Reading List

"We are a country that imagines itself as democratic, and yet the majority has never cared much for equality."

So smart. Real history, but very readable. It upended many things I thought I knew, plus it could not be more relevant.

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Racism? Or Just a Proud Slice of History?

When you write social studies lessons, which I do but rarely, you learn quickly how every word matters. There is no objective viewpoint; both writer and reader bring bias to the text.

The other day, Chuck sent me a clipping about a new Scholastic book for young readers called A Birthday Cake for George Washington. The author is a New Yorker with a Caribbean-Iranian background; the illustrator is African-American, and the book tells the story of a real-life chef in George Washington's home, a chef who was also a slave. It is primarily about his relationship with his daughter, also a real person. As the writer of the blog noted, it appears to be "a book for parents who want to teach their children that slavery, American style, wasn't that bad."

I LOLed at the commentary and passed the article on to DZ, whose connections in the children's book biz allowed her to find out the moment Scholastic decided to scrap the book. This was after the VP of Scholastic, a well-respected African-American award-winning author of books based on historical personages, wrote a blogpost in support of the book. It was also after 900+ people signed a change.org petition asking for it to be pulled. Now people are accusing Scholastic of self-censorship that takes away from our ability to have a reasonable conversation about race.

So who is right? I am reminded of my father's refusal to let us watch "Hogan's Heroes," because although you can make a show about people acting kooky and having fun in a Nazi prison camp, you probably shouldn't.

I grew up at a time when Communism was vilified and people of color did not exist in my childhood textbooks. I can't say that either fact destroyed my life or even made me who I am today, but I was lucky enough to have a lot of other influences. I object to censorship or trigger warnings for college-age students, and I'm disgusted when local school districts cave to parents who want LGBT-themed books off the library shelves. But when you write for little kids, even if you can't show horror, you should nevertheless not sugar-coat reality. The chef and his daughter may have had a loving relationship, but he ended up running away, and she was enslaved until she died. That's not your ordinary daddy-daughter relationship story. What do you think?

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Dickensian Trope Trump

It came upon me as I watched him bloviate for an hour plus in TX last night. I've had this weird sense of deja vu all along with Trump, but I thought it stemmed from following his antics when I lived in NYC long ago. Wrong. He is a creature from another era.

"Here's the rule for bargains. 'Do other men, for they would do you.' That's the true business precept."

The very first word he learnt to spell was "gain" and the second (when he got into two syllables), "money.”

"Why, I don't exactly know about perjury, my dear sir," replied the little gentleman. "Harsh word, my dear sir, very harsh word indeed. It's a legal fiction, my dear sir, nothing more."

. . . still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine.

Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars.

“Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same.”

"A man can well afford to be as bold as brass, my good fellow, when he gets gold in exchange!"

"Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing."

He wore a sprinkling of powder upon his head, as if to make himself look benevolent; but if that were his purpose, he would perhaps have done better to powder his countenance also, for there was something in its very wrinkles, and in his cold restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would announce itself in spite of him.

The man who now confronted Gashford, was a squat, thickset personage, with a low, retreating forehead, a coarse shock head of hair, and eyes so small and near together, that his broken nose alone seemed to prevent their meeting and fusing into one of the usual size.

He had a certain air of being a handsome man—which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man—which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

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Reflecting on the Mine

At our Board Presidents' Round Table in Syracuse last night, we heard from TC3 professor Jeanne Cameron, who has written a book about high school dropouts' perceptions of school. She interviewed a dozen Cortland dropouts and determined that the problem was not the kids but rather education reform, especially reforms that impose specific requirements on high school students. For example, Olivia had science and math requirements that I never had in my NYS high school career. She did fine with them, but it's a safe bet that she won't be using precalculus or chemistry if she ends up in a social science or humanities career path, as seems likely. For Cameron's dropouts, the lack of relevance of certain coursework to their own interests and life plans was the final blow. These were, for the most part, students who easily could have graduated, some with high grades—but they were turned off by the regimented character of high school today. Cameron compared it to her own school days in the late '70s, when she failed several science and math Regents but was saved by her many humanities electives, which taught her to read critically and to write elegantly. The more you pack the curriculum with requirements, the less hope there is for choices that match students' passions.

It is interesting to contemplate this on the heels of the governor's recent flip-flop on Common Core. It's not working (suddenly) and must be fixed, and he (very suddenly) sympathizes with the Opt Out parents. He wants his retired education commission, which I wrote about when it was first convened, to review the standards and make some recommendations in time for his State of the State.

