worries that too much of current literature, driven by fashion and a desire for profit, may actually invite kids to wallow in degradation and misery. Novels about self-mutilation may encourage self-mutilation; novels about sexual abuse or incest may re-traumatize those who have experienced it.

National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, answers in a piece of his own called "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood." (Grumpy aside: I guess the Wall Street Journal believes in controversy but not in apostrophes.) Alexie's argument can be paraphrased as follows: "Come on, adult world, you're kidding yourselves. Bad things are happening to kids all the time. If you think you're protecting them from the harsh realities of life, you're way too late. They need someone who is willing to talk about their experience, someone to accompany them and give them a sense of hope."

I haven't read enough of the cited books to judge the justice of Gurdon's arguments. I can say that I seem to be one of very few people in the world who was turned off by what I felt was gratuitous violence in Suzanne Collins's otherwise masterful Hunger Games. I didn't like the part where the two protagonists rest safely atop a rock while listening to their rival being slowly eaten by mutant wild dogs all night long. (As an aside, one editor at a writing conference stated his belief is that the reason dystopias are so popular with young readers is that their chaos and cruelty is a direct reflection of readers' experience in the typical American high school.)

On the other hand, I loved Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, which deal with a 14-year-old girl's reaction to date rape. The daughters in our mother-daughter book club were probably twelve when we read it, and it gave us mothers an opportunity to make an impassioned plea for them to come to us if they ever met such trouble.

Still, the books I'm talking about are all award winners, and it's quite possible that other books out there are much more exploitative and much less helpful to readers. I'll have to keep reading before I can make any blanket judgment. And while I applaud young adult writers who have the courage to write about life the way it is, I hope the tide of dark vision won't submerge everything. There are more subtle and even more innocent tales worth telling as well.

Why Boston schools are improving, part 2

2011-06-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

In my last post I wrote that stable leadership, outside pressure, and a relentless focus on instruction have all contributed to the Boston Public Schools' steady improvement over the past ten to fifteen years. Today I offer reasons four through six for that improvement.

4. Competition. Since 1994, when Massachusetts law first allowed for charter schools in the Commonwealth, independent groups have been eager to establish schools in Boston. Today there are fourteen Boston charters, among them some of the highest performing public schools in the city or even the state. Controversy continues about whether charter schools, which admit students through a lottery system, serve their fair share of English language learners and students with special needs. Still, one thing seems certain: the looming threat of the charter school movement motivated the Boston Teachers Union to embrace an innovation of their own, pilot schools.

Pilot schools represent a collaboration between the district and the union, where certain work rules and district mandates are suspended. Pilot schools, which are designed to be laboratories of innovation, have autonomy over budget, staffing, schedule, curriculum, and calendar. Twenty-three pilot schools now serve 9000 Boston students, with pilot schools for the arts, for science, for leadership, and for students who are over age. Like charters, pilot schools attract teachers and students who share a particular vision, and they often serve those students particularly well.

Thus Boston is no longer a monolithic system. Instead it offers a menu of schools that challenge one another toward constant improvement.

5. Careful attention to managing innovation. The pilot school program demonstrates that the leadership and often the teachers of Boston are willing to take risks and innovate to give kids a better chance at an education. Of course, eagerness to innovate can bring problems of its own. Like many cities surrounded by universities and philanthropic organizations, Boston sometimes fields more offers for partnership than it can handle. It's easy for a school system that's hungry for funding to fragment its attention among hundreds of small projects, each backed by enthusiastic advocates, each good in itself, but each a distraction from the district's core strategy. Boston, instead, has sought to convince its partners to throw their joint efforts behind the superintendent's priorities.

Moreover, the district has taken a measured approach to innovation. Usually it has allowed a new program, such as coaching for school change or a workshop model for building reading comprehension, to take root first in a few schools. Often these efforts have been piloted by the Boston Plan for Excellence using philanthropic money, only to be brought in house under the core school budget once the kinks have been ironed out. This careful, systematic approach has sometimes frustrated those who want to see change come faster, but it has guarded the district against the whipsaw effect of constantly embracing new enthusiasms.

6. Attention to data. Both the school district and the Boston Plan for Excellence have embraced the notion of delving into student data to drive reform. School teams examine student work for evidence of the quality of assignments. BPE developed a tool called FAST-R to diagnose students' successes and errors in reading comprehension. The team developed an early warning system for identifying potential future dropouts so prevention efforts can be spent where they're needed. The district signed up to be part of NAEP's Trial Urban District Assessment program. This willingness to gather and examine data with all its potential for embarrassing findings has been key to driving an honest, hard-headed approach to reform.

So there you have it - my list for the factors I think have been most important in helping a mid-sized urban district elicit steadily rising performance from its students. Steady leadership, outside pressure, and competition have helped to drive the process. A clear focus on instruction and a devotion to data have helped to characterize it. And a careful, managed approach to innovation has kept the course steady. Now it's the job of everyone involved to continue the course and work for even more substantial change.

Why Boston schools are improving

2011-06-10T05:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's post presented evidence that Boston schools have steadily improved over the past ten years. Today I'll talk about six reasons for that steady improvement. These aren't the only reasons, and they may not even be the most important, but based on my own observations, I think these are key factors that could operate in any school system.

1. Stable leadership. Tom Payzant spent ten years as superintendent, and Carol Johnson, who succeeded him in 2007, has just signed onto another four-year contract. Such stability is almost unheard of in urban education, where mutual discontent between school committees and superintendents leads to an average tenure at the top of less than three years. Each time a new leader comes in, there's a period of adjustment. There are personnel changes. New priorities rise to the top. Some programs are dropped or starved of funds while others are launched. Time is lost and progress sputters.

One reason Boston superintendents can stay is that the school committee is appointed by the mayor, not elected. This makes it harder for one disgruntled or ambitious faction to undermine the superintendent's agenda. Some citizens view an appointed school committee as an insult to democracy, but voters have wisely approved it. They elect the mayor, let his choose his team, and hold him accountable for the results.

2. Steady outside pressure. To have an outside partner, sympathetic but demanding, examining your work can be infuriating but helpful. The Boston Plan for Excellence played this role in Boston. Ellen Guiney came to head the plan just as Tom Payzant arrived to lead the school district. They had worked together before, when Payzant was President Clinton's Assistant Secretary of Education and Guiney was Senator Kennedy's top education aide. They shared a dedication to kids and a deep interest in research.

Under Guiney, BPE kept a steady focus on the district's performance. The Plan pushed for changes in teacher hiring and how professional development money was spent. It pressed for closer attention to problems with special education. It advocated for new coaching programs.
Most of all, BPE pushed to increase the pace of reform. Bureaucracies tend to drag their feet, but BPE was a terrier nipping at the school district's heels.

