Passed Made Present

The Inventor

Who’s the most brilliant scientist to have immigrated to America?

Is that your final answer?

Did you consider the inventor of washable crayons?

Colin Snedeker came to the United States as a youth. After inventing a non-staining shoe polish, he went to work for the maker of Crayola Crayons. As his obituary in the Wichita Eagle tells it:

[H]e had run out of ideas as to what to make next… He went into the company’s complaint department, where they had all kinds of mail from people complaining about what was wrong.

Thus inspiration struck.

“He had that kind of mind that could just figure things out,” his sister said. Snedeker is just one of the brilliant minds America has been blessed with from abroad: since 2000, 40% of Americans who won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics have been immigrants.

Mr. Snedeker may not have been a Nobel Prize winner. He is, however, (yet) another immigrant who has improved our lives.

The Librarian

“Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in these books?” – Walter Dean Myers

Pura Belpré was the first Puerto Rican public librarian in New York City.

As this NPR tribute recounts, “Belpré could not find any books in Spanish – so she wrote them herself.”

Moreover:

Belpré travelled all over the city, from the Bronx to the Lower East Side, telling stories with puppets in Spanish and English. Nobody was doing that back then.

Today there is an award in her name, given each year by the American Library Association, to honor a Latino author.

The chances of winning this prize are, alas, not as slim as they should be: “the proportion of books for kids by Latino authors is so “shockingly low” that “it’s insane,” says the award official.

The problem is even larger. “Children’s and young adult literature… represent a stubbornly white world even as U.S. children are increasingly people of color,” Amy Rothchild concludes in FiveThirtyEight.

Ms. Belpré needs our help.

Roald Dahl

For many children Roald Dahl is synonymous with reading.

Fighter ace, surgical device inventor, FDR’s drinking buddy. And then there’s his services to literature, and literacy.

For Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday, the Oxford English Dictionary added several of his words – that’s how we’ve come to think of them – to their volumes.

He is rightfully known for his inventiveness with English. But as the Independent noted in Dahl’s obituary a quarter-century ago, “The quality of his writing is easily discernible by the fluency with which it can be read aloud.”

See for yourself by reading the passage below out loud. A lesser writer would have crammed it with detail or been oblivious to its rhythm:

Continue reading “Roald Dahl”

Tommy Kono

“Weight lifting is 50 percent mental and 30 percent technique. Power is only 20 percent, but everybody has it reversed.”

Grit is a popular topic in education these days,* and Tommy Kono’s life provides a case study: the man whose New York Times obituary twice includes the word frail was a world champion weightlifter.

His life offers instruction in irony, as well: Kono began lifting weights in the internment camp where his own country imprisoned him, then went on to serve that country’s military and represent it at the Olympics.

It also provides a notable example of cause and effect. Mr. Kono, recounting a conversation with someone who had attended one of his competitions in Austria, said: “He told me he was a 13-year-old boy in the audience that day and was so inspired he ran home and started working out.”

*What is grit? It’s passion and perseverance for long term goals, according to Angela Duckworth on the Freakonomics podcast “How to Get More Grit In Your Life.”

Jerry Parr

One of my favorite lessons is to put students in Jerry Parr’s shoes. He was the Secret Service agent who had to make a life-or-death decision for President Ronald Reagan.

We read “The Day Reagan Was Shot” from the Wall Street Journal, stopping at the last sentence below:

Parr spun quickly through his options, wondering whether they should return to the White House or head straight to the nearest hospital. But what if the assassination attempt was part of a coordinated attack? What if there were other assassins out there? In that case, the White House was the safest place on earth, and that was where he should go. Besides, if he decided to take the president to a hospital and he hadn’t been seriously injured, the visit might unnecessarily panic the country or trigger a financial crisis. Moreover, the hospital wouldn’t be guarded, so he would be putting the president at great risk, especially if co-conspirators were lurking there, waiting, if need be, to finish the job.

Still, what if Reagan was badly injured? Going to the White House could be disastrous; they’d be much better off at the nearest trauma center, in this case the one at George Washington University Hospital.

Parr weighed the two options. Neither seemed particularly good.

A dilemma, I explain to students, is when you have two bad choices. The trick is to decide which one is less bad. So before finishing the article, we complete this exercise: students list the pros and cons of each option, make their decisions, and write persuasive essays to Agent Parr.

Agent Parr didn’t have time for contemplation. His agile mind, however, made the right call, and his heroism provides a lesson in how to make decisions under intense stress.

His obituary can be found in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and via the Associated Press.