Now, it's important to recognize that the Common Core State Standards set no requirements for numbers of courses, although they suggest "pathways," and the math standards, although they get into trig and proofs and functions, don't extend into the world of precalculus and calculus. They allow for accelerated pathways, in which advanced middle school students work their way into high school math. But when it comes to advanced coursework in math, the Standards leave it up to districts, saying, "STEM-intending students should be strongly encouraged to take Precalculus and Calculus (and perhaps a computer science course). A student interested in psychology may benefit greatly from a course in discrete mathematics, followed by AP Statistics. A student interested in starting a business after high school could use knowledge and skills gleaned from a course on mathematical decision-making. Mathematically-inclined students can, at this level, double up on courses—a student taking college calculus and college statistics would be well-prepared for almost any postsecondary career."

So requiring higher math of students who are not "STEM-intending" or "mathematically-inclined" is a state decision, unrelated to Common Core. Cameron is right about its connection to a desire to make America more competitive on the world business-and-economics scene, and she's also right that it's not a path for everyone.

Parenthetically, it would be nice if all discussion of Common Core went as science standards discussion did recently in Alabama, where "at public hearings where citizens could voice their concerns, the state required comments to be about specific standards. Critics couldn't simply oppose the whole effort on principle." Imagine that. The result was that Alabama, for the first time ever, is teaching undiluted evolution and even a smidgen of climate change. Back here in NYS, I hear "the standards are not developmentally appropriate," and I ask, "which ones?" and I wait.... Kudos to Alabama.

If Cuomo's commission wants to do something useful, it will pause all discussion of linking standardized test scores to teacher evaluation and will look seriously at limiting numbers of tests. Paul suggests that (since the point of testing for the students is to get kids who need it into AIS) if students get a 3 or 4 in third grade, they don't have to take any test in fourth grade. Then they're retested in fifth grade to make sure they're on track, and don't have to take a test in sixth grade if they are. That's one way. Another is to go to the European model, which used to be our model, of testing three times—say, fourth, eighth, and graduation.

But I like Cameron's idea about offering more choice at the high school, and it doesn't interfere with Common Core in the least. In NYS, we're talking about instituting multiple pathways to graduation, and if we ever figure out how to make that work from school to school, it will help to solve the relevance problem. In the meantime, the state would do well to look at graduation requirements and consider tweaking them once more.

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Reading List

The author was called both too pro-Israel and too anti-Israel by reviewers, which probably means he's on to something. Don't read it if you're looking for The Answer. But he's very smart and thoughtful and writes like a dream.

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How Merger-Happy Publishing Harmed Education

How sad is it that one can be "the largest education company and largest book publisher in the world" and still not crack the Fortune 1000? Yes, the corporatization of education is a sorry-looking thing, and publishing of any kind is still a bad bet for your portfolio.

I worked in educational publishing in NYC at a time when you honestly needed a scorecard to keep track of who was buying whom. I got a job at Harper & Row Educational one day, moved to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich the next, and saw the ed division at Harper dissolve before Harper & Row itself was bought up by Murdoch, who later merged it with William Collins, another acquisition, and formed HarperCollins, now Harper. Then HBJ (formerly Harcourt Brace & World, before which it was Harcourt Brace & Company, once Harcourt Brace & Howe) left NYC for Orlando and San Diego, where it was purchased by General Cinema Corporation, which soon divested itself of anything having to do with cinema and started calling the publishing division Harcourt Brace & Company. It is now Harcourt, Inc. and is owned by Reed Elsevier, which sold the educational publishing group to Houghton Mifflin, forming Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The story of the 1990s, by which time I had left NYC and moved upstate, was all about foreign companies (Murdoch's News Corp.; Reed Elsevier, which is British and Dutch) buying up American publishers. Bertelsmann (German) bought Doubleday, Bantam, and Random House. Maxwell (British) bought Macmillan. Viacom, which is American, and which does appear on the Fortune 1000 at rank 210, tried its hand at publishing but couldn't find the profit in it, so it sold many of its holdings to a British company called Pearson. That's how Pearson acquired Scribner, Simon & Schuster, and Prentice Hall. Along with Simon & Schuster, Pearson got several education-related subsidiaries, including Allyn & Bacon and Silver Burdett Ginn.

