Author Archives: David

What If

Esteemed non-fiction author Elizabeth Partridge recently wrote in her blog, Hot Tea and a Pencil, that she had just learned about an ancestor of the same name as herself who, in 1846, had been transported from England to Australia.

Contemporary Elizabeth asked,

“What did this Elizabeth Partridge do that got her ten years in jail, swapped off for being sent to Australia? What was it like for her once she got there?”

What if….

and a seed is planted. I don’t know that I would ever take this any further, but it is exhilarating to have my mind tumble in a new direction.

What kind of random things have been making you think ‘What if….?’”

Here is what I wrote as a comment:

Continue reading

Saving Lives — and Math Education — With Statistics

Once again, a child at a school assembly asked me where I get my ideas. As usual, I said ideas are everywhere. This month I’ve been getting ideas from the newspaper, particularly coverage of the Tucson tragedy. It’s given me the idea that it’s high time to write a book that will go some small way to make our country a better place for people’s lives, not just a better place for people’s math. In fact, I’m thinking of a book that can do both because they just might be related.

We live in an era and a society where dogma trumps evidence and the drama of one trumps the experiences of many. The tendency to generalize from single examples Continue reading

Are Picture Books Dead?

UPDATE: One of the commenters on this post pointed out that Amanda Gignac was badly misquoted, or quoted out of context, by the New York Times in the article I refer to. Apparently, her misquote has been perpetuated widely on the internet and I am one of the perpetuators. I hereby offer my apology to Ms. Gignac and I will delete two somewhat sarcastic remarks I made in the original version of this post. Her account of what happened and her commentary, can be found on her book blog, The Zen Leaf, and I urge you to read it.

Despite the unfortunate aspects of this kerfuffle (Ms. Gignac’s appropriate word for it), and without meaning disrespect singled out at any individual, it does remain the case that the push for higher test scores and faster achievement in reading has taken a toll on the attitude toward picture books held by many schools, parents and even children. Many of us find that to be a disturbing and counterproductive trend.

–David

Did you see the obituary for picture books that appeared earlier this month in the New York Times?

Continue reading

Speaking to the Test

I think I did pretty well, but I’m not sure.

Several teachers told me that the presentations I had just given were the best they had ever seen. One said it was inspiring to her students and herself. Another said she didn’t want me to stop because the kids were learning so much. A third said I was explaining difficult concepts in ways she had never thought of, and the kids were getting it — and having fun to boot!

But the only evaluation that “counts” will be the one that comes in after the tests are graded. Yes, the Big Brother of testing is now watching over authors who speak at schools. I spent three days giving author presentations in central California, funded by a special state program for the children of migrant agricultural workers. It was explained to me that the state requires the children to be tested before and after the presentation so their learning (i.e., my teaching) can be assessed. It was a new experience for me. I had to write a test for each grade level, to be administered both before and after my presentations. Improved scores would be the ticket.

Continue reading

Goodbye, Mr.Gardner

[singlepic id=2 w=189 h=299 float=left]A few years ago, after I finished a presentation at an elementary school in Norman, Oklahoma, a boy came up to tell me that his great grandpa also liked to make math fun. “Who’s your great grandpa?” I asked. “Martin Gardner,” he said.

Martin Gardner! He might as well have told me that his great grandpa was God. No doubt about it, Martin Gardner, creator of the witty and mind-bending “Mathematical Games” column that ran for 24 years in Scientific American, could be called the God of recreational math. And Gardner was more than that. He wrote more than 70 books on subjects as diverse as philosophy, magic and literature — The Annotated Alice, his definitive guide to Lewis Carroll’s classic, was perhaps his best selling title. He was also a leading debunker of pseudoscience: after retiring from Sci Am, he sicked his penetrating logical powers on purveyors of quackery, ESP, UFOs and the like in a column called “Notes of a Fringe Watcher,” published for 19 years in The Skeptical Inquirer.

Poet W.H. Auden, sci fi author Arthur C.Clarke, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and astronomer Carl Sagan were among his many admirers. Vladamir Nabokov named him in a novel. Astrophysicists named an asteroid after him.

Continue reading

Researching with Researchers

I always enjoy outdoor activities and meals with Tom and Ellen but I had an ulterior motive this time. Ellen, aka Prof. Simms, is a botanist in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. I am writing a book on what happens to the jack-o’ lantern after Halloween — a Halloween book for November, you might say. My ulterior motive is that I wanted Ellen’s help in identifying some of the blotchy, fuzzy and moldy looking things growing on the pumpkin. Their portraits, captured by photographer Dwight Kuhn, were the perfect accompaniment to herb tea and ice cream.