3. Focus on instruction. BPE and the superintendent shared a belief that getting all kids to high levels meant big changes in how teachers taught in the classroom. Together, they carefully introduced new literacy programs, followed by new, more demanding math curriculum. BPE piloted and the district embraced a program of instructional coaching, where skilled coaches worked closely with teams of teachers inside the schools. Professional development became increasingly school-based, team, based, and focused on student work and the content teachers needed to address every day in the classroom.

Changing what and how teachers teach is slow, demanding work, but the Boston Public Schools now have some of the most coherent curriculum and most effective teachers in the state--teachers who can reach not only the eager, high-achieving kids but also the reluctant and confused.

Next time I'll talk about three more key factors behind Boston's steady improvement.

Improving education in Boston Public Schools

2011-06-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Films like Waiting for Superman feed into the common belief that urban education in America is dismal and getting worse. Yet in yesterday's post I wrote about the strong work of Ellen Guiney and the Boston Plan for Excellence, and I promised to share some data today about how education in Boston is steadily improving for its 56,000 public school students.

Improving a whole school system is a lot harder than improving a school. An inspirational school leader, a surge of parent involvement, and a cohort of skilled and dedicated teachers can convert one school into a high-flying outlier. But to see steady improvement in the performance of students across a whole district requires a different level of persistence, good curriculum, good professional development, good use of data, and good policy. How does Boston look?

Twelve years ago, 58% of Boston tenth graders failed the English Language Arts section of the respected Massachusetts state test, MCAS, the first time they took it. Only 18% scored Advanced or Proficient.

In 2010, after steady improvement, only 8% of first time test takers failed the tenth grade English test, while a full 60% scored Advanced or Proficient. That's a huge difference.

Math results tell a similar story. In 1998, 75% of Boston tenth graders failed the math MCAS, and 13% scored Advanced or Proficient. By 2010, only 14% of first time test takers failed, and 60% scored Advanced or Proficient. What a huge difference in preparation for these kids who have been through a school system in a period of reform.

You might think these results come from teaching to the test or from the state test getting easier over time. After all, there's a pattern of state test scores rising while national test scores stagnate. But that's not the story here. Yes, schools and districts who embrace standards see their greatest score improvements on tests also aligned to those standards. But if the increases reflect real improvements in learning, we should see an echo of the improvements in other test results.

Since 2003, Boston has participated in the Urban District NAEP trial. Our urban districts have a concentration of kids who are poor, who don't speak English as a first language, or who come from ethnic groups that have traditionally not performed well in school. Their data can get lost in the overall mix of state performance data, and the point of the Urban Trial was to uncover the differences that exist. At grades 4 and 8, the "Nation's Report Card," NAEP, pulls out the scores of particular participating urban school districts, so they can directly compare their performance with one another, with states, and with the nation as a whole.

In 2003, Boston 4th graders scored 11 points behind the nation in reading and 15 points behind in math. By 2009, the last year I have found, those gaps had decreased to 6 points in reading and 4 points in math. Over six years, the reading gap fell by almost half and the math gap by almost three fourths.

Over the same time period, the gap in 8th grade reading performance between Boston and the nation fell from 11 points to 7, and the gap in 8th grade math performance fell from 16 points to 4. In the case of both reading in math, national scores increased, but Boston scores increased faster.

These changes are huge. The improvement in the scores of Boston children suggest that in reading, by 2009, Boston's 4th and 8th graders were performing almost one instructional year higher than they had six years earlier. In math, student performance improved by more than one year's worth. Standards and performance are rising.

This is a story that is not being told about urban education. Tomorrow I'll write about what I think are the most important factors behind these improvements.

Ellen Guiney, tenacious education reformer

2011-06-08T07:40:00.000-07:00

Ellen Guiney is retiring from her post leading the Boston Plan for Excellence, the local education fund and spur to reform which she has led for the past sixteen years. Yesterday I attended her goodbye reception at the top of the Bank of America building in downtown Boston, overlooking the glittering harbor. Bank presidents, superintendents, and the Massachusetts Secretary of Education all went over their allotted time to regale us with tales of how Ellen has inspired them, argued with them, prodded them, and never let them waver from their duty to the schoolchildren of Boston.

Founded in 1984 by First National Bank of Boston, the Boston Plan for Excellence or BPE began as a family of charitable funds donated by financial, legal, and insurance firms and devoted to special projects that carried the donor's name. When Ellen came in, she convinced the donors to pool their funds and focus on whole school change with a sharp focus on the quality of instruction in the schools. In partnership with superintendent Tom Payzant, she helped raise $100 million over ten years from foundations such as Annenberg, Carnegie, and Gates. The Plan and the district devoted the funds to setting up coaching models, professional learning communities, data systems, teams to look at how policies should change, and efforts to restructure high schools.

Ellen pulled together a fantastic team. She read and digested research, examined and displayed data, asked questions, doubted, and re-designed. She sat on the couch in her office surrounded by piles of paper and sparked ideas for her devoted staff to spin off. She incubated the Boston Teacher Residency Program, which has supplied 300 promising new teachers, many of them teachers of color, to the Boston Public Schools. According to yesterday's testimonials, she cornered people in the grocery store to talk to them about reform ideas. Sometimes she even laughed at herself.

BPE served as a laboratory for the Boston Public Schools and even the state. The district picked up BPE's successful coaching and data programs and implemented them district wide. When BPE developed an early warning system to identify middle school students at risk of dropping out or failure, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education decided to spread its use to all 351 school districts.

There's so much more I could say. Ellen built dialogue among charter, parochial, Jewish Day, secular private, and public schools in Boston. She sought doggedly and not always successfully to maintain positive relations with the Boston Teachers Union. According to her staff, she lugs giant trash bags stuffed with recycling from the BPE office down to her truck to take home so they can be properly recycled, and does so with no smidgen of concern that she might be mistaken for a bag lady.

And all of this has paid off for the children of Boston. Tomorrow I'll share some data that demonstrates how, with steady, persistent, thoughtful attempts at improvement, urban school systems can come to serve all their students much better.

Ellen is small, slight, and easily embarrassed. She blushes easily, and she would rather stand at the back of the crowd. Yesterday her colleagues hauled her up front and made her listen. Once again, the real beneficiaries were all the rest of us. I walked away inspired by what one smart, dedicated, patriotic woman can do to change the lives around her.

A great surprise review

2011-06-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

Today I received unexpected notice of this great, sarcastic review of Lost in Lexicon in Open Letters Monthly Review.

I didn't know about this online review of arts and literature, but I like their mission statement:

Open Letters is dedicated to the proposition that no writing which reviews the arts should be boring, back-patting, soft-pedaling, or personally compromised. We’ve all had the experience of reading a review that sparkled—one that combined an informed, accessible examination of its quarry with gamesome, intelligent, and even funny commentary.

I think this review sparkled. And I wonder if Steve Donoghue always reads with a basset hound on his lap.

