We're Rallying the Troops

               What was your reaction to Roz
Schanzer’s excellent post,
yesterday?  Frankly, it made steam come
out of my ears.  I took it as a shot
across our bow.  The Washington
Post article she linked to and the article last week in the NY Times show an enormous lack of
knowledge about our genre.  It’s almost
as if we’re invisible to the rest of the world. 
We’re fighting all kinds of assumptions. 
Here are a few right off the top of my head:

·        
All nonfiction is
equal and equally boring.

·        
Nonfiction is
reading a manual

·        
“there isn’t that human connection that you get with
literature. And the kids are shutting down”

·        
Nonfiction is “recipes and train schedules.”

·        
“nonfiction requires more rigor than a literary novel”

·        
“nonfiction may help you win the corner office but won’t
necessarily nourish the soul.”




And the articles that I excerpted these quotes from mention only long-form
journalism as an example of high quality nonfiction; neither article mentions
the existence of our genre of nonfiction literature for kids.




It’s not like we haven’t been thinking about
this for a looooong time.  Here are a few
of the reasons our books are not studied in classrooms as the CCSS say they
should be taught:  

·        
They don’t come
with ancillary material such as lesson plans, and teacher’s guides and study
questions.

·        
Educators don’t understand
how they support and fit into the curriculum. 


·        
Teachers are
afraid to stray from the prescribed reading material for fear something might
show up on the assessment tests that they should have “covered” but missed.

·        
Teachers are
over-worked, over-scheduled and have very little time to invest in doing
something differently unless they know it will work.

·        
Many educators
have not taken the time to read even one of our books.  Teachers have no time to read them.
Librarians may beg teachers to work with them and pull books but often they don’t
have much influence. 

·        
There is a LOT of
confusion about the CCSS.  Educators need
to understand that the standards are in
the way things are taught, not in the books themselves.  Teaching from badly written material is NOT
the way to teach kids to read to learn—one of the basic literacy skills of the
CCSS. So they need to find out that our books are going to liberate them to
teach with much more creativity, critical thinking and, yes, humanity. And
reading is not just for ELA classes but for all subject areas.  Our books are not competing with the teaching
 of fictional literature. 




iNK Think Tank is in the process of
becoming a company that will address these issues.  It’s been a learning curve to find out how to
be a business but, after three years, it’s starting to come together. Here are
some of the things we’re planning:  (I’m
into lists today.)

·        
We are going to
expand our membership to include you, our readers.  If you were a member, what would you want
from such a membership? We’re thinking lesson plans, book clubs with online
discussions, a community of sharing and strategizing about using nonfiction in
the classroom.

·        
We will have the
money to pay for high-quality lesson plans, and consultants, and  passionate advocates and we invite you to
participate. 

·        
We’re not yet
sure how things will develop but we already have a mailing list of thousands
of registered users for our database and will use it to keep you informed.  So
if you’d like to be involved please register in the iNK Think Tank database and
be sure to use an email address that won’t come up against a school
firewall. 

·        
If you have ideas
and suggestions about how you personally can help, please send them in to: thoughts@inkthinktank.com





It’s
clear that we authors can’t fight this alone; we need your help. Please join
us.  Learning is a struggle, but the
community that reads this blog knows that it can be a joyous one.  It’s time to help the rest of the world find
out.



PS.  Yesterday, I sent Roz's comments to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post, who responded with interest.  Here two posts of hers hot off the keyboard:  Common Core Reading, Pros and Cons; and List: What Common Core Authors Suggest High-Schoolers Should Read.