So over the course of a few decades, foreign companies gobbled up dozens of American publishers that dated back to the 1800s. (Macmillan was 1843, A&B 1868, Silver Burdett 1888. Prentice Hall and Simon & Schuster were relative newcomers at 1913 and 1924 respectively.) These companies simply were not profitable enough for American corporations to take a chance on them.

When fast food companies conglomerate, you run the risk of all the food tasting the same. When educational publishing companies conglomerate, you run a higher risk. When I started in ed publishing in 1980, there were twenty or so companies right in NYC who were trying to capture some part of that market, and other companies (Dick Jane and Sally's Scott Foresman, for example) were scattered across the U.S. That competition gave genuine choices to school districts who were looking for new textbooks or other educational materials. By the time I left in 1991, the market had already shrunk by more than half. And today we are stuck with a small handful of niche publishers and then gigantic megacorps (though not gigantic enough by Forbes's standards) like Pearson, the company everybody loves to hate. As a source of income, publishing just stinks, so, as the author of this Fortune article states, "Testing has helped Pearson reduce its dependence on old-fashioned publishing."

A lot had to go wrong to get us to this point: American publishers had to wear blinders and ignore the movement toward digital publishing; American corporations had to hold their noses when offered a chance at purchasing a publisher; successful European companies (Pearson does rank in the top 100 on the British Stock Exchange, which shows what a sad state British industry is in) had to see the possibilities in cornering the education market worldwide rather than sticking to their own tiny market shares; and everyone involved had to worship at the fire of the global free market. It's not at all clear to me where we go from here.

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Reading List

Heartbreaking. And gorgeous.

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Prisoner of the Amazons

"I think the definition of a book is changing." So said Jeff Bezos of Amazon some years ago, and he was right.

I have lately had an issue with Amazon that I haven't heard about elsewhere, not on Wikipedia's growing list of Amazon controversies, not in February's remarkable New Yorker article. I haven't met anyone who's had this particular problem, and I am not sure what to do about it.

One of my best-selling books (which is to say, one of the ones that sells best, not that I have dozens of bestsellers) is a test prep for the nursing test known as the TEAS. It has sold close to 100,000 copies on Amazon alone, a fact that I know because I log onto Amazon's useful Author Central website every so often to check things out.

Among the features on Amazon's Author Central are customer reviews. Amazon has had a bit of trouble with those reviews, some of which is documented on Wikipedia (above), but in general the reviews have been useful for me and fairly informative—and regularly positive. All of that changed back in May, when I started getting reviews that read like these:

I would love this book for studying, except all the graphs/maps/charts aren't printed correctly, so you can't answer 15% of the questions in the book because you can't read the charts! Almost all of the charts have missing information. For example, a bar chart without the bars!!! Horrible. And there is no way to contact McGraw-Hill...

Looks like I received a copy of this book that has a print defect. None of the charts and graphs are filled in, so I cannot answer those questions. I really was depending on this book to help me with the Teas test that I am taking in a week. Real bummer to have received this defective item. If you are planning on ordering this book, make sure with the seller that the graphs and charts are all visible. I feel like I have been ripped off!

And so on, and so on. There is no way to identify a reviewer on Amazon, and even though I wrote back to the angry customers and asked for details (where the book was purchased, etc.), I got no responses. Meanwhile, my ratings dropped, and eventually, in July, Amazon had so many complaints that they pulled the book, dropping sales into the toilet for several weeks.

At the same time, my publisher was going nuts, with the inventory manager ripping open cartons and checking books willy-nilly and finding absolutely nothing wrong.

Finally, in August, the publisher had a complaint directly from a real person and asked him to send a copy of the defective book. Surprise! THE BOOK WAS NOT PRINTED BY MY PUBLISHER. It was actually printed by Amazon as part of their "just-in-time" stocking program. If a publisher runs low on a title, they must allow Amazon to do short printings to stay in stock. In my particular case, the books were not even printed from existing digital files; they were scanned and sold, presumably for the same price as the originals. Somehow in the scanning process, pieces of the charts and graphs dropped out.

My publisher is looking into this, and I trust them to follow up. I have lost revenue (and ratings), my publisher has lost countless hours, and the poor customers who assumed they were buying a real book have been scammed twice.

Gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout, who writes often about monopolies, made it clear at breakfast the other day that she is down on Amazon for a variety of reasons. The battle with Hachette appears to be just one in a long string of dubious business practices. And now I am a victim, along with a bunch of would-be nursing students.

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Might Actually Have to Read His Book

I don't know, but I still think this stuff's important.