Metaphors at the State Science Fair

2011-06-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

Here is a selection of the tasty similes and metaphors middle school students from the Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair contributed today to the Mistress of Metaphor's pot (Students pick up a prompt and complete it in this activity related to my book Lost in Lexicon):

I sat down and cried like... a river flowing down after a big melt.
Annoying as... a dog barking in the middle of the night.
Tall as... a skyscraper looming over a city.
The setting sun was... like an orange Jello over the horizon.
My bed at the end of the day was... messy and unclean like after a tornado. [We did have tornadoes in Massachusetts this week.]
My old dog panted like... an old train exhausted from travel.
Cold as... winter's frost infested breath.
The setting sun was... a falling fiery red cannon ball the size of the moon.
Dark as... a night alley.
We ran out of there like... a herd of wild buffalo being chased by Indians.
I sat down and cried like... a baby that just had a shot.
The night sky was... ominous as a wizard lifting his cape.

Three hundred middle school kids, selected from their school science fairs all across the state, attended the state science fair today. They were a very diverse group, about equally divided between boys and girls, with a good representation of black, white, Hispanic, East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern students. I saw projects on using pheromones to trap males of invasive crab species; testing how far a soccer ball flies when it's inflated to different pressures (and struck by a mechanical foot); testing what characteristic of a glass determines its resonant frequency, and many more. There were bubbles, sugary drinks, music played to growing plants, solar-powered hydrolysis, and a model of tide power.

All of this, and they were also good with words. I left feeling proud of Massachusetts students and optimistic about the prospects for innovation and discovery among the rising generation.

What works in UK schools?

2011-06-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

The UK's Guardian newspaper just published an article reporting on the most cost-effective ways for schools to spend extra money. It turns out that effective feedback to students, peer tutoring, and parental involvement are more effective as well as more cost-effective than school uniforms, reducing class size, or performance pay. The article draws on a research report from the Sutton Trust.

The report itself is definitely worth a look, because it defines what it means by practices such as effective feedback, reducing class size, teaching assistants, summer school, homework, peer tutoring, ability grouping, and parental involvement. A chart shows the relative cost of the different interventions along with the expected student gain in months of increased learning per year of intervention. Then a separate sheet on each intervention discusses the nature and strength of the evidence. It looks a bit less rigorous but more general and perhaps more useful to help allocate resources than the new practice guides in our own What Works Clearinghouse.

31 books in 2011

2011-05-31T13:07:00.000-07:00

Back at the start of the year, I posted a resolution to read 100 books this year. Fifty of them would be middle grade or YA books, since those are the age groups I write for. The other were going to be an ambitious mix of non-fiction and fiction from different cultures and in genres that would stretch me. Moreover, I said I would try to learn something concrete about writing from each book.

How am I doing? Well, the first thing to fall by the wayside was my record-keeping. Last week, when a friend asked for an accounting, I started trying to reconstruct a list. I managed to come up with the titles of 31 books I've read this year. Twenty of them are adult books, which surprised me, because the kid books are a much quicker read.

First, here are the books I have reviewed for the New York Journal of Books:

The Emerald Atlas, by John Stephens. Action-packed MG fantasy.
Suddenly, In the Depths of the Forest, by Amos Oz. A beautifully written fable for children.
Dog Tag Summer, by Elizabeth Partridge. MG post-Vietnam fiction.
Feral, by Deena Metzger. Adult fiction; self-realization.
Deadly, by Julie Chibbaro. MG/YA historical fiction about tracking down Typhoid Mary.

Reviewing is a great way to clarify your thinking about a book. I recommend it to other writers.

Here are additional kids' books:

Enna Burning - Shannon Hale. MG/YA fantasy. I blogged about this one.
Trickster's Choice - Tamora Pierce. YA fantasy. Great author in the genre.
The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, by Jeanne Birdsall. Charming MG fiction, with lots to teach about writing humor. Here's my blog post on it.
Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, by Joe Schreiber. YA humorous thriller. This was an ARC from Book Expo America. The book is due out in October.
The Genius Files: Mission Unstoppable, by Dan Gutman, wacky MG action adventure. Damian liked it.
Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall, by Wendy Mass. YA, told in verse, a quick, fun read.
Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick. Another advance copy from BEA. Children's, two interweaving stories told in text and art, a fitting follow up to his Cabinet of Hugo Cabret.

Now for the adult books:

Midaq Alley,
The Thief and the Dogs, and
Miramar, all adult fiction by Egyptian Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, about whom I wrote a blog post here.
God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens, adult non-fiction. Here's a blog post about this one.
The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, classic adult science fiction, one of the genres I resolved to read.
The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, fascinating adult non-fiction (science). I'd still like to blog about this one.
Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier, adult historical fiction about fossil collector Mary Anning.
The Immortal Live of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Adult non-fiction.
The Uncertain Places, by Lisa Goldstein, adult fantasy.
The Capitol Game, by Brian Haig, a thriller which I enjoyed and promptly forgot.
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand,by Helen Simonson. Adult literary fiction, a November romance and gentle social satire that all of us in the family loved, including the guys.
Tinkers, by Paul Harding. Adult literary fiction, allusive and poetic.
Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake. Ponderous, richly descriptive adult fantasy. Here's my comment on it.
Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Adult non-ficiton, amazing historical account of WWII survival.
Cute Eats Cute by C.B. Murphy. Hilarious adult social satire and coming-of-age story that I blogged about because it should be better known.
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, by Alison Light. Adult non-fiction, biography/history.
The Mathematical Tourist, by Ivars Peterson, very readable book about modern mathematics.
March, by Geraldine Brooks. Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction about the Civil War. I blogged about this book.
I cheated a little by also counting New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, a book only in manuscript form that I'm helping edit for the Harvard Education Press. I've read all the chapters multiple times, so that should count for something, shouldn't it?

That's the list so far. I'm going to have to pick it up a notch to meet my goal by the end of the year. I also have to broaden my genres. Still to read: Books from Asia, Africa, and South American writers. Books in French and Spanish. Poetry, short stories, memoir, myth, literary criticism, and a book about business or money. I'll keep you posted.

Arsenic critiqued

2011-05-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

Almost six months ago I wrote a post about the report of a bacterium collected from Mono Lake that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in such crucial biological molecules as DNA. The announcement raised the possibility that living things could construct building blocks quite different from those we were used to seeing.

However, in the weeks and months following the initial publication of the research report online in Science Express, several scientists began to share their concerns and criticisms online. Blog posts with comments shot back and forth. People raised their concerns about the methodology of the arsenic group and complained about NASA's over-the-top PR. Some researchers wrote letters to Science , which sent them out for review, eventually accepted them for publication, and asked the original researchers to provide a response. Eight comments and the response appeared online yesterday.

This is all good. It's the way science is supposed to work. Ideally, major holes and problems with a research paper will be addressed by reviewers before the paper is published, but after publication there will always be other scientists with special expertise who can offer their own commentary. This is the process of post-publication review, made more powerful by the way online communities allow a doubter to spread the word. Questions and criticism often spur the original authors either to do more experiments to confirm their findings or to change their hypotheses to address the objections.

