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Between the Lines |
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Interview with Edward Bloor |
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Story Time
Edward Bloor
George and Kate are promised the finest education when they join the famous Whittaker Magnet School, but their new school is as strange as its test scores are stellar. Classes take place in the dreary basement of the town library, a monstrous old building in which several people have died under strange circumstances. The school curriculum is focused on beating standardized tests, and the students are fed noxious protein shakes to improve their test performance. Worst of all, there seems to be a demon loose in the library whose murderous work has only just begun. |
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Biography |
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| Edward Bloor is the author of the award-winning and bestselling Tangerine, as well as the acclaimed novel Crusader. A former high school teacher, he lives with his family near Orlando, Florida. |
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Interview |
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Q: In Story Time, you give teenagers suspense, mystery, and adventure intertwined with a couple of lessons about family relationships and life as a middle-school student. What's the most important message that you want teen readers to walk away with?
A: That standardized testing is not really about them at all. It is about real estate and politics and money, but not about them. Therefore, they should not let such tests upset them. They should concentrate on discovering and developing their God-given talents.
Q: You've said that this book is "part ghost story, with lots of supernatural action, and part satire about public schools." Can you give us an example of how you use the ghost story element to illustrate public school politics?
A: This book isn't really about our hard-pressed public schools, which I support wholeheartedly. The Whittaker Magnet School is a gross anomaly in which callously ambitious pseudoeducators get what is coming to them. Story Time is more of a cautionary tale than an indictment.
Q: At the fictitious Whittaker Magnet School, the main focus is improving test scores through test-based curriculum. The children know the big vocabulary words, but they don't know what they mean; they've mastered learning by rote. As for books, they house demons, which possess people. These scenarios are bleak—what are your thoughts about the current state of education?
A: I am surprisingly upbeat about it. I think we are turning out the kind of people we need to keep our society going. I hope young people will reject the notion that they are inferior if they do not possess Harvard MBAs. The jails are full of those guys. We need regular, honest working people much, much more.
Q: Where do you think education is headed?
A: I think public school education will continue to help a lot of people, but it will have little impact on the status quo. The rich will stay rich and the poor will stay poor. What is important is that children of the poor will have a means of rising in economic/social class via public education.
Q: George's parents are incredibly supportive, but they're passive when it comes to his education. In fact, they spend a lot of time whooping and generally embarrassing George and their granddaughter, Kate. Does their behavior reflect that of parents today?
A: No. Those are just comic characters. Story Time, in my mind, is a comic novel with some serious threads added. If you don't laugh while reading it, then I have failed you.
Q: This book seems to have several potential audiences: teenagers, educators, administrators—even the First Lady (with a reference to a teaching background). In addition to teen readers, whom else did you write this book for?
A: I think every Harry Potter fan, worldwide, should own a copy and then immediately purchase my backlist titles!
Q: You were once a teacher. How did your experience shape the message behind Story Time?
A: I know from my own experience that teachers are not treated as professionals; they are treated as slackers who need to be told what to do by their betters. Every few years, a new trend in education achieves prominence, and teachers are forced to implement the tenets of that new trend. Story Time's test-based curriculum seems a ridiculous exaggeration, but it's really not. If that approach got the First Lady and the President's blessing, every teacher in America would soon be implementing it.
Q: After writing three books—the bestselling and award-winning Tangerine, Crusader, and Story Time—what's on your literary agenda?
A: Another hybrid—with threads about time-travel, history (World War II), and family dysfunction. It's titled London Calling, and I hope it will be out in the fall of 2005. I've done a lot of research on London in 1940, and I purchased a lot of related stuff on eBay to that end.
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