Books Update

Trip to the Museum of Natural History on Friday revealed indeed an extensive selection of children's science books. Unfortunately, again, quite dissatisfying. Shelf after shelf of "core dumping" titles on dinosaurs, plants, mammals, frogs, snakes, human body, technology, etc. I want stories! I don't mean fictional stories, I mean stories in the sense of the books produced by best science writers for adults - Carl Zimmer's books tell stories about how scientists work and along the way reveal a great deal of information about the products of science in addition to the process. They have a central focus - usually a mystery or a problem to be solved - around which all the details coalesce. One would think that the story format would be all the more appealing to children, raised on a diet of fiction most of their lives, and yet they are the rarest of science books. In the stores there is often a "Young Adult" section for upper-middle school to high school aged students, and there's a rather large selection of titles - all fiction.

It's also my hunch that many of the non-fiction titles that may be more interesting are geared almost exclusively toward libraries. Few are available in paperback and fewer still are available in bookstores - what do I know, maybe they just don't sell. So I'll be talking to our librarian about getting some new material into the school library. In addition to the NSTA recommendations I mentioned earlier, I also stumbled on the Young Adult Library Association's recommendations. They have a quite extensive list including a list for college bound older students. All lists are broken down by category (fiction/nonfiction or science, history, etc.) and many are annotated.

core dump
n.

A recapitulation of knowledge (compare bits, sense 1). Hence, spewing all one knows about a topic (syn. brain dump), esp. in a lecture or answer to an exam question. “Short, concise answers are better than core dumps” (from the instructions to an exam at Columbia).

Originally: A copy of the data stored in the core memory of a computer, usually used for debugging purposes.


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