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Steve Sheinkin
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Yeah, you did, he said. That was funny. For the rest of the session and the rest of the school year, through colonial times, the American Revolution, the Constitution, and all the way to Reconstruction, Louis kept stopping between those vague and disjointed textbook sentences to look up, always grinning, and say, Remember the time you burned your hand? Of the names and dates and facts he read about in that textbook, he retained nearly nothing. The only nal exam question he was fully prepared to answer was: What happened when the tutor attempted to adjust the lightbulb? In what way did he cry out? I thought about that a lot during the year. What makes something memorable? Its related to stories, clearlywe just naturally remember engaging stories. (This is hardly an original theory.) The real question for me was this: Is it possible to turn the history of our great nation into stories as entertaining as a grown man leaping from a chair while crying out like a girl? Maybe not. Still, I told myself, its something to shoot for, a way to measure the success of my work. I vowed that from that time on, I would keep Louiss lightbulb lesson in mind every time I sat down to write. The timing was perfect. I had spent the last few years copyediting U.S. history textbook manuscripts and revising the text of existing books. Once in a while, I got the chance to write featuresshort, stand-alone pieces like biographies or skills lessons. Understanding Bar Graphs was one of my early works. The editors liked my stuff. By which I mean they didnt have to throw it out and start over. This led to my big break as a textbook writer. Soon after I nished working with Louis, my bosses, two very experienced textbook editors, invited me to lunch and told me that our company was about to start developing a new fth-grade U.S. history textbook. I was going to be the main writer. The plan was to write the American Revolution chapters rst, as a prototype. While we were writing the rest of the book, the publishing company could start using the sample chapters for focus testing and early promotion. This is why the editors decided to start with the Revolution. Its
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Copyright 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
accepted wisdom in the world of educational publishing that if you cant make the American Revolution come alive to young readers, youve got impossible problems. What are you going to do with The Federalist Papers? The War of 1812? And the editors stressed to me: this is not going to be the same old boring textbook. This time were going to bring history to life! With this goal in mind, the editors asked me to begin by researching some possible grabbersexciting true stories we could use to introduce key characters and pull readers into the action of each lesson. I spent the next few days in libraries, lling notebook pages with stories and quotes. It was just as I had suspected: being a history textbook writer was my dream job. About a week after that rst meeting with the editors, we met again. They sat on one side of a long table. I sat on the other side with my notebook open in front of me. They waited for me to begin. I leaned forward. I think I actually lifted my hands in front of me, storyteller style, as I said: It is the night of April 18, 1775. Boston, Massachusetts.
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The editors smiled. That was a nice choice, April 18. The wild and sleepless night before the explosion of revolution. I continued: There is a bright, nearly full moon over Boston. British soldiers ll the streets, marching in rows down to the Charles River. And at the same time, darting from shadow to shadow, Paul Revere works his way to a dark spot by the water. At the river, he meets two friends, fellow Sons of Liberty. Everything has been planned. They will row Revere across the river to Charlestown, where a saddled horse is already waiting. Then on to Lexington and Concord with the alarm: the British are coming! But Revere looks out at the river and sees a problem. The moon lights the shape of a 64-gun British warship oating between Boston and the Charlestown shore. Revere and the boys will have to row right under those guns. They have one chance: perfect silence. If only they had something soft, some cloth, they could wrap it around the rowboats metal oar locks,
cloaking the locks clanks and squeaks. Revere should have thought of this. He has brought nothing. One of the friends has an idea. He has a girlfriend who lives just a few streets away. They rush to her house and stand below her secondstory window, and the guy, the boyfriend, whispers her name as loud as he dares. She comes to the window, looks down, listens to the request. Without wasting a second, she reaches under her dress, pulls down her annel petticoat, steps out of it, and drops it out the window. Revere catches it. Still warm from her body, he notes. The three men rush back to the waterfront. They rip up the petticoat, wrap it around the oar locks, and push out into the river. And as their boat slides under the bow of the British warship, the sailors onboard hear only the routine sounds of the wind and the black, lapping water. A few minutes later, Revere jumps onto the shore. The horse is ready. And Revere sets off on the most famous horseback ride in American history. There was a long silence in the conference room. I turned the page of my notebook, just to do something. The editors exchanged glances, then began. The story was a good grabber. A very good grabber. Exactly the type of thing that brings history to life for kids. We should absolutely use it. There were