I want to preface my remarks with a dedication, as if this were a book.

To all the children who have had the courage to ask me a question of any kind, whether in writing or in person. I have learned much from you and I thank you.

Soon after the publication of my first book, How Much Is a Million?, I started to receive fan mail replete with questions. A short time later, I began visiting schools for author presentations and I heard many more questions. I began to realize that I could benefit by listening closely to the questions and thinking about what was behind them. I also realized that children could benefit from learning what makes a good question!

Students are over-assessed these days, but it is always their answers that get assessed. I think questions are at least as important as answers, yet only rarely have I seen a teacher provide guidance in the art of asking questions. The ability to ask good questions is a skill of paramount importance in many human endeavors and it opens the mind to countless wonders. In this post I am going to turn the tables and “grade” (well, comment upon) the questions that kids ask.

In the 15 years that I have been visiting about 50 schools per year, three top questions have emerged.

1) How old are you?

2) How much money do you make?

3) Where do you get your ideas?

Teachers are aghast when their students ask 1) or 2), but I answer both. After joshing “Less than a million” in response to the first question, I simply tell them how old I am. (Actually, I tell kids in the intermediate grades that I was born in 1951 and let them do the math – which sometimes results in my being over a hundred years old!) For the second question, I tell them how much (i.e., how little) money I make on the sale of a single book, and everyone is shocked.

Before I get to the third question, let me assess the first two. I think the age question is natural for children to wonder about, but if they had done research in their school library, they probably would have found my date of birth in a reference book such as Something About the Author. That’s OK—I don’t really expect everyone to do a research project before I get there, but I believe that well-prepared students (who have done research on the author and his/her books) make the best audience and ask the best questions. The other thing that makes this a mediocre question is that it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t lead to follow-up questions, which are usually the best ones, or teach them anything that can propel them to further learning. What can they say after learning my age (other than, “Oh my God, he’s older than my grandfather!”) Perhaps a rule of thumb is that if a question is bound to be answered with one word, it’s probably not the world’s best question.

Despite teacher objections, I actually think the question about how much money an author makes could lead to an interesting answer, but for it to be meaningful I would have to spend a long time putting it in perspective by discussing how much various authors earn, and how those earnings compare with typical salaries in other careers (and the huge incomes of well-known celebrities). This discussion could go in many directions – for instance, why do a very few authors rake in enormous sums while the majority earn so much less? How is an author’s income determined? Here’s a “math guy” direction: given that a picture book author (who is not also the illustrator) usually earns a royalty of about 5% on a hardcover book, calculate the income on one book and determine how many books would have to be sold for the author to make a million dollars.

The third of the “Top Three” questions always gets the Teacher Seal of Approval, and for good reason. It can lead to discussions and thought-processes likely to go in many directions. The author’s answer can be applied to students’ own experiences and the students might be able to use the answer to improve their own writing. In most cases, the answer is not one that can be looked up in a reference book.

My answer to that question usually begins like this: “Ideas are everywhere. If you keep your eyes open, your ears open and your mind open you’ll find lots of good ideas. If you also wonder about the world, you’ll find lots of great ideas.” And then I talk about where the ideas for specific books of mine came from. Very often my books go back to when I was the age of the questioners. I tell them how, as a child, I wondered about things that came in big numbers. “How many hairs do I have on top of my head?” “How many blades of grass are on the baseball field?” “How many grains of sand are on the beach?” I drove my teachers crazy, but years later I turned those musings into How Much Is a Million?

When a child queried the origin of a machine that fills an entire school with popcorn in On Beyond a Million, I explained that I sometimes get ideas from other books. “My favorite book in third grade was Homer Price by Robert McCloskey. In that book, a donut machine goes out of control and fills a lunchroom with donuts. Well, I took the out-of-control donut machine and morphed it into a popcorn machine. The two books are completely different but I wouldn’t have thought of the popcorn machine if I hadn’t remembered the donut machine from Homer Price.” And then I try to bring it home: “You can do the same thing,” I tell the children. “Take something you have read, change it so it becomes your own idea, then use it in your stories.”

Look at all the mileage I got out of one simple question!

A few other things for the proactive teacher to think about in a class devoted to questioning.

