I think one of the big necessities of the Common Core is that the librarian, whether school or public, and the teachers have to get back together. I think they’ve been out of touch, the teachers have been overwhelmed, they’ve been dealing with testing and NCLB, the librarians very often suffer from the stubbed-toe complex, like I tried, she didn’t listen, why bother? That can’t work.
Because the biggest problem we’re seeing in the teachers is not so much that they’re resistant or want the right answer, it’s they don’t know the books.
They know fiction, or they can know fiction or they know what’s around or they know the book they used last year or the teacher down the hall did. They do not know nonfiction. They don’t even know that it exists in these wonderful forms. The librarians do know those books, or at least they’re trained to know how to know. They know the Orbis Pictus Award comes from NCTE. They know there’s the NCSS-CBC list of notable trade books.
They know about the Sibert. They know about the Young Adult Nonfiction Award. So they can be the resource, to come to this, you should say, “let’s build a cluster.” For example, last year Candace Fleming came up with a new Amelia Earhart book, which had a very innovative structure, uncovered some new facts about Amelia Earhart. Put that next to two or three other Amelia Earhart books, not as one’s right and one’s wrong, how are they different? How could they be different? And think about this. Have the teacher work with the kids; how can nonfiction be different? How could it be that… it can be different…
In the old days it couldn’t be different, ‘cause there was a right answer. In the new days they can be different, ‘cause there’s a point of view. Just as, what I always say when I do school visits, or what I sometimes say is, if you hear a rumor in the school, X did Y, do you necessarily believe it? Maybe you do. Or maybe you ask your other friend “do you think that really happened?” You gather evidence. You hear stories around you all the time. You try to figure out which make sense, which don’t.
That’s the same thing we’re doing with our books and in our nonfiction.