Science is far from perfect, but it earnestly works to perfect itself, learning from mistakes along the way. This doesn't seem to happen with, say, the social theories behind public policy. If only there were such an efficient and agreed-upon way to address flaws in social theories thrown too quickly before the public, or a way to dispassionately point out when enacted policies fail to produce the expected results! Then maybe politics could progress, erratically but always tending forward, as science does.

Cute Eats Cute, a book review

2011-05-28T14:33:00.000-07:00

Cute Eats Cute by C.B. Murphy is a cynical, funny, and surprisingly tender-hearted social satire and coming-of-age story. In a Minneapolis suburb, community discord over whether hunters should cull a burgeoning deer herd in the local nature reserve becomes a vehicle for dissecting a multitude of modern America's social divisions. Talk radio, New Age religion, eco-sentimentalism, pop psychology and macho hunter culture all come under Murphy's microscope.

Fifteen-year-old Sam's hippie parents want him to call them Jeff and Elissa, but they agree on little else. Elissa is an eco-feminist, a vegan, and a newly converted Wiccan, while Jeff, an officer with the Department of Natural Resources, swerves ever closer to a manly hunting culture. Sam and his band of high school friends are convinced that killing deer is cruel and harmful to the earth, and they decide to Do Something. The Something escalates from street theater to sabotage. When Megan, the object of Sam's lust, asks him to infiltrate the hunters' camp, Sam finds himself bouncing wildly among people with different belief systems and affiliations.

Sam's undercover mission allows Murphy to poke fun at a medley of characters, from the activist lesbian who wears a gas mask for her Environmental Sensitivity to the bow-toting Christian Hunters of Men. A family eco-therapist urges Sam to pass through an initiation and be on the lookout for a spiritual guide, but Sam can't figure out whether to follow a radical ecoterrorist who may or may not be advocating human sacrifice. Meanwhile his parents are on the verge of divorce, his friend Ryan always says the least helpful thing, the alluring Megan thinks he's gay, and Holly, the fourth member of their gang, gets pregnant. How does a girl who would do anything to stop the murder of deer reason about abortion?

In Murphy's pitch-perfect and very funny dialogue, characters talk past each other as if they're speaking code and never seem to arrive at truly common understanding. Sam's observations of the people and places around him are astute, but his own teenage cluelessness and confusion come through with increasing clarity. From its hilarious beginnings, the book moves almost imperceptibly to a more serious level where Sam has to make real choices with real and at times disastrous consequences. A strong action climax brings the book to a close, and if Sam's emotional confusion never entirely clears, maybe that's just a realistic reflection of what it means to live in a greyish, imperfect world. This book was great fun to read, and I recommend it highly to teen boys and adults.

Students' cool discoveries in astronomy and paleontology

2011-05-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

Today I ran across three articles about students making significant scientific discoveries. All of them depended on mentors helping to set up the question and parameters of the project, but nevertheless, it's the students who gathered the breakthrough data. What an exciting way to make a contribution to the world!

In the first discovery, a 22-year-old Australian student from Monash University found a big chunk of the universe's missing mass, which scientists had been seeking for decades. During a six-week summer project, Amelia Fraser-McKelvie looked for the missing mass in filaments, huge shoelace-like galactic projections with low density and extremely high temperatures. At such high temperatures (a million degrees Celsius), the mass should be visible at X-ray wavelengths, so Fraser-McKelvie did a "targeted X-ray search." Lo and behold, she found much greater mass than had been seen before.

The second discovery also came from summer work by a university student, this one Thomas Weinreich from Brown University. While carefully sorting through microscopic grains of lunar dust, Weinreich followed a hunch of his own. Along with separating the pieces of orange glass he'd been ask to look for, he also set aside tiny crystals flecked with black spots. It turned out that these crystals, called olivine, formed around molten rock from the moon's interior. When sent out for analysis, they proved to contain water--not huge amounts, but as much as in the earth's mantle, the layer just below the crust.

Finding deep water was big news. Although some ice has been found on the lunar surface, hidden in the shadow of craters, the idea until now has been that any surface ice came from comets striking the moon. Accepted ideas about the moon's origin suggest that it was created when a huge collision struck off a chunk of the early earth. The force of the collision would have caused such heat in the broken off chunk, which eventually became the moon, that its rocks would have melted and all its water evaporated. Now this finding of water deep within the moon challenges the accepted wisdom.

The last bit of news concerned a class of fourth graders doing citizen science, where ordinary citizens help scientists collect data. This particular project is called the Mastodon Matrix Project. During excavation of a pond eleven years ago in Hyde Park, NY, workers uncovered the bones of a mastodon, an ancient ancestor of the elephant. Excavators dug out the bones along with eleven tons of surrounding sediment. Now the Paleontological Research Institute ships out one-kilogram boxes of dirt to citizen scientists--hobbyists, clubs, school groups, dedicated amateurs--to sort through looking for twigs, teeth, shells, or anything else that gives a clue to the mastodon's ecosystem.

Using plastic magnifying glasses, fingers and toothpicks, the Pennsylvania students sifted carefully through their 2.2 pounds of dirt. They found shells, a twig, and finally an eight inch long strand of coarse brown hair. Full of the delight of discovery, the students weighed, labeled, and bagged their finds and sent them to project headquarters. Sure enough, the word came back that they had found a mastodon hair. The students had uncovered something that had been missing for 11,500 years.

There's something truly empowering about making a scientific discovery. To follow a hunch or to painstakingly carry out a procedure, to see what no one has seen, to find evidence that challenges or confirms a theory, brings an intrinsic reward that has nothing to do with grades or recognition. All of these students know they've been part of something big and important--the human quest to understand how the universe works. The more such experiences kids can have, the more we'll be raising a generation with the curiosity and discipline to keep making discoveries, keep learning, and keep pushing knowledge forward.

Needed: A Copy Editor Who Can Subtract

2011-05-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

I just read this on Yahoo! News:

A Public Policy Polling survey released Thursday found that Gingrich's favorable rating with GOP voters has dropped 27 points in the last month--from 52 percent to 38 percent.

By my calculation, 52 - 38 = 14, not 27.

True, 14 is 27 percent of 52, so you could say Gingrich's support among GOP voters has dropped by 27 percent, but not by 27 points. There's a difference.

A Day at Book Expo America

2011-05-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

After the Ben Franklin awards ceremony Monday evening, I spent Tuesday at Book Expo America. The looming Javits Convention Center has escalators looping this way and that. Lithe young women in boots and very short skirts handed out convention newspapers but could give no information about where anything was.

