The other side to it is I hope more and more of all of our readers, our best readers, middle and struggling, is coming to recognize that thinking is pleasure. Thinking is not a responsibility, I have to execute this assignment. It’s exciting your brain cells. I call it, it’s endorphins for the brain. It’s when you make connections, it’s when something you didn’t know before, you look at from a new angle.
And that’s what the Common Core wants you to see, nonfiction as pleasure reading. Pleasure because it excites your brain cells, because you’re knowing more, ‘cause you’re seeing things differently, ‘cause you’re coming up with a completely new argument. One of my favorite experiences is I wrote book called If Stones Could Speak, where I got to spend part of a couple of summers at Stonehenge with a team of archaeologists. And it was about how I got to live out my childhood fantasy of being an archaeologist.
And the key point in this book was that a man from Madagascar, an archaeologist from Madagascar, asked a question that none of the famous British archaeologists had ever asked, which opened a whole new door to Stonehenge, and a 12-year-old boy saw evidence at Stonehenge that no one had ever seen. So it’s about asking new questions, it’s about showing that I was wrong as an 11-year-old to believe there were no new discoveries, and I was teaching this or talking about this to 4th graders, actually, in Houston.
And this 4th grade girl, looking at the book, pointed out a set of questions I hadn’t asked about my own book, which I then e-mailed the archaeologist and she was right. And I was so thrilled, because she did to me what I was telling them to do to the world. And I think if the Common Core works, that’s what’s going to happen. The young readers will be challenging what their teachers tell them, what I tell them in books.
