My 91 year old mother called Saturday to compare notes on Jeremy Lin with my 11 year old son. That officially confirms his status as a phenomenon — beyond basketball, beyond sports. If by any chance there is a reader of this blog who is not “up” on the latest pun on his name, and the reasons behind it, here’s the short version of his story (and then I’ll explain the link to the CC). Lin grew up in Palo Alto, a 5 3 skinny 9th grader, he had no prospects in basketball. But he played pick up games with… Read More

As some of you know, several years ago Patty Campbell and I edited War Is, a collection of interviews and stories about the experience of war. Our purpose was to give teenagers who faced a decision about entering the service — and, though we did not at first think of this, the families of those in the service — a resource for understanding what it is to be in combat. Several other YA books, fiction and nonfiction, have been published dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan. All good. But, as this survey shows, http://tinyurl.com/896uap4, there is a much larger issue developing… Read More

My nonfiction class is going swimmingly, and I am learning as much as the students. Yesterday we had two guests, the great reviewer and critic Dr. Betty Carter, and Kathleen Krull, whose “Lives of” books are all over library shelves. Kathleen said something very interesting about herself — which one of the students then amplified. She said she sees herself as a writer, not a historian. Her gift, and her goal, is to write about people young readers should get to know (in other words they may well not know) with a soupcon of humor, a dash of wit, a… Read More

The title of this blog is the most familiar instruction in writing classes throughout this land. And even way before you turn on your computer to revise your latest effort at the Great American Novel, way down in Elementary School teachers encourage students to include “details” to build up the story. It as if our entire nation were on a class trip out in the forest making sure to note the glistening of dew and how moss feels soft when brushed and spongy at the press of a finger. Details are nice, and can create an immediate mental picture which… Read More

This headline article in today’s Times is a must read: http://tinyurl.com/7jhsxbq The very short precis is the headline — the education gap today is more one of class than of race. As one Stanford professor put it, “We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race.” This is a very personal issue for me because our town is truly black-white integrated in population — while in the past many suburban towns whose black population… Read More

Yesterday’s guest in my Non Fiction class at Rutgers was Sally Walker, who is not only a fine writer of books for younger readers, but a lively guest speaker. In fact I’m afraid our discussions, comparing notes, bits of disagreement proved all too entertaining for the class. Sally’s stories of working at the Smithsonian, then being invited to participate in digs, contributing insights into a Smithsonian exhibition, and then writing made a very significant larger point: many experts want to communicate with a wider public, perhaps especially young people. They know they are doing exciting work, they want to share… Read More

My last post was about the individual — well this weekend Evgeny Morozov, whose book on The Net Delusion, I have recommended here before, wrote a fine Op-Ed on the Facebooked, Social Networked, Googled net: http://tinyurl.com/76m3zpr The idea that the net is not a clearn open door, but rather is as sticky as, well, a web — where you leave traces of yourself all over the place for others to gather, collect, analyze, and sell — is hardly news. Indeed the world of parents, teachers, and librarians quickly raised alarms about chat rooms and predators. But Morozov — with charm… Read More

I am reading a book all of you should read, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands http://tinyurl.com/28wrobt I mean you should get it and read it as quickly as you can. It is so powerful it effects everything we do. The book is about that region between the then USSR and Poland where 14 million people were slaughtered by the Nazis and the Communists between 1930-45. We think we know the Holocaust, and we do know many individual stories — which is wonderful. But as Snyder points out, the camps deceive us. The camps were both slave labor sites and death machines. Both… Read More

Yesterday Candace Fleming Skyped in to my NF class at Rutgers, and we spent a lively 90 minutes talking about her books, her process, her passion for giving young readers history in new ways that may spark new questions. By the end we began talking about the book she has just finished, and she told us that it has something new for her in it: within the book itself she writes about her own journey in creating it. That sounded wonderful, perfectly in key with the Common Core (which she did not know), and a real hand out to her… Read More