The Children's Book Breakfast featured an inspirational panel and a bag of free books at every seat. Katherine Paterson, author of A Bridge to Terabithia and now the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, spoke about how reading sweeps children away into a place where they can recognize themselves and not be alone. Julianne Moore introduced her character Freckleface Strawberry. Kevin Henkes and Brian Selznick took us through the process of creating a book where the illustrations carry a huge part of the story. Sarah Dessen talked about how young adult literature is becoming more respectable and mainstream.

After the breakfast Scarletta's publisher, Ian Leask, pushed his authors out to walk the show. He has us do this so we'll know what's out there: what's new, what's compelling. What I observed: The Dork Diaries is big enough to merit a huge advertisement painted in strips on the risers of a double stair. The children's books-- board books, easy readers, phonics books, workbooks, books with music CD's, middle grade fantasy, YA paranormal romance, full color hardcover science and history books for the school market, graphic novels, dual language books--were less numerous than at the London Book Fair, but still enough to leave my feet aching. Two feelings arise from seeing so many books. The first, uncomfortable, is that the world already appears to have plenty of books. The second, rather more reassuring, is that I really don't see any books out there that are just like what I'm writing.

In the afternoon I attended a packed talk where five YA publishers presented their most exciting new properties to booksellers. Every one of the five featured main characters with either paranormal gifts or very close to super crime fighting powers. I wonder if this means that in the current economic environment teens are feeling dull and powerless, so they need a fantasy of power and escape. Or is it just a case of publishers falling over each other to get in on a current craze? At the end of the editors' bubbling presentations the audience had a chance to pick up advance copies of the books they were pitching. I got Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, a funny, action-packed guy book in which the homely female Lithuanian exchange student turns out to be a hot and sophisticated assassin. I also picked up Laini Taylor's beautifully written Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

Then it was time to head for the airport to fly to DC, where I'm serving on a panel to suggest a research agenda for examining the impact of the Common Core State Mathematics Standards. Quite a switch from imaginative to analytical thinking. Still, I wonder if any editor will ever talk about one of my books the way the editors talked about their hot new YA acquisitions: "I shut myself in my office and couldn't stop reading." "After twenty pages I called the agent and said, 'Don't you dare let someone else take this before I have a chance to bid!'" "Halfway through, I ran to my boss and said, 'You have to read this tonight.' We made an offer the next day."

Maybe someday.

IBPA award

2011-05-23T20:53:00.000-07:00

Lost in Lexicon has won a Benjamin Franklin Award for interior design! Interior design refers to the layout of the book, the choice of font, the spacing, the way the text wraps around the illustrations, and everything else that gives the inside of the book a certain "look." The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) gave out the awards, which are quite prestigious, at a reception in the Javits Center in New York City tonight, on the eve of Book Expo America. Each category had three finalists, and I was happy just to have my book among those three. To have a self-published book judged by a jury of independent publishers to be of finalist quality sounded like tribute enough. Besides, I'd had good news today already: my daughter Sabrina, who graduated from Tufts yesterday, got two job offers as a research assistant in her chosen field today.

But then the announcer called out that the winner was Lost in Lexicon, and I made my way, half-stunned, up to the podium to the accompaniment of harp music. I thanked Lexicon's wonderful designer, Jeanne Abboud, and picked up a heavy box with an inscribed glass plaque inside.

As readers of this blog know, Lost in Lexicon has been acquired by Scarletta Press, which is publishing a second edition (with a new cover but luckily no change to the award-winning interior design) in August. Scarletta's publisher was delighted with the award, and after the ceremony took a team of us out for Greek dinner and champagne. A fitting end to a great day.

After the Apocalypse, What Next?

2011-05-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

It's almost 2 pm and the first sunny afternoon in well over a week. The grass is long, the trees are flowering, and birds sing jubilantly. So far, there's no sign here in Massachusetts, and no news from elsewhere, suggesting that the world will truly end today.

I really have no intention of mocking the Family Radio true believers who will watch in puzzlement as this day peters out with no disappearances and no world-ending disasters. What I'm curious about, though, is how family relations will change after this non-event. For every faithful follower of Harold Camping, there were skeptical children or spouses or siblings who did not believe the world would end today. How will the skeptics and the believers navigate their changed positions? What happens when a truth so passionately believed in fades away without a whimper? What a great subject for a novel!

The novel I know of that brushes closest to this theme is a young adult novel by my friend Denise Jaden. Losing Faith tells the story of Brie, black sheep of her very Christian family, who finds her position changing after her pious older sister Faith dies in an accident. Or was it an accident? As her parents' faith wavers, Brie devotes herself to finding the truth hidden in the record of her sister's last days.

Religion runs deep within our character, whether we are devout or heretic or eclectic or atheist. I was going to sy it's something we don't write about much, but that's forgetting the whole genre of Christian fiction. But doesn't having a whole separate genre put Christianity in the same category as crime, science fiction, fantasy, espionage, or vampire tales? It's as if food were only considered in "food fiction" or marriage only discussed in "marriage fiction."
I think as authors we're reluctant to tread on people's beliefs for fear of offending someone. All the more reason, then, to salute Denise for taking on the subject of faith and its distortions.

Teachers Weigh in on Growth-Based Evaluation

2011-05-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

The idea of having their evaluations based on growth in student test scores makes a lot of teachers nervous. That's not surprising. Hospitals get nervous about having surgical success rates published, because some patients are sicker than others when they enter the hospital. I suspect dentists would be worried if they were rated based on how many new cavities their patients developed under their care. There are so many variables, and our systems for measuring cavity development or student growth are clumsy, opaque, and subject to error.

Still, it would be a mistake to think of all teachers as opposed to having their performance measured. A great organization called Teach Plus has pulled together small cohorts of excellent, dedicated, mostly young, mostly urban teachers to learn about education policy and make their collective voices heard. The teaching policy fellows choose issues that matter and formulate thoughtful, practical solutions to thorny issues.

The Boston teaching policy fellows have written ten recommendations to state policy makers suggesting how assessment systems need to be adjusted to make evaluations based partly on student growth both fair and helpful. For example, the policy fellows suggest testing students at the beginning and end of each year. They point out that systems of linking teachers to their students need to be more accurate and reliable. And they point out that unless the tests are much better at measuring growth among very low and very high performers, teachers will be strongly motivated to expend less effort with these two groups than with the students in the middle.

I urge my readers to take a look at the ten suggestions. They're couched in a positive tone, idealistic but also practical. And they're the work of a set of savvy teachers who want to see improvements in teacher evaluation come without a lot of ugly unintended consequences. These fine teachers expect to be evaluated as well and rigorously in teaching as they would be in another field. They know they're doing a good job, and they will welcome signposts to help them continue to improve.

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, a book review

2011-05-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading the third book in Jeanne Birdsall's delightful ongoing adventures of the Penderwick sisters. Batty, Jane, Skye, and Rosalind now range in age from five to thirteen, and while the sisters' widowed father is off on his honeymoon and Rosalind gets a vacation in New Jersey, the three younger sisters and their fatherless friend Jeffrey go to stay on the coast of Maine with their favorite aunt.

