Are You Using Them? Are Teachers In Your School? Last spring I gave a series  of talks on the West Coast, and in one school they were using Promethean Whiteboards. tinyurl.com/dfkgk7 At the time I didn’t even know what they were. And in class the one we used was a bit glitchy. But since then I [...]

A Couple of News Items Today’s Times has a story about Claudette Colvin, with a wonderful photo of her with Phil Hoose when their book won the NBA young readers prize, tinyurl.com/ybthjtz My interview with Phil will run in the January issue of SLJ. Here is the latest on Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, which he will announce next [...]

What Happens When We Know Something, But Not Enough? One of the great challenges of our time — for adults and younger people — is partial knowledge. That is, the tools available to science and medicine are allowing us to understand how our bodies and minds function in amazing new ways. We can isolate genes, [...]

Some Thoughts From a Quick Trip to NCTE I hobbled on to the train down to Philadelphia on Friday to attend the National Council of Teachers of English conference. My view of the meeting was skewed in a few ways — I attended two seesions honoring notable books, so I got a close view of a selected [...]

More Facts or More Thoughts? Last night I met with two experts on education and education reform. They have both been working with the government, foundations, and private companies for decades — seeing one phase of reform replaced by another. They made clear to me something Nina had raised in her comment the other day [...]

The Times coverage of last night’s NBA awards fits our interests perfectly — note the speech from the adult NF winner and the focus on the young readers’ winner — again for the first time a NF author — congratulations to Philip Hoose and to non fiction writers, editors, copy editors and proof readers everywhere [...]

"Question the Answers" Time out for a quick book report — you’ll see, there is a reason for this: My men’s reading group meets in a couple of weeks, and we’ll be talking about Craig Mullaney’s book whose title is the title of this post. Mullaney is a graduate of West Point, an Army Ranger, [...]

My Doctoral Adviser Once Said of Historians, "We Are the Elders; We Pass On the Knowledge of the Past" If you know something, it is your responsibility to share it with those who lack that knowledge. You have been presented with a gift, but the terms of the bequest are clear — you must share [...]

More Fallout from the CCBC Discussion Sorry to be late posting today, over the weekend I got caught up in the CCBC thread on reviewing where both my own views, and, more generally the issue of NF reviewing, came up in many posts. A few key themes emerged from the discussion that are worth our [...]

Afghanistan As we wait to see what Obama decides on troops, I realized that I had been avoiding my (and perhaps our) responsibility. I am not sure what the right strategy is there — this blog is not a advertisement for one political camp or another. But it suddenly hit me that our nation is [...]