just a few considerations. Some small things we might want to think about as we moved forward. I picked up my pen and took notes: We denitely cant say the petticoat was still warm from the girls body. Were not comfortable with the woman pulling down her petticoat. Its too much like pulling down underwear. You cant have a woman pulling down her underwear in a textbook. You really cant have underwear in a textbook. Especially not womens underwear. Lets just have the girlfriend take off a piece of clothing. Taking off any clothing is not quite ageappropriate. Why does she have to remove her clothing? We can say instead: The girlfriend threw down a piece of clothing. The word girlfriend could be chancy at the fthgrade level. Why not make it friend, to be safe. Other than these minor points, the editors thought the story was fantastic. We should denitely use it. Just a much shorter version. Theres so much to get through: previews, reviews, state
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standards, names, dates, and so on. I looked down at my notes and considered a rewrite: It was the night of April 18, 1775. Paul Revere needed some cloth to row silently across the river. He went to a friends house. The friend threw down a piece of clothing. The end. This was probably no longer a grabber. And it was a blatant violation of Louiss lightbulb lesson. But I wasnt worried at this point. Theres no shortage of great Revolution material, I thought, and I can come back to Revere later, ready to concede one or two of the risky detailsthe petticoat doesnt have to be warm from the girls thighs, for instance, though Revere did tell his grandchildren that it was. Yes, I really was that nave. In fact, I was so ignorant of the realities of textbook writing that it turned out to be a major challenge just to introduce the Founders (not Founding Fathers), simply to get them onto the page. George Washington is the major gure of the American Revolution, so textbooks always work him in early in this part of the book, usually with some kind of stand-alone biography. I sketched out a full-page bio in which we meet George as a teenager, show him having an adventure, get to know and like him. The focus was on Washingtons rst job as a land surveyor. He had just turned sixteen when he set out for the wilds of western Virginia with an experienced surveying crew. We traveled over the Blue Ridge, Washington wrote in his journal. We went through the most beautiful groves of sugar trees. So far, so good. Then after an exhausting afternoon lugging iron measuring chains up and down wooded hills, George and the crew ate their suppers and prepared for bed. He explains: I not being so good a woodsman as the rest of the company stripped myself very orderly & went into the bed, as they called it, when to my surprise I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or anything else but only one threadbare blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as lice, eas, etc. I was glad to get up (as soon as the light was carried from us) & put on my clothes and lay as my companions. I thought this was a great little scene, showing a very human and even funny young George. The story was instantly rejected. The main thing that made the editors uncomfortable was the fact
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that George stripped himself. Stripping is never a good thing. Washington stripping is out of the question. It shows a lack of seriousness and possibly a lack of respect. What are young readers supposed to learn? Can it be tested? Also, the image of the nude Washington waiting until the candle was gone and then jumping and wriggling into his clothes . . . it seems almost as if were supposed to be laughing at the most important Founder of our nation. Laughing with, I suggested. Laughing at, laughing withthats not the point, the editors explained. Any attempt to combine laughter and Washington could get a textbook into terrible trouble. In the end, there was some room for compromise. We included the fact that Washingtons blanket was full of lice, eas, etc., but not that he was naked at the time of the nding. Next I tried to get readers interested in Thomas Jefferson. I quickly realized that textbook writers hoping to bring Jefferson to life in a few sentences have very little to work with. We can introduce young Jefferson as tall and skinny, with red hair. We can say that he liked to be called Tom. The most popular textbook fun fact about the teenage Jefferson is that he studied fourteen hours a day and that he kept books stuffed in his pockets, even while playing outdoors. But can this really be turned into a story that will endear him to ten-year-olds? After school you challenge your friend Tom Jefferson to a wrestling match. You grab Toms waist and struggle to bring him to the ground. Suddenly, you feel a hard point sticking painfully into your side. Its his Latin grammar book! I kept looking. Finally I found what I think is by far the best young Jefferson story. A friend of Toms had a fast horse. He kept pestering Tom to race. But Jefferson resisted, pointing out that his horse was fat and old. Finally, under constant pressure, he agreed to race on the condition that he could choose the date. The friend agreed. Jefferson set the date of the race: February 30. His friend eagerly awaited the dayonly to realize it would never arrive. As with the Washington story, this was a rare chance to show a playful side of the typically stiff Jefferson. My only concern: the part about Jeffersons horse being fat and old. This seemed like an important detail, since it was the reason Jefferson avoided racing. But would it cause the story to be rejected? Are we implying that fat and old are undesirable traits in animals? What about human beings?