As the Oldest Available Penderwick, Skye, 12, almost buckles under the responsibility of keeping everyone in the family alive and whole. A series of disasters occurs, with one sprained ankle, one bloody nose, one bad case of writer's block, and one broken heart. And all of these small disasters are only the prelude to the summer's biggest event, a revelation that has the potential to be life-changing.

Although Skye's early panic seems overdone for my taste, as the speed of the action picks up, so does the conviction of the writing and the quality of the humor. Birdsall's humor always arises naturally (and seemingly effortlessly) from the characters' quirks and special qualities. Other children's writers who want to inject humor into their work could do a lot worse than study to Birdsall's technique. Such writers could also benefit from noticing the way she juggles four points of view and multiple sub-plots.

When Birdsall sought a publisher for her first Penderwick book (which went on to win the National Book Award), a number of editors turned it down for being old-fashioned. The Penderwick sisters don't spend their time instant messaging, and the institutional world of school with all its tropes of bullies and cliques never appears in these books. The Penderwicks' world is the world of free time and independence. The girls write books, toast marshmallows, view seals, sell golf balls and search for moose. They clean the house and try their hand at cooking. Somehow the four of them, despite occasional clashes, manage to stay devoted to one another without ever seeming saccharine. The sisters are not goody-goodies: they're lively and contentious and full of conflicted feelings and dramatic expression. I think any 8 to 12 year-old reader would enjoy getting to know them.

Amount or number?

2011-05-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Just to prove how crotchety I am, here's another grammar-and-usage pet peeve: the way many people, including radio journalists, confuse "amount" and "number." Do any of the following make you shudder?

A. "There was a good amount of people at the wedding."
B. "I've never seen such a large number of ducks on that pond before."
C. "The amount of natural disasters happening around the world is really frightening."

I hope you selected (A) and (C). "Amount" refers to continuous quantities, like water or oil or money or happiness. For discontinuous, countable quantities, use "number." For example, you can eat a large amount of cake but a large number of cupcakes. You only need a small amount of shoe polish to polish a small number of shoes.

New State Assessments for the Common Core

2011-05-16T19:19:00.000-07:00

Computer adaptive assessment, fairer approaches to assessing English learners, virtual worlds for assessing science inquiry--Will the next generation of state assessments embrace these ideas to give a fuller sense of what students are learning? This morning, PACE of California and the Rennie Center of Massachusetts just released three papers discussing these frontiers in assessment. I flew to D.C. to introduce a panel discussion of the three papers, collectively called The Road Ahead for State Assessments.

Mark Reckase of Michigan State University started off the session by discussing the promise and difficulty of computer adaptive assessment, which is used in tests as diverse as the GRE's for graduate school and the Army's vocational aptitude test. In computer adaptive assessment, the difficulty level of later questions is determined by how a student answers earlier questions. The fact that the test difficulty level adjusts to the student allows a finer discrimination of student skill and knowledge levels with fewer questions. Computer adaptive tests are also better at distinguishing student performance at the tails of the ability distribution. A common test has only a few very easy or very difficult questions, with most questions in the middle; a computer adaptive test can offer many questions at about the level that matches the student's knowledge. But such a test requires a very large question bank and lots of computer hardware that is regularly updated. One of the two new large assessment consortia, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium or SBAC, plans to include computer adaptive testing in the model it rolls out in 2014.

Robert Linquanti of WestEd next discussed the complex question of testing English language learners in content areas other than English proficiency. He pointed out that group reporting on how "English learners" are performing is always problematic, becasue unlike other demographic subgroups, the subgroup "English learners" is a revolving door. New immigrants arrive all the time, while those who have finally mastered English (and are therefore likely to be higher performers in other content areas as well) are moved out of the category.

Lack of academic English knowledge can lower students' test scores even when they actually understand content well. Linquanti suggested a number of accommodations, such as English dictionaries or glossaries, use of "plain English," math or science tests involving very little language, and others, to allow better estimates of what English learners actually understand in content areas such as math and science. He also suggested that while English proficiency should be reported as a function of time in the English learning system, proficiency in other content areas should be reported as a function of both time in the system and English proficiency.

Finally, Chris Dede and Jody Clarke-Midura discussed the possibility of measuring complex learning in science through immersive virtual environments. In their research, students choose an avatar that interacts with a scientific problem in a virtual world, generating hypotheses, gathering data, making inferences, and arguing from evidence. These virtual performance assessments can be more consistent and less expensive than hands-on performance assessments, and they offer promise for understanding how students use the tools of scientific inquiry. Dede and Clarke-Midura suggest that such assessments should form part of a comprehensive state assessment system.

The challenge for SBAC and the other assessment consortium, PARCC, is that they need to create a complete testing system in two subject areas for use in 2014. With such a short timeline, the temptation will be great to settle for creating systems a little better than what we have rather than groundbreaking innovations. But such innovations are what we need to reverse the curriculum-narrowing impact of current standardized tests and to encourage the teaching of more complex thinking and problem-solving skills. Educators interested in these issues should definitely take a look at the Rennie Center/PACE report.

New York Times needs a better copy editor

2011-05-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a gem of a sentence from today's "Room for Debate" on the New York Times site:

"Mitt Romney, who has not yet declared, has yet to declare himself."

How the Arts Enrich Education

2011-05-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

The arts help kids succeed in reading in math and inspire them to stay in school: that's the claim of a new report, "Reinvesting in Arts Education," appearing this month from the President's Commission on the Arts and the Humanities. In support of this argument, which is not new, the report collects a broader than usual range of evidence from a diverse collection of studies.

Most of the studies are correlational: that is, they show that students who are involved in the arts do better in a multitude of outcomes than students who are not involved. Correlation, of course, is not causation. Students may become involved in the arts because they already feel connected to school, or because they live in wealthier neighborhoods or have parents at home that can drive them to lessons, etc. Still, most of the reports try to correct for these confounding factors. For example, an anthropological study in a low income neighborhood found that students who spent 9 hours or more per week on the arts were four times as likely to have high achievement and three times as likely to have high attendance as their peers with less arts exposure.

Another study approach is longitudinal. Catterall et. al. found using national longitudinal data that by their twenties, students heavily involved in the arts in high school were more likely to have finished college, to have good jobs, to volunteer in the community, and to vote.

Then there are the case studies. The CAGE school in Chicago and the A + schools in North Carolina have seen significant gains in student achievement since introducing integrated arts education. A study of three arts integration schools and three control schools in Maryland showed that arts integration was associated with a substantial decrease in the achievement gap between poor minority students and other students in the schools.

So it goes - study after study suggests that arts education increases self-esteem, math scores, attendance, reading scores, and persistence, while decreasing drug use, delinquency, boredom, and discouragement. Is it plausible that arts education could have all these benefits? Neurological studies suggest that early study of music can increase phonological awareness, which is key to early reading. Similarly, working to develop skill in a particular area of the arts helps devotees develop focus and attention. Study of music increases students' ability to manipulate working and long term memory. All of these are foundational skills that study of the arts can strengthen.

