On this week's episode of the Adventures in Learning podcast, we meet Caldecott Medalist Jason Chin, whose books include Grand Canyon, Your Place in the Universe, The Universe in You, and Watercress. Join us for a conversation that explores the importance of story and connection in nonfiction books, as well as the ways educators can build real STEAM connections and experiences with them. Plus learn some really interesting facts about whale falls and hurricanes (hint -- you may see them appear in a future Jason Chin book).
📘[00:55] Inspiration Behind the Books:
🔍 [02:04] Research Process as a Voyage of Self-Discovery:
📚[04:06] Diverse Range of Topics:
🌟 [07:09] Career Journey
👥 [09:16]Mentorship and Giving Back:
📚 [12:50] Educational Impact of Jason's Books:
📘 [16:58] Power of Narrative Nonfiction:
🌟[18:43] Invitation to Learning:
🎉 [21:45]Diverse Characters in Illustrations as Windows and Mirrors:
📚 [31:40] Educational Impact:
📘 Life After Whale:
🌟Curiosity is the Cure:
Read the full show notes, visit the website, and check out my on-demand virtual course. Continue the adventure at LinkedIn or Instagram.
*Disclosure: I am a Bookshop.org. affiliate.
On this week's episode of the Adventures in Learning podcast, we meet Caldecott Medalist Jason Chin, whose books include Grand Canyon, Your Place in the Universe, The Universe in You, and Watercress. Join us for a conversation that explores the importance of story and connection in nonfiction books, as well as the ways educators can build real STEAM connections and experiences with them. Plus learn some really interesting facts about whale falls and hurricanes (hint -- you may see them appear in a future Jason Chin book).
📘[00:55] Inspiration Behind the Books:
🔍 [02:04] Research Process as a Voyage of Self-Discovery:
📚[04:06] Diverse Range of Topics:
🌟 [07:09] Career Journey
👥 [09:16]Mentorship and Giving Back:
📚 [12:50] Educational Impact of Jason's Books:
📘 [16:58] Power of Narrative Nonfiction:
🌟[18:43] Invitation to Learning:
🎉 [21:45]Diverse Characters in Illustrations as Windows and Mirrors:
📚 [31:40] Educational Impact:
📘 Life After Whale:
🌟Curiosity is the Cure:
Read the full show notes, visit the website, and check out my on-demand virtual course. Continue the adventure at LinkedIn or Instagram.
*Disclosure: I am a Bookshop.org. affiliate.
[00:01] Dr Diane: Wonder, curiosity, connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr. Diane, and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures in Learning. So, welcome to the Adventures in Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Diane, and today we have award winning author and illustrator Jason Chin with us. Jason, welcome to the program. I'm so excited to have you with us.
[00:30] Jason: Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
[00:32] Dr Diane: So you have written so many incredible nonfiction books. I actually bought Grand Canyon as our travel guide. When we did a hike of the Grand Canyon, I got it for my husband to prepare us, and it was the perfect guide. But you've got Your Place in the Universe, The Universe in You — where do you find your inspiration for your beautiful books?
[00:55] Jason: So I read a lot of science, and when a topic excites me, then I like to share what I've learned. I always tell this to kids and when I'm doing school visits and they know what I'm talking about because they like to tell their friends about the cool fact that they've learned. When I get really into a topic, I tend to tell my kids and my wife all about it and go on and on and they kind of roll their eyes. But that's when I know I have a good topic to write a book about because means I'm passionate about it. And a book is a great way to share what I'm excited about with kids. So I'd say that's the main reason that I do it.
[01:54] Dr Diane: And I heard you say once that your research process is a voyage of self discovery. Can you describe a little bit about how you do your research into a topic?
[02:04] Jason: Sure. Well, like I said, it starts with kind of casual reading about a variety of topics. But when I settle into one topic, I do a deep dive to really get a good grounding in the topic. So actually, right now, I'm working on a book about hurricanes and I've kind of moved, I’m done with that stage for the most part. I've read a dozen books about hurricanes. I have a good grounding. But now I'm in the creative process and trying to write about the book and continuing to do research because as I start to create, more questions come up. And in this stage, I'm learning about what the topic really means to me, like why it's really important to me and special to me and what I want to say about it. That first stage of research where I'm getting a good grounding in the topic and learning about it, it's about acquiring information. It's about acquiring the knowledge that I'll need, the base of knowledge I'll need to be able to do the book. But the stage I'm in now, it's about learning what my relationship is with the topic. And I think that well, for me, that's very important. To make a good book and to make a piece of art, I have to have something to say.
[03:46] Dr Diane: I guess that makes sense. And you've done Coral Reefs and the Grand Canyon and you've done teeny tiny things and giant, big things. In terms of measurement — how do you go about kind of coming up with the images that you use in your books? How does that part of the process happen?
