Literacy in the Sciences

When I’m in the field, I have several different notebooks, and one of them is just a little pocket-sized thing that I just write stuff down. I have another notebook for interviews that I conduct. And probably the most important is my field journal. And at the end of every day, instead of just sitting there writing a diary, what I do is I write a narrative. I write a story.

I write what this day taught me. What was kind of the theme of the day. And believe me, at the end of the day, it’s the last thing you feel like doing, you know. Because you just sprained your ankle, or you hurt your hand on a stick and you’re really tired ‘cause you walked 15 miles and your camel was in a bad mood, or whatever. But you make yourself do that. And a lot of my sentences and paragraphs are pulled almost directly from that field journal.

And so if there’s an immediacy and excitement to the books, it because it really came out of the field journal as it happened.

I have a brand-new book out. This was probably my most emotional expedition yet for kids. It’s called Kakapo Rescue. Nick took the pictures, I wrote the words. We waited five years for the opportunity to write this book. It’s about this extremely rare parrot that only lives on tiny islands off the southern coast of New Zealand, and rarely nests.

But when it does, this bird has inspired the most elaborate and the most compelling effort ever in the history of the world to save a bird. When we went, there were fewer than 90 of these kakapos on the planet. They’re giant, flightless, nocturnal parrots. They can weigh up to 11 pounds. They look like a monster parakeet.

They’re very, very friendly, very intelligent. And Nick and I for five years had kept our springs free, because they might nest. And every spring we’d like wait for the call to see if they were nesting. And then finally, they did, and I got on the plane with less than two weeks’ notice, and just flew to New Zealand. And we went to this island.

And to be part of this effort. Every single one of these birds is so important, because there’s fewer than 90 there. Every bird has a backpack with radio telemetry so you can follow the bird everywhere it goes. The scientists know where every bird on the planet, every kakapo is at any given time. And every nest has a pair of nest nannies attending to the nest.

Volunteers, who have also waited for years for this opportunity, set up a tent right outside the underground nest of this giant nocturnal parrot, and in the nest, which is quite big, there’s a video monitor. So they can see what it’s doing every second. And they also have set up this little infrared beam so that when the mother parrot leaves the nest, it breaks that beam, and a doorbell sounds in the volunteers’ tent.

So the volunteers, when she leaves the nest, she’s going to get something to eat. The volunteers then put on all their warm clothes, ‘cause this is in the latitude known as the “roaring 40s.” It’s cold. It’s the middle of the night. They put on all their clothes. They stagger out to the nest.

And they take out the little baby and put a warm blanket on it. I mean, how cute is that? Every chick. It looks like a little wet piece of tissue. Baby parrots are very funny-looking critters. I mean, baby humans are kinda funny-looking too, but. They’re so ugly they’re cute. But here you are, holding — they’re only — when we got there, we got to hold the only kakapo chick on the planet.

And that was so thrilling. And that first baby chick died when we were there. And we all wept. The scientists, the volunteers. And it was horrible that this dear little thing lost its life, but it also was like the only chick on the planet. But then we were there when another one hatched, and watched it hatch from the egg. So you get to be part of that, and you get to share that with your readers. And you really show them that there is nothing on this earth more important than what these people are doing, trying to save this species from extinction. And it really is worth a very great deal of effort, and a very great deal of care.

And even if our readers never see a wild kakapo, which many of them are not going to do, knowing that our planet has this wondrous, 11-pound, flightless, funny, smart bird who can live to be 70, 80, 100 years old, that has memories of stuff that, you know, your grandmother isn’t gonna remember. That this bird continues to exist and adorn the earth, I hope that matters to these readers after you’ve taken them on that expedition.

And these parrots, and the volunteers, and the scientists, they were such great teachers. And to be able to bring back the immediacy and the emotion of that expedition was a really great privilege. So right now, that’s my favorite of all the kids’ books that Nick and I have ever done together.

When Nick and I created “Scientists in the Field,” what we were looking for was to be writing, not just about some animal, a bunch of facts about it, we wanted to provide some real drama. We wanted to take kids on a real, exciting, real-life expedition. And our books have narrative. And there wasn’t a whole lot out there. Not only do we have a narrative, but we have these great heroes and heroines in our narratives, who I think are great role models for kids. Scientists— a lot of people who are working in science in the field today— didn’t even like science when they were growing up because they thought it was a big book of answers you had to memorize, and not a process, and not an adventure, not exploring. But that’s what it is. And in the field, as a scientist, you’re really using so much more than science too, aren’t you?