Moreover, when the arts are integrated into schoolwork, students are likely to repeat and re-emphasize a concept through different modalities, helping them remember it. They are also likely to exercise choice and work to perfect their own individual approaches. Choice and mastery enhance motivation. Moreover, thinking about (for example) how music, drawing, or words can represent the same ideas is a cognitively complex and challenging task. Students involved in such tasks report that they don't get either bored or discouraged.

My seventh-grade son just finished a final project on Macbeth. His teacher asked the students to do two arts-related tasks of their own choosing and to write a paper explaining their choices. Damian chose to illustrate five of Macbeth's scenes in Act V with one photograph and one related drawing each. He also made a two-minute film of the "Out, out, brief candle" speech, with background piano music he composed, played, and computer-distorted to make it more haunting. His paper discussed how even as Macbeth declines into darkness and despair, his last battle with Macduff reclaims some honor and offers hope to Scotland. Damian explained how the symbolism of swords, ghosts, shadows, candles, light and darkness in his film and drawings reflect this theme. Damian pursued this pretty sophisticated project completely independently, and he loved doing it. I'm sure he'll remember the project and feel connected to Shakespeare for a long time.

There's still a lot to learn about the effects of arts education. The President's Commission report is a good place to start. We should also ponder why the arts seem to be so motivating, and how we can weave motivating factors like choice, individual expression, personal goals, and mastery into more of what we ask our children to learn.

Principle vs. principal and may vs. might

2011-05-08T20:10:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to gripe about two errors in usage I've seen multiple times in the past couple of weeks. The first is failing to distinguish between principal and principle. The principal is the headmaster of the school. Your principal player is the most important member of your team.

A principle, on the other hand, is a fundamental rule, doctrine, or guide for conduct. It should never be used as an adjective. So let's not read any more LA Times stories chiding the Lakers for the way they "abandon well-worn principals," unless they mean someone is leaving graying and exhausted headmasters by the side of the road.

My other complaint is a little more subtle. Many writers don't seem to recognize that the helping verb "may" has a past tense, and that past tense is "might." For example:

He may come to the party.
He said he might come.

If you don't finish your paper, you may flunk the course.
If you hadn't finished your paper, you might have flunked the course.

James thinks Sarah may be the love of his life.
James thought Sarah might be the love of his life.

I think it's the second example where I've been seeing the most errors, both in children's books and in journalism. People write something like, "If Gore had won the election, we may not have become entangled in the Iraq war." NO! We might not have become entangled.

Formative assessment book turned in

2011-05-07T14:17:00.000-07:00

I did promise that I'd be back to blogging once I turned in the formative assessment book to Harvard Education Press. It's done--done for now, at least. There are twelve chapters by 24 authors, and then the introductory and concluding chapters written by me and my co-editor, Dan Hickey of Indiana. David Ellis, former president of Boston's Museum of Science sent me the comment that trying to get a bunch of academic authors all to turn in their chapters on time and in the right format is like pushing a wheelbarrow full of toads uphill. I have to say that although they are kindly and attractive toads, they do tend to hop out of the wheelbarrow!

The book will be called New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, and if all goes well it will come out next fall. We hope the audience will include teachers, professional developers, a professor or two, curriculum developers, and assistant superintendents for curriculum and instruction.

First, though, there will be a lot of back and forth with the press and the authors, refining the chapters, copy-editing, and most of all, making the charts and figures consistent, attractive, and informative. When it's done, I think it will be something to be proud of, with chapters on formative assessment in math, literacy, and science, and with and without substantial use of digital technology. We mean the book to paint a hopeful but realistic picture of how to use assessment in the classroom to improve the quality of teaching and the depth of student understanding.

Larry Davidson, Brookline's Pi Man

2011-05-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across this lovely blog post about last month's Lexicon evening in Brookline. Larry Davidson teaches math at Weston High School, where he taught two of my kids. He's an enthusiast of linguistics, and he also has a sister who teaches at both the college and elementary school level. It was Ellen Davidson who introduced a club of fourth grade readers to Lost in Lexicon, and it was the boys, now my favorite fourth graders, who invited me to bring Lexicon to their school.

Larry, as he explains in his post, staffed the village of Irrationality, helping kids use measurement to approximate pi.

Because of a promise made by the Mistress of Metaphor, I owe each of those boys a manuscript copy of The Ice Castle, which is still in draft form. I'll send the copies out tomorrow, I promise!

Bin Laden as ultimate villain

2011-05-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

When I learned this morning of Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of American attackers, I found myself emitting whoops of joy. The whoops came in spite of myself, because like most Americans, I don't cultivate a practice of rejoicing at the death or destruction even of adversaries. But bin Laden wasn't just an adversary: he loomed large as the Enemy, the Dark Lord of our time. His death felt like a release, a vindication, the fulfillment of a long-frustrated quest for retribution.

Bin Laden had many of the attributes of a great villain or antagonist in fiction, and I think authors have something to learn by examining why. For one thing, bin Laden was huge in his ambition, which was no less than to defeat Western humanism and return the world to an idealized version of a medieval theocracy. Mythic villains have to be after something big, something that matters. And note that if the villain is to be a leader, that goal has to be one that comes to be shared by large numbers of people. It has to appeal to the followers' sense of identity, belonging, and highest values. For a villain to have power, he has to present a vision of the future that has a logic and appeal of its own, just as the idea of returning to an incorruptible emirate guided by the wisest men and best laws has appealed to so many in the Islamic world over the past ten years.

Beyond his vision and goals, bin Laden had other characteristics that made him charismatic. He was a billionaire ascetic, apparently indifferent to luxury or even basic comforts. He cultivated a reputation for courage, appearing fearless in the face of death. He carefully managed his image, appearing grandfatherly, beatific, and soft-spoken, beseeching Americans more in sorrow than in anger as he urged us to turn away from our leaders and our involvement in the Middle East. He had the trappings of goodness, even of saintliness. Remember, this was a man hundreds if not thousands of other men were willing to die for.

Too often in fiction, especially in fantasy and in writing for children, we create villains nobody would willingly follow. When we create monsters who rule only by fear and torture, like Voldemort, Sauron, the Emperor of Star Wars, and many lesser villains, we risk making stooges or cartoon figures of their followers. There may be a cathartic shudder of satisfaction in reading about the defeat of such creatures, but authors miss out on a chance to portray the true attraction of evil. Evil doesn't feel evil at first. It feels meaningful, powerful, perhaps convenient (think embezzlement) or perhaps noble (think of National Socialism restoring the dignity of Germany).

