Tag: Education

8 Questions with SK Bennett, author of Marco the Great and the History of Numberville.

Marco did okay in math. He could follow the complex blueprints provided to him, navigate the steps, and arrive at the answers that earned him a shiny grade near the front of the alphabet. That is, until middle school. As new and confusing letters started creeping into every question, Marco developed a problem. When a new figure ‘pops’ into his life, he is introduced to a fantastical world where numbers rule, where they live together in villages, engage in duels, build stadiums and cheer for their favorite team as players are flung through the air. Marco’s imagination runs wild as he develops new powers and hungers for more.

But everything is not as it seems. Join Marco, his annoying little sister Maggie, and his best friends Oliver and Liam (a math whiz and a conspiracy nut), as they discover this magical world is more real than they ever could have dreamt. And find out… Will Marco master the Numberfolk before the Numberfolk, very literally, master him?

Marco the Great and the History of Numberville is the first installment in a fantastical adventure series that will have readers learning math and enjoying every minute of it. In addition, the text includes over 300 practice problems and solutions as well as access to an entire digital world allowing students to dive directly into Marco’s world with 40+ games to level-up their learning.

Marco the Great
Marco the Great

See the tour–wide giveaway at the end.

How did you come up with the idea for Marco the Great? 

I have always been an avid reader and a lover of stories. When my daughters were young, we  would read The Magic Treehouse series and I was so impressed with how well my kids could  pick up on facts from fiction much better than they could with standard textbooks. The idea to  create a similar mathematical fantasy world rattled around in my brain for years. It wasn’t until  my daughter hit 6th grade and was really struggling that gave me the push I needed to help  her. I was substituting a class and the way I happened to explain solving equations had a fun  and creepy vibe to it. At that moment I finally knew what the story would be. I started writing  and honestly haven’t stopped since! As a bonus, my daughter no longer ‘hates’ math, she has  this wonderful excitement when she talks about it, she is so proud and confident, and she went  from being behind to being a leader in her honors course. This alone was well worth it, and I so  hope that Marco the Great can have a similar impact on students across the world.  

How did you do research for Marco the Great? 

The math was the easy part. I feel like I have been researching not only the content but the  best way to present it to students for my entire personal life and professional career. Every one  of the 100+ math textbooks I own, every experience as an educator, and every ‘aha’ moment  contributed to the scope, sequence, and presentation of the topics.  

I, in some way, researched everything else that went into Marco the Great. Sometimes this was  a deep dive into Google or the books I have at home, but often it was just throwing myself into  the experience. In one scene, Marco and Mr. Pikake do math in the snow. My kids and I  physically did this. I wanted everything to be just right and believable. For instance, I needed  to know how it sounds when you are shivering and trying to speak the character’s words. So we  played it out! We even wrote out all the equations with a stick and took pictures of them to aid  me as I wrote the scene. 

Marco the Great has unique page numbers, how did you come up with this idea? 

One goal of the book was to help students see that numbers are everywhere. There are  numbers we see and don’t ever really think about, and there are others we don’t see that are  governing the natural world like friction or gravity. The page numbers were a great place to  highlight this. By making them different mathematical equations and expressions, my goal was  to show that no matter how difficult the math might look, it’s just a number. 

Every book has page numbers that serve as a way to reference and communicate information. They are something we often ignore. In Marco the Great you can’t miss the strange mix of  letters and numbers taking over the bottom of each page and they differ depending on the  chapter and the concept we are talking about. This provided both a fun and novel way for  students to check their understanding and an opportunity to normalize complicated notation  and make it more approachable. It had the added benefit of highlighting the unseen numbers  we take for granted.  

What makes your book different from what’s out there? 

One of the reasons I finally took the terrifying leap to publish was because there wasn’t  anything on the market. I am certainly a bibliophile and I searched and searched and came up  empty. There are books that are math adjacent, but I found these never dug deep enough into  the actual concepts. Books that did dig deep were textbooks or technical writing that were  hard to read and felt like I had to first translate them into English and then try to understand  what they were attempting to explain. Marco the Great presents rigorous mathematics in a way  that is fun to read and much easier to comprehend. It uses the power of storytelling to provide  a fresh perspective that I believe is so needed in today’s classrooms. 

Do you have another profession besides writing? 

My technical profession is educator and instructional designer. I have spent years designing  and developing courses and curricular material which made the transition to writing a bit  easier. A huge part of my educational philosophy is that learning should be fun. Most of my  days are spent coding math games. I think that learning through play is the absolute best way  to master new concepts.  

