I'd see my middle-class friends and painfully realize that their
kids grasped entire subject areas about which my students knew
nothing: the organs of the body, the solar system,
photosynthesis, rockets, dinosaurs, creatures of the ocean.
Their kids hadn't learned about such things solely from hands-on
experiences with, say, bodily organs, but from reading or being
read to at home; they had begun to explore their interests
through reading and were building up a wealth of knowledge on a
wide range of subjects. I despaired at the discrepancy between
what they and my students knew, and doubted that ''boats'' was
going to help bridge the gap. I began to yearn for the kind of
textbooks that I had once loved as a kid: big, beautiful books
that I liked just holding, smoothing down their shiny pages of
colorful illustrations and photographs. Certainly, science
lessons should include experiments, but boats, at the time,
constituted a third of the science curriculum in my district.
Too often, lessons deteriorated into