[04:06] Jason: Well, I write first because they're informational books, so it's important for me to write and get the information down and start wrestling with how to organize the information and also how to tell the story that's in the book. All of my books have a story in them, a narrative that carries the reader through the book. While I'm writing, I have images going through my head always. So even though I'm writing first, that's the first thing that goes on paper. The images are there. They're knocking around. I'm imagining this or that. In fact, the images come to me while I'm doing research. So a lot of times I'll be learning about something and an image will pop into my head and actually the images might be there before I even put words on paper. So that's the origin of the images. And then I start with small, simple sketches to go along with the words I'm writing sometimes. Simple sketches that have nothing to do with the words or not nothing to do, but that aren't tied to any specific words I've written yet, but that I feel like are really important images that I want to be in the book. So, for example, actually, there's an example I have right now because I'm working on this book about hurricanes. A friend of mine who lives in Florida sent me pictures. She took pictures throughout her experience with not. It wasn't like a direct hit on her where she is. She's in Sarasota, so she was kind of on the edge of the storm's path, but she took photographs of the whole experience. And one of those photographs, I was like, this is an image that I want to be in the book. It's like the storm approaching kind of image. I've got that in my mind, and I did some drawings of it, and I'm currently trying to figure out where to put it or, like, how to put it in the book.
[06:44] Dr Diane: That makes a lot sense.
[06:45] Jason: I think I know where in the sequence because it's the storm approaching, I know where it's going to go in the order of the narrative. I'm not exactly sure how to fit it into the narrative. So we'll see.
[07:00] Dr Diane: Okay, so have you always wanted to be a nonfiction writer and illustrator? How did that happen?
[07:09] Jason: I have not always wanted to do nonfiction. When I graduated from college, I studied art illustration in college. And after that, I got a job at a children's bookstore. And that's kind of where I decided I'd like to do picture books. And at first I was writing these stories to be picture books and illustrating them, making book dummies, and I was doing some really terrible work. They were not good stories because I didn't have a story I wanted to tell. I had pictures I wanted to paint and pictures I wanted to make. And then I'd come up with some not so good story to go along with them. So I was kind of making stories just for the pictures, not because I wanted to tell a story or cared about the character or had any investment, really, in that story. So they didn't come out very well. They weren't good books. It wasn't until read I read a magazine article about redwood trees that really intrigued me. And it was this I was actually on the subway when I read it. And then I started reading more about the trees because I was really intrigued by this topic and telling my wife all about them. Talking her ear off about Redwoods. And then it kind of flowed from there. I was like, oh, maybe I can make a book about this. And that was the first book that I wrote and illustrated.
[09:16] Dr Diane: Very cool. And you were fortunate to have a mentor growing up. Can you tell us a little bit about Trina and about sort of that mentorship?
[09:27] Jason: Yes. So the mentor was Trina Schart Hyman — Caldecott Award Winning Illustrator .I grew up in Lyme, New Hampshire, which was her town, and every year she would come to our school and present. And it was a small town, so I didn't know her personally, but it was a smallish town that I was only one degree of separated. Friends of mine knew her, or friends of my parents knew her.
[10:07] Dr Diane: Sure.
[10:08] Jason: And when I was in high school, I was interested in art, and I thought, I have this artist in my town. Maybe she can help me. So I called her up and asked for help. And she was very generous with her time, and she agreed to help me. I'd visit her every few months, maybe every three or four months. I'd come by with some new artwork, and then we’d talk about it, we’d talk about life. And I learned from her, not so much how to make artwork, but how to be an artist, or how she was an artist, what her life was like and what her approach to art was like. And it was really incredibly valuable. It changed my life. And I've come to learn actually, over the years, how many people she mentored. Actually, she mentored many other artists, and she's just a generous spirit and had a big influence on a lot of people's careers. So I'm grateful that I was one of them.
[11:31] Dr Diane: And that all started from her coming to do school visits every year and sort of building that connection.
[11:37] Jason: Yeah, that's right. That's how I knew about her. She was a local celebrity, our town celebrity.
[11:48] Dr Diane: How does it feel now that you're on the giving end of doing school visits and things like that?
[11:55] Jason: Yeah, it feels great. I think a lot of artists feel this way, but I certainly feel, you know, I guess I could say an obligation to give back. But it's not, it doesn't feel like an obligation. It just it feels like this is what you do. This is what was done for me, and this is what I want to do for the next generation. I guess I'm old enough now to say the next generation.
[12:33] Dr Diane: I think so. As you're doing school visits, are there interesting, fascinating ways you've seen teachers use your books with STEM or with STEAM? Do you get a chance to see the connections that they're building?