When people think of what it means for a non-fiction author to do research, Continue reading

To Be a Writer: Read, Read, Read. But…

Last week, I had the pleasure of working with Linda Sue Park and Ed Young at the American Embassy School of New Delhi, India. We were the featured authors at AES’s annual Authors’ Week. During one of our many dinners together, Linda Sue and I talked about the importance of reading children’s books as a prerequisite to writing children’s books. Linda Sue is a Newbury Award-winning novelist and picture book author. Although she is essentially a fiction writer, the crafts of writing fiction and non-fiction probably have more in common than they have differences, and the need for reading is surely a commonality.

Linda Sue has posted something about reading for writing on her website, www.lspark.com. I am traveling in India this week, checking email intermittently at internet cafes (and wondering why they call themselves cafes when they serve neither coffee nor tea nor anything else one can drink or eat). For this post — if I can squeeze it out before the power goes off again — I am going to quote this portion of Linda Sue’s website, and then comment upon it briefly.

The Importance of Reading

Continue reading

Happy Pi Day

In case you missed it, March 14th was an important international holiday. Every year, math enthusiasts worldwide celebrate the date as Pi Day. March 14th. 3/14. 3.14. Pi. Get it? If you’d like a higher degree of accuracy, you can celebrate Pi Minute at 1:59 on that date (as in 3.14159). Or why not Pi Second at 26 seconds into the Pi Minute (3.1415926)?

“It’s crazy! It’s irrational!” Continue reading

If They Had A Million Dollars

Remember the hit song by the Barenaked Ladies, a Canadian alternative rock band (whose members are neither ladies nor naked — it least in public)? Here’s how it starts:

If I had a million dollar

If I had a million dollars

Well I’d buy you a house

I would buy you a house

I’d buy you furniture for your house…

Hate to sound like a million dollar spoilsport, but I sure wouldn’t pay a million for those lyrics. Not even a hundred. Still, the tune is darn catchy, and the refrain is a bit touching:

If I had a million dollars,

I’d buy your love.

Whether or not that particular commodity can be purchased at any price will not be the subject of this post, although you may wish to pursue it elsewhere.

Since the 1989 publication of my second book, If You Made a Million, I have seen countless examples of student writing that begin with the prompt, “If I had a million dollars…” They fall into three categories of roughly equal size. I’ll call the them “fulfillment,” “greed” and “charity.”
Continue reading

Math-Lit for the Older Set

I got an email the other day from a parent looking for good mathematical literature to interest and challenge older children. Is there any? Which books would I recommend?

Before I describe a few of my faves, I must point out, as I did at length in my INK post of May 28, 2008, that many educators have inspired intermediate grade, middle school and even high school students with picture books, using them as age-appropriate teaching tools. I believe my most successful mathematical picture books are those that can be used on many levels. In fact, when asked the target age for How Much is a Million?, I often say, “Preschool through high school.” Actually, it’s not true. I should say. “Preschool through college,” but that answer might sound overly smug. (I have twice met college professors who use my book when teaching about Avogadro’s number, a behemoth number critically important in understanding quantitative chemistry.) That said, I will mention a few books that probably wouldn’t make it into the 2nd grade math classroom but should be a staple of math classrooms or libraries serving upper elementary, middle school and high school students.

In The Number Devil by German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a middle school-age boy named Robert dreams of travels through the world of mathematics under the tutelage of an impish devil whom he at first finds annoying but gradually comes to enjoy and admire. At the start of the book, Robert is a mediocre and indifferent math student — no surprise, considering that his ho-hum teacher at school gives the students mathematical busywork without the least bit of mathematical inspiration. (His uncomprehending mother is no better: she believes a son who voluntarily speaks of mathematical concepts must be ill!) But Robert and the devil are on an irrepressible romp and together they challenge each other while developing plethora of mathematical concepts and meeting a pantheon of famous mathematicians. All names are whimsically disguised — Leonhard Euler becomes “Owl” (Eule in German translates to “owl” in English) and roots (as in square roots, cube roots, etc.) are called “rutabagas” (which are literal roots) — just two of many such examples. Figuring out the conventional words for the concepts at hand just adds to the devilish fun of this 1997 book which is well on its way to becoming a classic.

Flatland is not on its way to classic status: it’s already there. Like The Number Devil, it incorporates dreams but the concepts are geometrical rather than numerical. This novella, written in 1884 by English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott, is a pointed satire of closed-minded, hierarchical Victorian society but it is also, as Isaac Asimov put it, “The best introduction one can find into the manner of perceiving dimensions.” The story has been developed into several short films and a 2007 feature film; there have been TV episodes, a role-playing game and sequels by other authors.

The narrator of the original Flatland is a square named – ready? — A. Square. He lives in Continue reading