* Children often ask questions that are way too vague. “What’s it like to be an author?” is a classic. How about reshaping it to, “What’s the most enjoyable (or frustrating) aspect of being an author?”

* Some questions are overly specific and basically trivial. I particularly dislike “favorites”: “What’s your favorite food/color/number?” I realize the kids are trying to get to know me as a person, and I like that, but does it matter that my favorite color is purple? Sometimes it’s blue. And I also like red! The truth is, I don’t have favorites. How about hobbies? I don’t mind being asked about my pastimes, but a good way to give it some importance might be to reshape the boring old “What are your hobbies?” question into “Do your hobbies relate to the books you write? How?”

“What was your first book?” and “How many books have you written?” are popular questions after my assemblies but they are absolutely terrible questions. Why? Because I have already answered both of them in the assembly! Perhaps the questioners weren’t listening. Perhaps they composed their questions before the assembly. Possibly both.

Which leads to my plea to teachers: Don’t encourage children to write out questions before the author comes to school. It locks the children into their questions, and they will mentally rehearse asking them instead of listening to the author and composing a question based on what has been said. Instead, practice asking meaningful questions as a response to something you tell them or read to them.

I will close with my all-time favorite question, which was asked by a second grader years ago. “Do you regret anything you’ve ever written?” What a fascinating question. I’ve always wondered what possessed her to ask it.

I told the audience I regretted a mathematical mistake I had made in my second book, If You Made a Million. Four hundred eyes riveted onto me. “What’s the mistake?”

“See if you can find it,” I replied.

I then realized that the silver lining in the cloud of the mistake is that kids get to do great math to find the error of my ways. And when they find it, they are triumphant. “Feels good to know we did right,” wrote a pair of students who found it together, “and the book has a boo-boo.”

I never asked “Why poetry in non-fiction?” until I had written (with my wife, Yael Schy) a science book containing a series of poems about camouflaged animals — Where in the Wild? Camouflaged Creatures Concealed. . . and Revealed. Yes, the book was already finished before it occurred to me to wonder why I had wanted to do most of it in verse instead of strictly in prose, like all of my other books. If someone had asked, my answer would have been similar to that of the proverbial mountain climber: because it was there. Poetry was a new peak for me and I wanted to see if I could climb it to enter a new literary realm. I didn’t think much about how entering that realm could improve the book or affect its readers.

I did know that I was not breaking new ground, though the poetic path through the non-fiction landscape was only lightly worn. The late (and certainly great) Ruth Heller, peerless author and illustrator of non-fiction on subjects that some might consider dry, wrote all of her books in verse. Nary a line could be called dry; “juicy” would be a better description, no matter how “interest-challenged” the topic. Here is how Ruth opens Up, Up and Away:

A Book About Adverbs
ADVERBS work terrifically
when answering specifically. . .
"How?"
"How often?"
"When?"
and "Where?"
Penguins all dress
DECENTLY.
Toe
dancers
practice
FREQUENTLY.
This house was painted RECENTLY. . . and
small green frogs live THERE.

(You really must see Ruth’s illustrations to appreciate the fullness of her genius.)

In preparing to write this post, I pulled Up, Up and Away and some of Ruth’s other books from the shelf. Here she is, speaking about the hows and whys of pollination in The Reason for a Flower:

From an ANTHER
on a STAMEN
to a STIGMA
on a STYLE
POLLEN
grains
must
travel
and
stay
a
little
while.
And
then
you'll
see
the
reason
for
each
FLOWER--
even WEEDS.
The reason for a FLOWER is to manufacture. . .
SEEDS

Now we know the reason for the flower, and I am beginning to know the reason for the poem. I can’t stop reading it! It’s fun! It has captured me, latched onto some nerve center in my brain and it doesn’t want to let go. The delicious rhymes and rhythms of verse do that. Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explains how music triggers pleasure sensors in the brain in his 2007 book, This is Your Brain on Music. My hunch is that poetry works in a similar way. Reading can be for information or pleasure or both. If poetry helps put the checkmark in both columns, how can we — why should we — resist?