The norm is for instructional designers to stay out of the classroom. I always felt this was a huge  mistake. How can I design a strong and engaging curriculum if I am so removed from the  students using it? So, throughout the years I have always kept one foot in the classroom. Not  only does this bring me so much joy, energy, and purpose, it helps me to continue to  understand the demographics I am designing for and what is important to them.  

What is your next project? 

I am very excited for the next book in the Marco the Great series: Marco the Great and the  Mystery of Phaseville. It focuses on Algebra concepts such as functions and graphing. I am in  love with the story and can’t wait to get everything just right.  

What are the biggest rewards and challenges with writing Marco the Great? 

The biggest reward is helping students to not fear numbers; to see their importance, and to  feel more confident in learning and doing mathematics. There is so much talk about how math  is useless, we don’t use what we learn in our daily lives. But I see it differently, I see math  everywhere I look. Learning math is the process of making sense of the world around us,  optimization, logic, engineering, it’s everything. If I can help a student to see, understand, and  appreciate math, it is all worth it.  

As a mom, how do you balance your time? 

My kids inspire me. I watch how my teenagers respond to situations, funny things they say, and  all of that goes into the story in some way. They help me a lot. I’ll read a passage and watch  their reaction. When they smile or can’t help but let out a chuckle it tells me ‘that’s a good  line’.  

My husband is also a huge help. We both work from home and homeschool. We split things  up. The kids rotate coming out into my office (my son is here with me now working on his own  math homework) and then back inside. Everything is a balancing act, and I am sure I fail at it.  But that’s okay. I try to do better every day and am so thankful for all the time I get with my  kids.

Marco the Great and the History of Numberville is a MathBait publication. The first installment in the series covers standards from 6th & 7th grade Prealgebra. The exact topics can be found at www.mathbait.com/marco-the-great.

Marco the Great has a 4th-6th grade reading level and was written for a middle school audience. However, it is a great option for younger students as well, either independently or read aloud. Throughout his journey, Marco encounters bullying which may be uncomfortable for younger readers. Parents may skip the related passages (pages 22, 60, and 112), if desired, for the given audience

Find Marco the Great an the History of Numberville at Amazon.

We are doing a tour–wide giveaway of a signed copy of the book and a MathBait T-shirt. SK has THREE sets available for US and/or Canada winners.

Just click below.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/463009dc9/

SK Bennett
SK Bennett

Author Bio:

SK Bennett is an award-winning educator, instructional designer, mathematician, and homeschool mom of five. She spent years designing courses for top companies and institutions before deciding it was time to embrace her belief that learning should be fun and math should never be all about memorization and rote procedures. Inspired by her favorite stories, she set out to create Marco’s world – where learning is an adventure and math is never ever boring.

 

Website: https://www.mathbait.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mathbait

Amazon: https://bit.ly/3RhtSZz 

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/135699300-marco-the-great-and-the-history-of-numberville

 

SK Bennett blog tour
SK Bennett blog tour

 

© 2014-2023- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.

#InterviewsInTranslation ‘Sunrise in Southeast Asia’ by Carmen Grau (@CarmenGrauG ) A traveller and writer Down Under.

Hi all:

As you know I try to bring you writers who mainly publish in Spanish and whose works have been translated to English to help you discover their wonderful offerings. Today, I have the pleasure of bringing you Carmen Grau, a writer from Barcelona (like me) who after travelling widely (and she keeps travelling) now lives in Australia. Therefore the interview title is a bit of a misnomer as she has written it in English, but I thought you’d find it fascinating. And it’s  a topic fairly different to the fiction I usually bring you. If you have children you’ll find her take on children’s education pretty interesting too.

And here, without further ado, I introduce you to Carmen.

Author Carmen Grau
Author Carmen Grau

Biography

Carmen Grau was born and grew up in Barcelona, Spain. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Barcelona and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Providence College, R.I. She writes in English, Spanish, and Catalan. She has traveled extensively and lived in different countries like the USA, Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia. In the year 2000 she set out on an unplanned journey around several Southeast Asian countries, and a year later she wrote “Amanecer en el Sudeste Asiático” (Sunrise in Southeast Asia), the number one ebook in all travel categories on Amazon Spain in 2012 and 2013. In 2004, she wrote the novel “Trabajo temporal”. In 2013, she published a second travelogue, “Hacia tierra austral”, which tells her journey on board some of the most legendary trains in the world, from Barcelona, Spain to Perth, Australia. The novel “Nunca dejes de bailar” is her most recent work, published in February 2015. She writes regularly in her blogs: elblogdecarmengrau.blogspot.com, in Spanish, and raisingchildreninfreedom.blogspot.com, in English. Apart from writing and traveling, Carmen has many other passions like cooking, walking, and reading; most of all, spending time with her two unschooled sons, Dave and Alex. She is a child advocate and a firm believer in the right of children to self-education. When not traveling, Carmen and her two sons live in Dunsborough, a small town in the South West of Australia.