Our adversaries have their own ideologies, their own persuasive arguments, and even their own virtues. There is something to admire in them, maybe even something the heroes on our side lack. It shouldn't always be easy at the outset of a fictional work to decide where goodness lies. (One example of a series where it is not easy is Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials.) I believe even young readers can tolerate a degree of subtlety and initial uncertainty about where their allegiance should lie. And that's important. After all, the first step in fighting evil lies in recognizing it, wherever it arises.

Gormenghast and the Royal Wedding

2011-04-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

I have been astonished at the fawning attention paid by the media and public to the to the royal wedding of William and Kate. Apparently our love of pomp and pageantry runs closer to the surface than I thought. Or is it our constant hope for romance, or our love of tradition?

My most recent reading has only underlined my bemusement. At the strong urging of Lexicon's new editor, I've just finished reading Titus Groan, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. Written starting just after World War II, the trilogy is something of a cult classic. I couldn't find it at Barnes & Noble or on Kindle, but a bookseller in a small shop in Richmond, just outside Kew Gardens, took it off the shelf for me without hesitation.

Gormenghast is a huge, dark, brooding castle in a grim domain where Titus Groan is born to become the 77th earl. The book itself, poetic and powerful in its descriptions (which is why Ian wanted me to read it), is ponderous, focused more on world-building than on pacing. Its overriding theme seems to be the suffocating weight of tradition. Nearly every moment of every day in the life of an earl is dictated by centuries-old traditions. Nobody remembers the reason for the traditions, and nobody can discern their meaning; nevertheless, the dictatorial librarian Sourdust, and later his even more stringent son Barquentine, demand that daily ceremonies be carried out to the smallest detail. By the end of the first book Titus is only two years old, but he has already set the world (or the earldom, which is the same thing) in disarray by tossing two ceremonial objects off a raft into the lake.

One finishes the book thinking, "Poor Titus! This little bit of unconscious rebelliousness in his spirit is doomed to be crushed out of him in the years to come." And given the Royal Wedding (Let's capitalize it to give it the weight it deserves) everywhere in the news, I couldn't help but think, "Isn't that what happened to Princess Di?"

Kate Middleton, a commoner, wore the traditional ring and the traditional tiara, rode in a traditional carriage and said the traditional words in Westminster Abbey, surrounded by people with archaic titles wearing archaic costumes. How courageous she is, to step into a life of constant scrutiny and expectation, when the last woman to stand in her shoes flamed out in a life of bulimia, betrayal, divorce, and finally the screech of tearing metal and shattering glass.

Formative Assessment

2011-04-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

It's been ten days since my last post. The reason is that it's coming down to crunch time for a book manuscript I've promised to deliver to the Harvard Education Press. No, it's not my own book, not really. This one will be called New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, and it contains twelve chapters by different authors working in education. I'm just the person who recruited them to the task, keeps hounding them, reviews and sends back their chapters, tries to decide how to cut the 28 figures per chapter they want to the 3 or 4 figures per chapter Harvard wants...and oh, yes, I need to write the introduction and conclusion.

I do have a co-editor, Daniel T. Hickey from Indiana University, who is actually an expert on formative assessment, while I'm an expert on... um... well, I'm trying to help make the writing of teachers and academics interesting and accessible to a general education audience. Dan's writing a chapter of his own, and he'll help with the first and last chapters as well.

Formative assessment, or assessment for learning, is the practice of constantly probing and monitoring what students understand in order to make adjustments to one's teaching. Ideally, it's what goes on in the classroom every day, as the teacher asks questions, walks around listening to student conversations, designs a mini-pop quiz to see if she got a point across, and then makes plans for the next day based on what she's learned. In reality, formative assessment is hard to do, and the twelve projects described in our book have all labored to come up with ways of supporting this teacher work. The examples come from math, science, and literature classrooms, and about half of them rely on the clever, integrated use of technology tools. In fact, all the classroom examples present tools, from computer programs that gather student responses in real time to simple templates for choosing what math problems to use next or how to plan a lesson.

Maybe this sounds a bit dry to those of you who aren't immersed in education and data as I am, but think of it this way. A classroom with good formative assessment is one where you don't have one set of students incredibly bored because they already know all this and another set completely lost because they're missing some basic understanding. How much more efficient schooling would be if teachers could spend most of their time working right at the edge of their students' knowledge!

For me, an ideal image of formative assessment is a parent sitting with a child who is learning to read. Together the parent and child have chosen an attractive, interesting book, one the child wants to master. Maybe the parent has read it aloud once or twice already, modeling the task for the child. As the child starts sounding his way out through the sentences, the parent helps by pointing to words, by giving hints and encouragement, or by asking the child to repeat a given line. If the child tires, the parent may step in to read every other page. When the book is done, the parent celebrates the child's achievement and is in a great position to choose the next book they will read together.

So back to work. I'll talk to you again when I emerge.

Report from the London Book Fair

2011-04-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

On the advice of my Scarletta editor and publisher, I came to the London Book Fair this year. April in England wasn't a hard sell. During the day my husband and daughter go to parks and museums while I wander the convention floor or squeeze into overcrowded seminars with terrible acoustics. In the evening we dine or go to the theater as a family.

A big theme of the conference is how the digital world is affecting the publishing world. There's an ongoing strand on the technical aspects of e-books and how they affect publishing models. There's another strand on "transmedia," creating "properties" or varied but related content that can pull in print books, e-books, graphic novels, TV, movies, Internet games, and/or apps all at once. Criteria for trans- or cross-media properties, according to one speaker, include use of more than one medium, different content for each medium, integrated use, delivery on multiple devices, and interactivity.

One such property was The Truth about Marika, a Swedish television series from 2007. The "docudrama" series claimed that many Swedes disappear every year as they are inducted into a secret society. As the series started, a "friend" of the "real" Marika" started a blog complaining that the drama series was exploiting the true story of her friend's disappearance. People were invited to use the Internet to research clues about the society, take film and photographs, and send in their findings to a central site in what is referred to as a "mixed reality" game. Interest and viewership was huge, and the series won awards for innovation, but viewers' enthusiasm turned to a feeling of betrayal when they learned that every part of the series, complaint, blog, and even a staged confrontation had been scripted and even filmed in advance. A less manipulative example closer to home is Scholastic's children's series The 39 Clues, which combines books (each written by a different, known children's author), online gaming, trading cards, and real prizes.

Both examples present another reality about these projects that are conceived of as transmedia or crossmedia from the first. They are group projects; they don't issue from a single author's imagination. The producers and marketers conceive of them, and then the artistic staff, including authors, are hired for piecework. It was encouraging, then, to attend a panel on books that successfully transfer to movies. Harry Potter's editor at Bloomsbury fielded a question on how she identifies properties that have the potential to become successful movies. She said, "I don't look for properties. I look for books. I look for wonderful author voices and originality."

I'm all for exploring how new technologies can catch audiences up in the excitement of a storytelling experience. But it's good to hear a reminder that in the end, the story is what matters most.