Bureaucracies organically flow toward the easier result, and the easier result is always a smaller company, an undefended person, a low-level drug dealer. They hesitate before it decides to proceed against a well-heeled, well-defended company [against which] they’re going to have to fight for years and years and years just to get the case in court … It’s not just about the poor, it’s more about how there’s a class that enjoys impunity and then there’s everybody else.

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R.I.P.

I appreciate her more as an editor than as an author/poet—she had a gift for sussing out the brilliance in a variety of favorite children's book authors, many of whom would have had no career without her. How many editors are worth their own imprint today? I can't think of one.

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Reading List

Just wonderful.

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Doward Catches On

Many, many years ago (around 30), when Mark and I were working on the Spanish and English versions of Mathematics Today, some galleys came our way, as they often did, with an unexpected error. In some cases,a misplaced letter would make us laugh: the change of "beads and shells" to "bears and shells" was one example. We kept that one, and the book had a nice illustration of a pattern of tiny teddy bears and shells instead of the original beads and shells that made more sense but were not nearly so cute. In this case, it was a name: Howard had been rendered as Doward.

What, we wondered, if we kept the name as Doward, and in fact went further, placing occasional "Dowards" in every manuscript we worked on from that time forward? How long would it take for Doward to enter the American lexicon as an acceptable first name?

Today I was rereading a manuscript in which Doward appeared, placed there by yours truly just once in 350 pages. And I thought I'd check into Dowards to see whether I could find any existing real-life examples. First I looked on LinkedIn. Sure enough, a trio of Dowards appeared. On Facebook, there were more. And here, in the White Pages, I found that Doward is the 37,989th most popular name in America (in 2011), and that the current 118 Dowards are scattered nicely around the country, with a preponderance in Texas, which happens to be the place where Mathematics Today was most heavily marketed.

The Dowards I found so far are of an age to be first-generation Dowards, conceived sometime after we started adding Dowards to textbooks. Who can say how many Doward Juniors there might be after 30 years? I call this some kind of success.

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Vlogbrothers Changing YA World

This is an article about Olivia's favorite author, his brother, and the way they and their community are changing the way kids interact with books. For those of us who sometimes despairingly think that kids don't read at all, it's fascinating and inspirational to see how John Green manages to suck them in without sucking.

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Reading List

Here's what I read on my summer vacation. The nonfiction is nothing you don't already know, but seeing it all put together is hair-raising. The authors propose solutions, none of which I think is particularly plausible (mandatory voting?), and they seem to wave a blithe hand at the issue of money in politics. Ornstein is married to Bill's cousin (we met him at the Bill-Lela wedding), which is why I found it worth reading on vacation with Bill.

Despite the hype surrounding the fictional work, it truly is a tour de force, gripping and clever and worth reading. A great beach book.

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R.I.P.

Just two weeks ago, I read I Feel Bad About My Neck, which like all Nora Ephron essay collections, made me laugh. I always liked her essays more than her novel or screenplays, and I didn't even know she was sick. Sad.

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Reading List

From the world of unreliable narrators come these two. Defending Jacob has received a lot of attention, but it's not as interesting (to me) as Turn of Mind, which is pretty amazing for a first novel.

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Reading List

I was never a fan of either one, but this delicate elegy is beautiful.

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Reading List

Olivia recommended it, and it is really as good as its hype. I bet the movie will just suck, however.

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My Friend Dahmer

Paul heads for Ohio this week for the book launch party for this soon-to-be-bestseller by classmate John Backderf about fellow classmate Jeff Dahmer. Like Backderf, Paul was barraged by media after Dahmer's capture and chose to say nothing.

In the wake of another school shooting, this one just an hour away from Revere High School, there's all the more reason for us to try to make sense of the senseless.

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Syria, Revisited

My 2010 book for kids on the Assads ends with the questions:

Can Bashar turn Syria's economy around in time to save the country from an internal coup? The history of Syria's nationhood sets the odds against his success. Will he return to the reforms of his first year in office? Crackdowns on journalists, teachers, and activists since the early 2000s make that openness seem a distant dream...[Bashar's] choices over the next few years could mean the difference between war and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Hardly prescient, given the realities in Syria. My outside reader on the book was Joshua Landis, co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and his blog remains the best site I know for finding out what's really going on in that benighted country. His inside contacts, friends and in-laws alike, give an angle on the news that you just won't get on CNN, and he has links to many other useful sources. If you want to know about Syria, start there.

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