I mean, you’re MacGyvering in the field. You’re using everything you ever learned. And for me, to do these books, I’ve had to use my physical fitness skills. I’ve had to swim for hours. I’ve had to ride camels, ride horses, and elephants. I’ve had to learn foreign languages. And it really helps to know one foreign language. And boy, even if you don’t learn the whole language, just being able to say hello in Bengali or Mongolian or talk pidgin, really makes people happy to see you.

All the stuff I learned as a Girl Scout, I’ve used in researching these books. And scientists need that. I think that field science or writing about field science is just one of the most fun and exciting and demanding and thrilling jobs you could ever have. I feel like I’m the luckiest person on Earth.

I always go to the library first thing, and of course I read all that I can about Mongolia if I’m going to write about the snow leopards, or New Guinea if I’m writing about tree kangaroos, or Bengali culture if I’m going to go to West Bengal. So, the research really does start in the library. And I try to see any films about my subject. But a lot of what we do, and scientists and field theory, is the science is unfolding in front of you. You couldn’t get it in a book. So the story is really happening in front of you, and what you want to do is go to the field with your heart full of all the background you can get. But you also want to be very receptive to this very stuff that is gonna happen in front of you. Maybe for the first time ever, anywhere.

And it invariably does, because the universe is just so full of gifts for us. And the teachers are going to come out of the woodwork and show us the way.

Animals have senses that we don’t. They are perceiving realities in our world that we don’t. But if you’re with an animal, you’re kind of seeing that reality. Seeing with new eyes. For example, tarantulas can taste with their feet. One time I was holding a tarantula, and it was a nice tarantula, but we hadn’t met before.

And the animal had never been handled before, to my knowledge. It started picking up its feet in a way that I know that’s often a threat gesture. They rear up, like a horse, you know, and often they show their fangs. It wasn’t showing its fangs to me. What was happening was, I was standing in a warm place, and my hand was sweating. And it was going, “eww!”

So there I was with this animal who was tasting the world with its feet. Same thing— any bird that you ever meet, that bird sees colors that we don’t even have names for. Their eyes, and their brains are different from ours, physically different from ours. They see all these colors that we don’t know, and they probably shimmer the way that iridescent feathers of, say, hummingbirds shimmer for us.

And elephants, they can hear infrasound. So can whales, they can make infrasound. Sounds lower than what we can hear. Sounds that can travel, in the case of whales, halfway around the globe. So they are perceiving the same world that we live in, but in a way that we can’t access. But we almost access it, being in their proximity. And we’re sharing that same reality.

So your reality really opens up when you’re in the presence of an animal. It’s like you’re being invited into their world, which is really our world, and in that way they expand our world in a way that a person doesn’t. And so, I feel very lucky that so many of my friends are animals. And to restrict your interest, I think, to just one species, is cutting yourself off from this great green world in a way that a lot of people may not appreciate.

It’s almost as if… Imagine a person who only listened to one kind of music, or only ate one kind of food. If you ate nothing but hot dogs, or if you were surrounding yourself with only the color pink. Well, when you have friends who are other species, that is mind-expanding, and world-expanding. And you feel much more at home, I think, on the earth.

I started reading about these ancient marine reptiles. Everyone knows about dinosaurs, but very few people realize that in the oceans at the same time were these incredible reptiles — many of them just as large as the dinosaurs and every bit as ferocious if not much more ferocious — because they were all predators unlike the dinosaurs, some of which were grazers or whatever.

I started thinking, “Why aren’t these animals on the radar? So many kids like dinosaurs. You would think they would really love these things, too.” I wrote up a proposal, sent it to one publisher, got rejected. I had an editor at Houghton Mifflin, who was really interested in it; but then she left and went to Charlesbridge Publishing.

She called me up when she got there and she said, “Sneed, I still want to do this book.” I started researching about these ancient marine reptiles which included things like ichthyosaurs, which looked like dolphins, but they were reptiles. A great example of convergent evolution, they were built for speed because they had to pursue squid and other high speed prey.

A beautiful example of evolution where it can take two totally different groups of animals — mammals and reptiles. I looked into those and these animals with kind of squat little bodies and really long necks called the elasmasaur, which are kind of a plesiosaur. What else happened was — researching the book — is I started getting into the stories of their discoveries.

It turns out, these ancient marine reptiles, or sea dragons, were much more popular and had been discovered before dinosaurs. Back in the early 1800s, every one was crazy about these ancient marine reptiles. When dinosaurs came along, they just fell off the map, basically. You learn a lot of these interesting stories about the early scientists who were studying these things. One woman was named Mary Anning and she was just an amazing fossil hunter. She discovered the first plesiosaur in England. She discovered the first terradactyl fossil and just really advanced science very far.