[12:50] Jason: I do. I don't get to be there while they're doing it because I come in for one day, right, and they’ve done a few weeks or maybe a month of prep with the books. They've done all sorts of things. One, I did a book about gravity, and they used it as their introduction to all these, it’s elementary school, so I would say physics, but it's a Forces in Motion unit. They did the egg drop, where they explored gravity that way. They did all their other normal units, but it was tied in with the book, which was really cool. One interesting thing that really excites me when I go to schools is when the librarian, the classroom teacher, and the art teacher get together and use the book as a way to tie all three of their curriculum together. So the art you know, I'll go into the school and the art teacher will have done art, I’m trying to imagine, they did collages of Grand Canyon or the desert Southwest landscape.
[14:27] Dr Diane: Sure.
[14:31] Jason: Several schools have done this, but they'll use as a way when you collage pieces of paper together, you can put in a background and then collage a foreground on top. So they use it a way to explore space. Another school used found, like, recycled materials in that project. So it was all ripped up cardboard and painted on. They took apart art magazines and painted. It was really cool. So anyways, that's what the art teachers were doing. But the classroom unit, I think those units were on geology and erosion and weathering and stuff like that. So they're learning that in the classroom and then in the library, they can do informational, text lessons, like, how do you find information in text sources, and where did author get their information? That kind of stuff. And what's exciting is that from talking to teachers, what excites me and what they tell me is that it's great for the kids because the kids have a continuity throughout their day. And so the art class reinforces what they learned in the classroom. The classroom reinforces what they learned in the library and so forth. And so they get a really good, I think, learning experience from it.
[16:16] Dr Diane: Absolutely, and I love that kind of collaboration. That's part of the way that I always tried to teach was to find a way to build in with their specials and to connect with the librarian, because I think you get a more powerful, holistic look at what you're teaching when you do it that way. And that's what I love about your books, is each one of them offers an opportunity, an invitation to be able to do that. And I think so much of it is because you have found sort of that story connection to nonfiction, that there's that engaging piece. You're not just spewing facts, you're finding a way to invite the reader into the world that you love so passionately, and it makes it easy for a teacher to adapt and fall in love with it as well.
[16:58] Jason: The narrative is a really important part of the book. I told you that I wrote really bad stories earlier on. It's not because I didn't like stories. I wanted to write stories. I just didn't have a story that I was really passionate about telling until I found nonfiction and the element of, I'm really passionate about this subject. I want kids to know about it. That's where my investment starts. But that's the launching pad. Right. But as I go along, I become invested in the characters and the setting and the place. And so the story matters quite a bit for me when I read books. It's why I want to turn the page.
[18:00] Dr Diane: Absolutely.
[18:01] Jason: Unless I'm already, you know, I'll read I'm reading a book, you know, like a textbook about meteorology. I want to learn about it. So I'm invested in kind of slogging my way through this book and have some reason to go get it. But I'm not going to expect a third grader or every third grader to really want to learn about the Grand Canyon or even know what it is to begin with. So I want them to have that story to give them a reason to turn the page if they're not at first engaged with the subject.
[18:43] Dr Diane: That makes sense because we all have our different passions. And so what you're doing is providing an invitation for somebody who maybe the Grand Canyon wasn't the thing that was driving their interest, but because it's got an intriguing story and something to connect with, they might find they have a new passion or a new interest.
[19:03] Jason: Yeah, that's kind of my thought process, I guess, behind making these books, is I want to put in as many things as I can to give readers a way in ,access to the book, a way to connect with the book. I think it's also better for learning. I want them to like the book. If they like it, then they'll remember it.
[19:37] Dr Diane: Right.
[19:38] Jason: I want them to have something in the book that they can relate to, because if you can or already know about right. Because anything that we're trying to learn, whether you're a kid or an adult, if you can attach it to something you already know, then it's much easier to remember it. That's just the way our brains work. And so I want to give them lots of things in the story that they can attach or that they can recognize so that the information has somewhere to attach in their brain.
[20:22] Dr Diane: Well, and one of the things I appreciate about your books as well is that your illustrations always provide a level of richness and extend your text so that there's more in the illustrations than just in the words, that there's something else that's added to it. I also love the fact that your characters are diverse, that you're allowing multiple opportunities for kids to see themselves in your work. And I think that that's so critical as we're introducing kids to the world to be able to let them see the possibilities of themselves in it. Is that something that you do with intention as you're figuring out how you want to present the illustrations?
