So I am working on getting the second book out. At some point, I need to focus on alerting people to the first book. But here is a book cover idea sent to me:
We put a giant magnifying glass on top of the front cover, with light streaming through and down to a point, where a little ant-like student in a desk is catching fire. The title is “Burned by the Looking Glass: How No Child Left Behind and the Common Core Trapped Students in a Frenzy of Testing.”
It’s a little dark, obviously. The scariest part: my looking glass cover absolutely captures what I have been writing about, what I have almost quit writing about because nobody running government offices/boards of education seems to care about that aspect of testing — the kids who are part of these hammer-hammer-hammer data collection efforts.
The guy I was talking to started by suggesting putting an ice pick in the kid’s brain. I countered with a double-bladed axe. We took off from there, slaughtering kids along the way and then setting that one little guy on fire.
Here’s a critical portion of the thread, a quote from the anonymous source who has been helping me brainstorm this afternoon:
“Maybe it would be more thematic to put a magnifying glass burning the kid like an ant. Isn’t the new common core stuff dehumanizing and minimizing to kids, so portraying them as ants under a magnifier seems on track.”
My source above has nothing to do with education, except for the fact that he recently graduated from college. He has nothing to do with teaching. This is the view from IT and he and I are in total agreement. I like that phrase, “dehumanizing and minimizing to kids.” Yep.
One more book to help explain why this is so. Then I think I am moving on to science fiction. Going back to the cover now.