It worked that way for Lucy, the 8-year old daughter of the creators of over 200 podcasts about children’s books published on the website Just One More Book. In their podcast on Where in the Wild?, Mark Blevis and Andrea Ross mention that on a recent ski outing, Lucy could be heard scooting down the slopes reciting the opening lines of our poem “Grayish, Greenish,” about the tree frog that can virtually disappear on the similarly-colored bark of a tree:

Grayish, greenish, blackish tree
The colors you see are the colors of me.
Grayish, greenish, blackish bark,
I'm bumpy and blotchy, part light and part dark.

Joy Hulme is another author (and another friend) whose non-fiction verse impressed me long before I considered trying my own hand at it. Looking for insight, I reread Sea Squares, Joy’s poetic introduction to the mathematical concept of square numbers. Using a marine motif, Joy “counts” in squares. Here is how she greets the reader:

Come with me to the side of the sea,
Where the ocean meets the shore.
We'll count some creatures that crawl and creep
Or grow on the ocean floor.
Some flop, some dive, some swim and swish,
Some fly where the breakers roar.

Joy not only paints a picture but she evokes a mood. I’m smelling the salt spray and feeling the sand between my toes. A couple of gulls hove into view. They’re in the book, too:

Two two-eyed gulls, with two wide wings,
Shrieking and swooping and pecking up things.
2 white gulls with 2 eyes each,
Have 4 bright eyes to watch the beach.
And then the mood turns slightly comical:
Three three-striped clown fish, black and white and red,
Nesting in anemones' spiny ocean bed.
3 clowns with frowny faces
Have 9 stripes in fishy places.

So poetry can evoke a mood. There’s a “Duh!” moment for you — any English teacher can tell you that and I’m sure many did. Chances are that your English teachers were not thinking of non-fiction. But why shouldn’t the wary eyes of the coyote lurking within the pages of a science book be just as mood-invoking as those of an entirely fictitious coyote? And why does the non-fiction reader deserve any less of a mood, conveyed in as few words as possible? Perhaps the ultimate example is in haiku, enjoyed by the Japanese for its paucity of verbiage. In Where in the Wild?, we use the 5:7:5 form to describe the speckled treasures that are a shorebird’s eggs, deftly hidden amid the similarly patterned stones of a riverbank:

speckled   treasures lie
bare upon   the pebbled bank
precious life   within

Poetry can also bring a smile on the face of anyone who appreciates worldplay. Our poem about the red-spotted newt, a salamander that roams the forest during one stage of its life cycle, offers surprising rhymes for some important scientific terms, including one found at the poem’s end:

... If you should see me   on a hike
You may think I'm lizard-like.
But I'm no reptile -- think   again!
I'm really an amphibian.

In thinking again, I begin to wonder why more non-fiction is not written in verse. I invite readers of this post to contribute selections from their favorite works of non-fiction poetry (or just to recommend book titles)… and to add to the list of reasons for a poem.

Hi Everyone!

I’m thrilled to be here, sharing some thoughts with you. I’m just back from Boston, where I was honored to received an award for my latest book, Where in the Wild? Camouflaged Creatures Concealed… and Revealed, which I co-authored with my wife, Yael Schy. (Our book was awarded the 2008 SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the category “Children’s Science Picture Book.” The award is sponsored by Subaru and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and it was shared between the two authors and photographer Dwight Kuhn.) I was planning to write about the award ceremony and the four books that received the prize in different categories (see www.sbfonline/prizes) but I have decided to save that for another day, except to give you a glimpse of our book’s cover and to share one detail about the ceremony.

The sponsors of the SB&F Prize arranged to have several local children present the awards to the winning authors. The kids told the audience (and the authors) what they liked about the books. Some of them spoke with passion about questions the books had raised in their minds. To these readers, a book that raises interesting questions is a good book indeed. Then the young book reviewers shook our hands while handing us our award plaques.

The opinions and questions of children often fascinate and delight me. I get a lot of great letters from children and I would be hard-pressed to pick a favorite, but one letter that stands out in my mind came from a nine-year old girl who wondered about the accuracy of various statements in my first book. I’m going to remove her name and address to protect her privacy, but we can call her by her first name, Lisa. Here is what she wrote. I apologize that the letters are small and a little hard to read. Lisa’s message is summarized in the last two sentences:

In my presentations at schools, I often tell children, “Wondering is wonderful.” I find it wonderful that Lisa is wondering about the statements in my book and whether or not they are true. These musings give her “mixed up feelings,” which may sound uncomfortable, but she quickly goes on to reassure us that she finds these feelings magical. Her letter ends with a sentence I find truly memorable. To Lisa, the magic in books is wondering whether the “facts” are true or not!