In America, there were two scientists who were constantly competing, who could make the best find of these giant marine reptiles? There’s a funny story there. One of them discovered this giant plesiosaur and a elasmasaur with the long necks. He was so anxious to get it on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Natural History.

They assembled it all and he put the head on the tip of the tail by mistake. Well, who do you think discovered this? Well, his archrival who walked into the door one day and he’s looking at this thing. He said, “Beautiful find, but why did you put the head at the tail?” Once word got out, his credibility was just shot forever after that. It was fun to write about this natural history of these animals, but also about the process of discovery in many interesting little stories that you find out about them.

Science is a tough one because a lot of people feel very intimidated by science. There is this stereotype of scientists locked away in their laboratories, or of being so shockingly brilliant that they can’t even talk to real people — the rest of us. There are scientists like that, but I’ve also found that scientists are also… Once you get past this facade that they have to maintain because they’re in academics or whatever, they are real people and the reason they become scientists is because they’re just passionate about learning new things and discovering new things about our planet.

One of the things that made me go into science writing initially was I realized there are enough scientists to save the planet, but if nobody understands what those scientists know, it’s not going to make a difference. Because politicians are not elected by scientists, they are elected by the general public.

If the general public doesn’t understand enough science to recognize how quickly the earth is deteriorating or how we need to manage our natural resources, they’re not going to hold politicians accountable for making responsible decisions that protect resources not only for our generation, but for future generations. My goal from the very get-go was to help transmit this knowledge that scientists had to the general public and in such a way that wasn’t intimidating. Now have I achieved that? I’m not sure. I hope so because one thing — the real key point for scientists, or for young people, is to have someone introduce them to it.

Yet parents and teachers often feel like, “Well, how can I share science with young people? I don’t know how to do this because I don’t know any science.” One of the beauties of science books, especially for young people, is you don’t have to have any prior knowledge of science to share and discover. You can sit down with a five-year-old and read them a book like Teeth, or whatever the topic happens to be and you can learn in that process along with them. One of the goals I’ve always had is to make accessible science books for young people.

The other thing in education that I believe is changing slowly — and I hope changes much more rapidly — is science has always been considered this subject over here. You know, “Oh, it’s a specialty. If we have time to get to it, we’ll go look at it.” What kids really need to know is reading and writing and math, which is true to some extent.

They do need to know those things, but science is not this thing over here. Science is part of everything we are and everything we do. It affects our economy. It affects our relationships. It affects what we want to eat. It affects who we’re attracted to in life. Every aspect of our lives is part of science. Understanding science to me is understanding ourselves and my wish for teachers is to not just pick a cutesy little fiction picture book to teach reading and writing, pick up a science book and use that to teach literacy. Right away they’re going to grab all these reluctant readers who never wanted to read before.

It’ll start imparting this sense among children that science is not something unattainable or unapproachable; it’s part of everyday life. If I’ve achieved anything in my career, it’s the hope that I’ve written books that are being picked up by people who’ve never picked up a science book before, and who want to just share that sense of discovery with young people.

I was born in the Bronx, and the Bronx is part of New York City, and, of course, it’s a very urban area. But even in the Bronx, there were many vacant lots, and the vacant lots were like jungles for tiny animals – the insects that live there, the plants and the weeds and the cats that would prowl all around the the vacant lot. And when I was older, I wrote a book called Science in a Vacant Lot, which sort of told about those things that one can explore very close to home.

Many of the books I write are about far, distant places – about the galaxy, stars and the universe; and even far, distant places on Earth, like the mountains of the Himalayas. But many of the books are also about things which are right next door, so, for example, I’ve written books about dogs and books about cats. I’ve written books about all the little animals that you can keep in a jar, called Pets in a Jar. I’ve also written books about observational astronomy, because when I was a kid, I was president of the Junior Astronomy Club at the American Museum of Natural History. And at that time, we had 900 members all across the country. We used to have observation meetings in Central Park, where a group of about a hundred of us would walk in, escorted by a policeman, to make sure that we were safe.

I choose the photographs, or take the photographs for my books, even before I begin writing them. I know the kinds of images that I’m looking for. I choose the images either from a source such as NASA; or Jet Propulsion Laboratory, if it’s outer space; or scientists who have been studying wolves in the field for many years. And these photographs that I choose, I winnow through them – I go through them and choose the images which are the most striking, the most arresting to me, because I’m almost childlike in the sense that I know what interests me, and if it interests me, again, I think it might interest the kid.

