{"id":21049,"date":"2013-12-31T06:30:05","date_gmt":"2013-12-31T11:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=21049"},"modified":"2014-01-02T14:11:54","modified_gmt":"2014-01-02T19:11:54","slug":"childrens-authors-on-education-policy-michael-buckley-talks-bullying-and-non-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/12\/31\/childrens-authors-on-education-policy-michael-buckley-talks-bullying-and-non-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Children’s Authors On Education Policy: Michael Buckley Talks Bullying And Non-Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Michael<\/a>

Abrams Books<\/p>

Michael Buckley is a best-selling children's author.<\/p><\/div>\n

Children\u2019s author Michael Buckley has spent a lot of time thinking about bullies. He\u2019s the bestselling author of the NERDS series, which features a bunch of nerdy kids who deal with bullies during the school day and moonlight as top-secret superheroes the rest of the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow hard it must be to be a teacher in the United States. Every four years some new knucklehead gets elected and then tells everybody that they\u2019re doing their job completely wrong and we\u2019re going to have to fix the whole educational system,\u201d says Buckley. \u201cSo every four years I think writers for children have to evolve a little bit, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buckley spoke with StateImpact Florida about bullying, writing for school-aged children, how his son\u2019s education is different from his own, and why Common Core emphasis on nonfiction in particular is changing expectations of children\u2019s writers.<\/p>\n

Your books deal a lot with school bullying. What has the response been from students reading this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I go to schools and I ask the kids, \u2018who here thinks of themselves as a nerd?\u2019\u2014what I discover is that almost every kid is raising their hands.<\/p>\n

Now that\u2019s not something I would have admitted at all when I was a kid\u2014I would never have confessed that I was a nerd even though I was a terrible nerd.<\/p>\n

But today, to be a little different and a little awkward is almost like a badge of honor with these kids. And they really love the thing about them that makes them different.<\/p>\n

And at the same time you hear a lot about bullying and adults being really confounded by what they see as an epidemic of bullying. So how do you square those two things?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bullies have been around since the dawn of time. And it\u2019s nice to see that people are starting to take it seriously. Because when I was a kid, if somebody picked on you, the entire staff of the school would say, \u2018oh, that\u2019s valuable learning experience.\u2019 Like, \u2018oh, he pushed you into a gutter? Well alright, good for you.\u2019<\/p>\n

Now people are taking it quite a bit more seriously.<\/p>\n

I think what bullying was when I was a kid was very different than it is now where the bullying is almost anonymous because you have Twitter and Facebook and text messaging\u2014and just the horrible, mean, nasty things that children can do to each other with electronic devices. I think what you see now more is a lot more social media bullying where everybody is bullying everybody.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m glad that parents and teachers are starting to take this seriously. I honestly believe a Facebook account is something that no child should have until they\u2019re, like, 17.<\/p>\n

How does the way that books and children\u2019s literature get taught in school affect the way that you think about writing for kids?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Michael<\/a>

Abrams Books<\/p>

Michael Buckley is a best-selling children's author.<\/p><\/div>\n

How hard it must be to be a teacher in the United States. Every four years some new knucklehead gets elected and then tells everybody that they\u2019re doing their job completely wrong and we\u2019re going to have to fix the whole educational system.<\/p>\n

So every four years, writers for children have to evolve a little bit, too. Right now we have this thing called Common Core, which people are literally rioting in the streets about. One of the things that\u2019s changing now is they want kids to read a lot more nonfiction. So I think some writers are scrambling because fiction is the bread and butter of most of us, and now they want us to write nonfiction, which I don\u2019t know how I\u2019m going to do that.<\/p>\n

I mean, [the students are] way too busy taking tests. Like every kid has to be tested until they\u2019re nearly dead\u2026 So there\u2019s really no time for reading in school.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t even really think about it when I\u2019m writing. I\u2019m honestly thinking about the kid who\u2019s sitting at the window, and it\u2019s raining, and he\u2019s got a book because it\u2019s the only time he has to read. Teachers just don\u2019t have the time for a novel anymore.<\/p>\n

You have a six-year-old son. How do you think your experience of reading and writing in school is different than what his is or what he\u2019s headed for?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, in some ways I think that he actually benefits from teachers who have a little bit more open mind. When I was a kid, the idea of a comic book or a graphic novel? That was just ridiculous.<\/p>\n

But now my son has access to books that I think appeal better to a boy because they\u2019re much more visual, things like\u00a0Diary of a Wimpy Kid\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Captain Underpants<\/em>. These things appeal to him in much bigger ways than I think the traditional stories that we read at home. So, what I\u2019m seeing is kids are seeing books in new ways, which I totally applaud.<\/p>\n

What were the stories that you read as a kid the age of your audience now that have really stuck with you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The truth is that\u2014and I tell this to kids all the time\u2014when I was their age, we didn\u2019t have all these great kids\u2019 books. We had, like, 10 kids books and nine of them were about shooting your pet. There was a bunch of kids living on the prairie and children living in boxcars, just like very sad things, you know?<\/p>\n

I remember the book that really resonated with me was a book called\u00a0The Mouse and the Motorcycle<\/em>, which a librarian forced me to read, and I loved it. It had the three most important things a nine-year-old boy wants: it was funny; it was a big adventure; and it was completely pointless. There\u2019s no heavy moral story in\u00a0The Mouse and the Motorcycle<\/em>, and that is what I wanted.<\/p>\n

What else? James and the Giant Peach,<\/em>\u00a0which I just recently re-read. Any kind of Roald Dahl book, I was totally, totally into.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Children\u2019s author Michael Buckley has spent a lot of time thinking about bullies. He\u2019s the bestselling author of the NERDS series, which features a bunch of nerdy kids who deal with bullies during the school day and moonlight as top-secret superheroes the rest of the time. \u201cHow hard it must be to be a teacher […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":21050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,15],"tags":[1157,879],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21049"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21053,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21049\/revisions\/21053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}