I’ll give just one other example of children wondering about what they have read.

After How Much Is a Million?, my book about big numbers, appeared in 1985, I quickly discovered what everyone really wanted to know: “How much is a million dollars?” It gave me the idea for my second book, If You Made a Million.

Now everyone is thinking about the federal bailout of 700 billion dollars, aka $700,000,000,000 – with an extra 30 billion thrown in, or not, for good measure. So, how much is 700 billion dollars?

Let’s start by counting the way the characters count in On Beyond a Million (yet another book I wrote with “million” in the title). In that book, the characters count not by ones the whole way (or they’d never get beyond a million) but by ones to ten, by tens to a hundred, by hundreds to a thousand, and so on. Mathematicians would say they are counting by “powers of ten,” but in the book I call it “Power Counting.” Let’s just quickly “power-count” our way from one to one million:

1 (one)

10 (ten)

100 (one hundred)

1,000 (one thousand)

10,000 (ten thousand)

100,000 (one hundred thousand)

1,000,000 (one million)

Did you notice that one million is three steps of power-counting past one thousand? Each step multiplies by 10, so one million is three of those, or 10 X 10 X 10, or one thousand times bigger than one thousand. One million is one thousand thousand. Let’s go on:

10,000,000 (ten million)
100,000,000 (one hundred million)
1,000,000,000 (one billion)

One billion is three steps past one million, or one thousand times one million. Just as one million is a thousand thousand, one billion is a thousand million. (In some countries, including Great Britain, they call it “one thousand million” instead of a “billion.”) Let’s do one more round:

10,000,000,000 (ten billion)
100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion)
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion)

One trillion is one thousand billion. Did you notice one hundred billion in bold? We’re going back to it. Take seven of those and what have you got? Seven hundred billion. In dollars, it’s the bail-out. One heck of a lot of money. Oh, we could figure out how high 700 billion kids or 700 billion one-dollar bills would stack if we were inclined to stack them, or how many homes it could build or heat, and so forth. . . but let’s not. Instead, let’s try to understand the magnitude of this giant pot of cash by taking a step back from big money to very small money: one cent.

Would you rather have a penny that gets doubled every day for a month (let’s say a 30 day month)… or would you rather have a million dollars in cash today, but not another cent for the rest of the month? Maybe you’ve heard this one before but no matter. I’ve told it dozens of times, and it still amazes me that doubling the pennies gives a pay-off of over $5 million in pennies on the 30th day (not to mention all the pennies accumulated from the other days)! Don’t just believe me — do the math. It’s not hard, especially if you round off along the way.

So, when you put one cent through 29 rounds of doubling it gets really big, really fast. That’s the power of doubling. (There have been some fine picture books based on this mathematical principle, including One Grain of Rice and The King’s Chessboard.) But what happens every step of the way when we put a zero after a number, when we “power count”? We aren’t doubling; we’re multiplying by ten. I don’t know of any verb for that, so I have invented one: decktuple. (Please use it widely.) If you thought doubling was powerful, think of decktupling – power to the max!

My favorite way to see the difference between big numbers and appreciate their magnitude is to think of seconds. One million seconds is about eleven and a half days. One billion seconds is — take a guess before you read on – about 32 years. And one trillion seconds is about 32,000 years. So the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion is like the difference between 11.5 days, 32 years and 32,000 years! I like to say that I have a pretty good idea of what I’ll be doing a million seconds from now. . . I have no idea of what I’ll be doing a billion seconds from now… but I have an excellent idea of what I will be doing a trillion seconds from now.

And what about 700 billion? That’s seven-tenths, or 70%, of the way to a trillion. In seconds it would be 22,400 years. I am writing this on December 28, 2008 at about 9pm. If instead of dollars we talked about seconds and I started clocking them right now, I would get to a million on Jan. 9th at about 9am . . . I would get to a billion early in the year 2040 . . . and I (or someone, I hope) would get to 700 billion in the year 24000 (not 2400 but 24000!), give or take a few hundred years.

Does this help explain the size of the bailout. Or does it just boggle your mind? Both are good.