Joy Hakim

I’m trying to upset the educational apple cart with, of all things, information-packed books. In an age of easy twitter-talk, solid absorbing reading may be the real balancing innovation. Traditionally, the best way to pass on information, and make it stick, has been through stories. (Read educational psychologist Kieran Egan to learn of the power of stories.)
     Since the days of the ancients, civilizations have always conveyed their important ideas through stories. (Check out the Bible; check Homer.) Somehow in our time we traded in stories for litanies of facts. We put those litanies in textbooks and school learning tanked. Now we’re setting those lists of facts on discs and on the web. But dull is dull. Stories have been and are the way to go.
     So I’ve been writing story-based books that, yes, are meant to teach history and science-but also to change some current educational thinking. Reading is essential if we are to produce thinking citizens; those who don’t read don’t have the in-depth knowledge to do a whole lot of thinking. Books are not the problem; it’s dreary books that are a turn-off.
     Read a tale from “Making Thirteen Colonies” (in the Oxford University Press’s American history series, A History of US) and see if you’ve learned some U.S. history. Or try a chapter from “Einstein Adds A New Dimension” and see if you’ve acquired insights into modern physics, along with some world history (from Smithsonian Books/NSTA’s The Story of Science.  In our world science should be for everyone, not just for scientists. (As it happens, we have some eloquent scientists writing stories of their craft.)
Back to that apple cart: Today, narrative learning books really are innovative: if you call going back to an old model innovation. This goes beyond subject matter. The idea is to create environments where teachers, pupils, and parents all learn together. The teacher as the purveyor of knowledge is an out-of-date model in a world where information is growing at exponential rates. No one, not even a great teacher, can be a know it all. So good absorbing books feed an environment where everyone can explore and learn together. It takes new thinking. It’s innovative. It’s fun.

I was a writer by trade, so writing on U.S. history didn’t seem daunting. Newspaper reporters tackle all kinds of subjects. I’d done a bit of medical writing, I was a business writer for three years, I wrote often about schools, I’d reviewed some plays and concerts, become an editorial writer, and done a lot of whatever-will-sell freelancing.  As for history?  A story I wrote about Jefferson’s “Statute for Religious Freedom” (a little known but enormously important document) ran in the Wall St. Journal. Virginius Dabney, one of my heroes and a grand old man In Virginia history circles, had actually complimented me on the article.  So had Dumas Malone, a Jefferson biographer and University of Virginia historian. The idea was to do as good a job as possible and go to experts to have my work checked. I didn’t realize it, but compared to those who actually write the books used in most schools, I was enormously well qualified.

         I already had a desk squeezed into a sunny bedroom corner; I was ready to begin. My intent was to write a one-volume U.S. history and take a year (at most) to do it. (Later I would chuckle over my ignorance of what I was undertaking.)

How to start? I headed for the Virginia Beach library where cardholders can check out 15 books. (During the time it took me to write A History of US, I would almost always have 15 library books stacked them on the floor next to the desk.)

And so I began reading: some overview American histories, some old college texts, and all the books I could find about the first people who walked and paddled over the Bering Strait area and on into the Americas. I discovered the wonders of used bookstores where out-of-print books often hold treasures of little known Americana. I tabbed library books and underlined in the books that I bought. When I could I visited the places I was describing.

Today I’m often asked about my writing method: Do I keep notes on index cards? Do I finish most of my research before I begin writing?

         Lots of writers do just that. I don’t. Maybe I’d be better off if I did. But I’m a rewriter. I start with an overview and some details-look for an unfolding story-and begin writing. Each time I read a new book or article I tweak, sometimes that leads to a major revision.

In my first newspaper jobs I had used a glue pot and scissors, as most reporters did then, moving paragraphs around by literally cutting and pasting. But thanks to a math-minded son, I was an early user of computers. I had a basic Apple and a dot matrix printer and found that the computer made rewriting enormously easy.

The Internet? When it arrived (years later, while I was writing “The Story of Science”), it would change my way of work. But that was in the future. When I began, the source of much of my information was a big bookcase filled with encyclopedias, dictionaries, and research resources. A thesaurus may have been the most used of those books.