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I wrote the story and turned it in. And it was rejected. The shape and age of the horse may or may not offend some people, the editors said. The real problem was that young Tom agrees to a horse race. This is dangerously close to young Tom gambling, and Founders never gambled. Actually, as I learned a little later while writing the Colonial America chapters, no one in American history ever gambled. Hoping to give fth-grade readers an idea of what life was like for people their age in colonial times, I quoted from a typical eighteenthcentury apprenticeship contract, which required ten-year-old signers to agree to terms such as: At cards, dice, and other games of chance he shall not play. This sparked some debate in our ofce. The clause in question was actually discouraging improper behavior. The problem was, it also openly acknowledged the existence of gambling in everyday life. This made the material inappropriate. Dice, it turns out, are considered particularly untextbooky. An editor told me that in a previous textbook, she had been pressured to replace the word dice with numbered cubes. No one drank, either, mostly because there was no place to do it. All references to taverns were changed to inns. More surprisingly to me, no one imagined. I wrote a chapter opener that started with a line something like: Imagine you walk into a bakery in New Amsterdam in 1656. The manuscript came back rewritten: Suppose you walk to a bakery in New Amsterdam in 1656. When I asked for an explanation, my boss, shaking his head, told me that some conservative critics, the same ones who were working to get Harry Potter banned from school libraries, had begun objecting to the use of the word imagine in school books. This word, they feel, evokes distracting, pagan, and possibly un-American images of magic wands and children studying spells. Was this just a passing pet peeve of a few wacky right wingers, or was it part of a more widespread and permanent objection to imagination? The editors could not be sure. So they decided to play it safe: suppose, dont imagine. No editor can afford to be remembered as the one whose book failed to sell because it asked young readers to imagine the taste of a seventeenthcentury baked good. This went on for months. My manuscript kept coming back to my desk marked up with red marks and suggested changes. Well, they werent really suggestions. Of course, I had known before
starting this book that there were rules about what could and couldnt be said in textbooks. One of my rst small writing jobs had been to update the passage of a middle school civics text that said: Andrew Johnson is the only American President ever to have been impeached by the House of Representatives. I added a brief and vague description of the Clinton impeachment, referring only to dishonesty, and other inappropriate acts. Everyone seemed relieved. But as I attempted to write this new textbook, I began to discover a whole new world of unwritten rules. These were the kinds of edits a textbook writer can only discover through experimentation, trial and error. These edits gave me my rst real glimpse at what I came to think of as the Listthe list of unwritten rules governing the content of American history textbooks in the twenty-rst century. This is a list of rules about which stories must be told and which stories can never be told. Its also a compilation of more subtle guidelines about how stories should be told, which characters, quotes, and details to emphasize, which to nesse, which to avoid. Intimidated by the sense of working in the dark, I at rst thought of the List as a secret and forbidden body of knowledge, a kind of Kabbalah of the careful. I wondered: at what point, if ever, will the editors call me into a windowless room and shut the door and show me the List? Now, many years and many textbooks later, I know that this was a ridiculously romantic view. There is no complete written List locked in a dusty basement le. Editors do not hold secret List-related gatherings. If I charged into a meeting of expert editors and waved a shotgun and shouted, Hand over the List! they would have no idea what I was talking about. Editors dont think about the List, they just use it. The List is an oral tradition, a practical gathering of editing precedents, practical rulings, and instructive anecdotes, a living collection passed down from one generation of editors to the next. Passed down and often amended to reect newly discovered objections and sensitivities. What makes knowledge of the List essential is the fact that textbooks are created in an atmosphere of intense fear. The single greatest fear is that something in a textbook will be seen as unbalanced, upsetting, or offensive by someone somewhere in the United States. An expert knowledge of all the objections that have been made in the past gives editors the invaluable ability to look at a manuscript and be preemptively offended on behalf
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of others. They can cut potentially troublesome stories or details before any text leaves the ofce. And its not just history. Ive worked on a few reading books and English anthologies over the years, and editors are just as nervous about these. Everyone knows to be very careful when it comes to works like Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple. They may be classics, but theyre always on ALAs list of the Ten Most Challenged books in schools and libraries. So we always end up choosing from the same old list of stories and poems. Are these the pieces most likely to engage and inspire young readers? Not necessarily. On the plus side, theyve been used hundreds of times without causing trouble. A friend who works on a lot of anthologies gave me a perfect example of what happens when you try to do something different. He recently selected a James Baldwin poem for a high school reading book. His editors thought it was a good choice, but decided to cut some of the language, concerned that it might (in the eyes of someone