And after I get the photographs, I do a thumbnail of the book, and I sort of design the book before I even begin writing it. I know that on this spread we’re going to be talking about a particular thing, and I have two or three photographs which I know will be used on that page. And all of this stuff goes into the editor – the photographs and my text – and what the designer does is decide whether to use the photograph on one page or another, or to spread it across the back of the text, but the pages stay together. And all of the books that I write are not written as individual pages. You can read any of my books from beginning to end without the pictures, because it tells a story. And I think that that’s very important, particularly in a book on photographs. I want the kids to be drawn into the book, and I want them to read it from beginning to end.

I’m often struck by how interested nonreaders, or early beginning readers, or readers who are having difficulty in reading – how interested they are in my books. And they remind me of a story that a teacher told me. The boy was reading a book about snakes, and he was lying on the floor and wiggling back and forth. And his teacher said to him, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’m a sidewinder moving across the sands of the desert.” And she told me later that that was the first book he ever asked to be read to him, and carried it around because he was so proud that he knew about all of the pictures in the book.

I think it’s important that we get the interest of a nonreader before we try to teach them how to read. And all of my early books – that is, the younger books – are so geared that if a child picks them up, he’s going to be fascinated by the photographs, and he will want to know what is it in this photograph that he’s seeing. Many of them ask to be read to, and many of them learn to read because they have the same page read to them time and time again.

Well it was certainly not an easy task, this is my very first anthology. I would not claim to be an anthologist by trade. And I knew I had to have 200 poems, and I knew National Geographic had the greatest collection of photographs of animals in the world. And so I just set out, first of all I made a long, long list of animals because I wanted to try to include 200 different animals, I didn’t succeed at that, I mean there are a couple of poems about elephants, and a couple of poems about spiders and so forth.

But that’s how I did it and I also made a list of potential poets. But the fact is that National Geographic wanted to use as many public domain poems, and anonymous poems as I could find.

And finding a children’s poem published before 1923 that resonated in the way that I suggested in the introduction is difficult indeed because those poems were written for a different audience, in a different time. I did use many of those public domain poems but I spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out which ones were the most kid friendly.

And then as far as the other ones go I used poems that were recently published or some, I commissioned some from my friends, I asked them to write about specific topics, and they did so, and in some cases it was a question of choosing between poet A, B, and C for this particular, for a particular elephant, it was a dicey proposition.

Well I think of it as both a coffee table art book but also one that you share with children and grandchildren sitting on your lap on the sofa. I hope this book sets a standard for books of this type for years to come.

I think it, I think in the sense of going from — Of filling out each section was really vital. And doing it as well as I could, and doing it with an admixture of poems that were wildly different from each other. I didn’t want page after another coming like tracer bullets, I wanted them to read, I wanted each one to be kind of a stunner, to make, to contain maybe an a-ha moment for the reader, I don’t know if I succeeded in that.

But I was — well you can tell I was very pleased with the outcome.

My objective, and I’ve said from the very first, is to write across the curriculum, and to write across the age spectrum. Occasionally I’ll write a “I can read” book for the very young. I’d also like to think that I’m helping to create another genre which is adult picture books.

I happen to agree with you, I think some of my books really are intended for adults or at least can be appreciated by adults as well as YA or the YA high school audience. And you know, I’m trying to write about every subject under the sun, math teachers and sciences teachers come up to me and say, I’m sorry math and science it’s, they’re like oil and water to poetry. I said not to me, I’ve written a book called Arithmetickle, I’ve written a book called Edgar Allen Poe’s Pie where I put classic poems into math puzzlers.

There’s nothing under the sun you can’t write a poem about, nothing. And it really bugs me. I heard this today at the school I spoke at, one of the teachers said this and he said it with almost a certain amount of pride, it was too bad because he used the term, and this is to me it’s unfortunate, two words that I think are the worst words in the English language when put together: Poetry and unit.

When I hear a teacher talk about a poetry unit, I know that he or she is going to spend maybe 3 or four days at poetry and then thank the lord it’s over, we can move onto something really important. But to me, poetry ought to be an everyday experience for every child, and you can do it with DEAR, Drop Everything and Read, take five minutes, you can.

I try to encourage principals at elementary schools, you should be reading a poem every day on morning announcements. It would take fifteen to thirty seconds, you would have no end to volunteers, teachers, students, custodial staff, secretaries, everybody would want to be on it.

Billy Collins actually came up with that idea it’s called, “Poetry 180” for 180 days in the school year, he came up with that as the US Poet Laureate, but I wrote to him in fact, I said, “Why didn’t you include elementary schools? That’s such a wonderful idea.” I think it should also be done for elementary schools.