When and where did you start writing?

I started writing when I was little. I remember writing my first book when I was eight. I don’t know what happened to it, but I still keep the journals I started when I was ten or eleven. I never stopped, but I did burn some of the later journals so that my siblings would stop wanting to read everything I wrote. I find this very ironic now because they are not interested in reading my books. I don’t mind and we still get along great.

Sunrise in Southeast Asia by Carmen Grau
Sunrise in Southeast Asia by Carmen Grau. Trans. Brendan Riley

Tell us about your experience as an independent writer

I published my first book Amanecer en el Sudeste Asiático (now available in English as Sunrise in Southeast Asia) on Amazon in 2012. I wrote it in 2001, right after my seven-month journey around Southeast Asia. I tried to get it published in Spain with no success. In the meantime, I kept travelling and living life. I also got distracted with marriage and kids. One day it dawned on me that the book had been sitting in a drawer for ten years. I only gave it to read to friends who knew about it and asked for it. One day a writer contacted me. She had heard about my book through a common friend and wanted to read it. She liked it and encouraged me to do something about it. So I decided to try again to get it published in the traditional way. I sent it to over thirty literary agents in Spain. Four of them replied and one said they loved it and would be happy to represent me. However, they did not manage to find me a publisher and blamed it on the current economic crisis in Spain. It was then, at the end of 2011, when I decided to self-publish my book using my small second-hand book business name, Dunsborough Books. The book finally came out in April 2012 and started selling on Amazon straight away. Soon it became number one in all travelling categories on Amazon and has remained at the top since its publication. After that, I was encouraged to keep self-publishing and, of course, writing, which I had never stopped doing. Since then, I have been contacted by traditional publishers who are interested in my work, and I might consider trying this other way, but for the moment I am happy as an independent author and publisher.

Do you have a particular moment about your experience as a writer that you remember with particular affection?

I can’t think of one precise moment. I have lots of anecdotes regarding my readers which I cherish. Once a reader found one of my books on a bench. He picked it up, read it, loved it, and wrote to me to let me know all this. Another time, my sister went to Thailand for a month and she met a couple who started telling her about this great book they had just read. It was my book!

Do you have a favourite genre (as a reader and as a writer)

As a reader, I don’t have a favourite genre, but there are genres I wouldn’t read even if they paid me. I read a lot of non-fiction. I love travel books, but also psychology and science books. And I love reading fiction too, mainly literary fiction. As an author, I aspire to write good quality contemporary fiction and also non-fiction about the things that interest me, like education and travelling.

What made you decide to translate your book? And how did you go about it?

The Spanish version of my first book was so successful that I thought I should try to have it translated into English. Besides, all my English speaking friends asked me for it. At the time, I didn’t think I would have the patience or skill to translate it myself, so I looked for a professional translator. Someone recommended me one that turned out to be quite unprofessional. I saw that straight away, so nothing was lost. Then I did some research myself, through Linkedin. I found a translator that seemed very talented and professional and started working with him. It was a great experience and I will be recommending him to a lot of people.

Any advice for other writers?

Have your book read, proofread and revised by as many people as you can, prior to publication. You’ll be surprised at how disparaging your friends’ opinions will be. In the end, though, you decide what changes to make. Write for yourself, you’re the first one who has to like it. If you like it, many other people will like it too, because you’re not that unique. That’s what I do, anyway.

Links to follow Carmen and read more about her book:

Book in paperback (and you can also get the e-version matched for price if you get the paperback)

https://www.createspace.com/5706521

E-book

mybook.to/SunriseinSoutheastAsia

Carmen’s page in Amazon:

amazon.com/author/carmen-grau

A post by Brendan Riley, the translator, about the book.

https://brendanriley2015.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/sunrise-in-southeast-asia/

Thanks so much to Carmen for telling us about her book and her writing, thanks to all of you for reading, and if you’ve enjoyed it, like, share, comment and CLICK!