somewhere) contain too frank a description of racial tensions. The worrisome words were replaced with ellipses. Not so fast, said Baldwins estate, which refused permission to publish an edited poem. So Baldwin was dropped and replaced with someone safer. The nal choice was unlikely to spark discussion in class, but it was unlikely to spark objections, either. In the textbook world, thats a pretty good solution. No matter what the subject, even the most expert editors can fail to anticipate an objection. This is a real concern. Many statesincluding huge markets like Texas and Californiahave laws requiring all textbooks be ofcially adopted by the states education department. Textbook makers cant afford to wait until the public adoption hearings to nd out that a particular pressure group is outraged by something in a book the company just spent millions of dollars developing. So what companies do now is solicit comments from groups all over the political spectrumwhile the book is still being written and edited. The result of this extensive process is that the editors desks are piled high with stacks of manuscripts marked up with thousands of pen slashes and sticky notes expressing a huge range of concerns and very strong suggestions. The editors job is not to incorporate into the nal text the exact combination of comments that will make everyone happy. There exists no such combination. The editors job is to determine the combination of com-
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ments that will keep each individual commenter from turning violently against the nished product. Writers and editors start off with a genuine passion to make their subject engaging and exciting for students. They end up scrambling to produce textbooks that will make all adults who ip through them equally, but only mildly, disappointed. Even this is almost impossible, because a single bit of text can inspire objections from critics on both the left and right. For example, whats wrong with this innocuous little lesson opener? It is July 4, 1776. Earlier in the day, Congress voted to approve the Declaration of Independence. Now three members of CongressBenjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adamshave been appointed to a new committee. Their job is to design a great seal for the new United States of America. What should the great seal look like? What should it say? The three men all present different ideas. They begin discussing and debating the competing designs. Will they be able to reach a compromise? This could hardly be called a grabber. But I proposed this opener several years into my textbook writing career. I had been conditioned to self-edit. My goal here was to set up a discussion of the basics of American government in a way that was appropriate and not unbearably boring. The editors had no objections. But thats what keeps this job interestingthere are always new objections. A college professor wrote beside the paragraph: Great! The rst three people we meet in the chapter, and they all have to be dead white men! And, on another copy of the same page, a conservative Texan noted: You deliberately omit the fact that both Franklin and Jefferson suggested the use of Biblical imagery on the great seal. Why are you censoring God? These were not zealous objections, as textbook objections go. But we were not sure we could accommodate both sides in the eight lines available. So we just cut the story and found something else. Why ask for trouble? I have many more examples of stories and details that were rejected from my textbooks. Over the years, I lled fat les with this stuff, all the while telling friends that one day I was going to do something with all of this great material. Finally, after many years of whining, I started writing my own books, packed with all the stories
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and quotes I was never allowed to put into textbooks. The rst two are King George: What Was His Problem? (the American Revolution) and Two Miserable Presidents (Civil War). The third book, Which Way to the Wild West? (Americas westward expansion), is coming out this summer. The whole time I was working on these books, I thought about Louiss lightbulb lesson. I pictured myself telling him stories, like the one about the time in 1776 when Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were traveling together for Congress and they had to share a bed at a crowded inn. The men put on their nightshirts and hopped into the narrow bed. Then Adams felt a draft and jumped up to close the window. Oh, dont shut the window! Franklin shouted from bed. We shall be suffocated! Adams explained that he was afraid of catching a cold. Franklin dismissed the fear. Come to bed and I will convince you, he said. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds. Adams reluctantly left the window open and climbed back under the covers. As he settled his head on the pillow, he heard Franklin begin a lecture about healthy air and bad air. I was so much amused, Adams remembered, that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together. This could never appear in a textbook for many reasons: no space, not in the standards, cant have two men in a bed, etc. Do I think its a vitally important story for kids to know? Not at all. The point is, its hard to remember anything about stiff, two-dimensional paintings, but its easy to remember stories about real people you know. So after theyve read about Franklin and Adams arguing in bed, kids are much more likely to care about these guys, to follow them eagerly into scenes of signicant action. Thats the theory, anyway. Its why Im always on the hunt for stories. Funny, gross, amazing, surprising, depressing, inspiring, and infuriating storiesanything I can use to put the lightbulb lesson into action. I hope Louis, wherever he is today, would approve.
Steve Sheinkin is a childrens author who also writes and draws a series of graphic novels about a rabbi in the Wild West. Steve lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, New York.