[21:03] Jason: Absolutely, yes. It's very intentional. It's been I grew up, my mom is white, my dad is Chinese or Chinese heritage. They're both born in the US. So I come from a mixed cultural background of mixed heritage. And so it's been natural my whole life to want to put a variety of people and characters in my books. I remember in middle school, I had always had sketchbooks when I was growing up. And when I was in middle school, I had a sketchbook and I was drawing all these characters and so forth, and I was into knights and shining armor and Star Wars and fantasy stuff and all my characters. One day I just like, oh, you know what? I'm always drawing white men as my characters. And that's who King Arthur was and that's who all the knights were. And I was, huh? That's interesting. That thought just popped into my head. And I remember distinctly being like, well, can I do Chinese characters and do that? So I remember starting to wrestle with that or just think about that. Wrestle might be a strong word because it wasn't like, conflict so much as just this awareness, sure, of who I was representing just in my little sketchbooks. And now, in retrospect, it was a reflection of what or how characters were represented for me by the artist. Now, I should say this idea of diversity in books and the importance of putting diverse characters in books was reinforced for me by Trina, and she was very passionate about putting a diverse cast of characters in her books. She started off her career or I don't know if it started off her career, but she became famous for doing Grimm's fairy tales, right. Arthurian legends.
[23:40] Dr Diane: Her Little Red Riding Hood was one of the first books I remember my parents buying me.
[23:45] Jason: Right. Little Red Riding Hood, Caldecott Honor book ,was really a big deal book at the time for her and the industry and then, of course, St. George and the Dragon and she did a whole lot of them. And I think there came a point, probably before I met her, but after that period where she was like, I think it's fair to say that she was tired of doing that. And she made a point to do folktales from around the world — that was big in the 90s, was into that, but also just putting a diverse cast of characters in her books. And actually, she did one book where she, it was kind of a fairy tale type book, and she just, the characters were every race she could think of. And so, anyways, just knowing her that way has just reinforced for me, and now I just do it naturally, I guess, or it's just second nature to be like, who have I represented? Who is this character going to be? And who have I not represented yet in my books?
[25:25] Dr Diane: Right.
[25:26] Jason: And does it make sense for the story I am writing? I want it to make sense for the story. I want it to be true to the, I want the character to be true to the place that I'm putting them in, and but it's always a consideration.
[25:58] Dr Diane: Yeah, but, like, when you did Your Place in the Universe, the heroine of that book is in a wheelchair, is that correct?
[26:06] Jason: Yes.The Universe in You. And that was a deliberate choice of saying, who haven't I represented? I haven't represented anyone who uses a wheelchair in my books that hasn't been the lead character in my books. And I thought, oh, maybe this is a good opportunity to do that. Actually, I reached out to a friend of a friend who uses a wheelchair for her advice, and she helped me to design the character and talk about her experiences, and actually, one of the stories she told me while we were talking ended up becoming part of the book. It was really nice how that my initial thought, maybe I could do this actually kind of organically, fit really well into the book.
[27:20] Dr Diane: And I think I remember you telling that story at the Shenandoah University Children's Literature Conference that the character, or the person you talked to was talking about how you have to go down the accessibility ramps. And so that changes sort of where this lead character ends up for the field trip, and that's when she sees the hummingbird.
[27:41] Jason: Yes, that's right. So what Kelly told me about was how it can be hard for kids in wheelchairs to be separated from their class constantly. So you're with your friends, chatting, talking, having a good time, and then suddenly that whole experience gets interrupted because you have to go down the ramp, everyone else go down the stairs. Or you're lined up, ready to get on the bus, and then you have to go up on the lift, the back of the bus. And everyone else goes up the stairs. And it's challenging to be you're constantly separated or constantly reminded of your difference. I guess that's how Kelly explained it to me. So anyhow, when I was creating the book, I decided at one point this should be a class field trip to the Desert Museum outside of Tucson, Arizona. For completely other reasons, I picked that location for the book, and I realized, oh, I guess if it's a class trip, they're arriving at the museum. There's a ramp, there an accessibility ramp there. I'll have her separated. Everyone else is talking to the teacher, and she's going to catch up to the group, but that's where she sees the smallest bird in the United States, and then that kicks off the adventure. So her experience that might be a negative one turns into positive because she gets to go on the adventure. Anyways, that was my idea for it, and it came from talking to Kelly.
[29:42] Dr Diane: I love that. Thank you for sharing that story with us.
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[30:42] Dr Diane: I was thinking about the way that we teach kids to write nonfiction because I love the fact that you're story driven in the way that you do it. And I think often, especially in elementary school, we sort of say, here's your topic, go research it and write a book or write a paper about it. That doesn't really seem to feed into that passion and that connection that you're talking about. If there were ways that we could help teachers ignite kids passion for nonfiction, can you think of ways that you wish it were taught now?
[31:40] Jason: I'm always hesitant to give teachers advice because I'm not a teacher. I have ideas and I have seen projects that I like and I know how I learn. So I can just give well, maybe share that rather. I can share some projects that I thought were cool and I can share how I learned the thing that the way that I learn. Or when I get excited I should say this, when I get excited about a topic, so often when I read something and an image pops into my head that seems really cool. And, for example, when I was reading about the Grand Canyon, I was reading this geology textbook, and it was pretty dry, it was very academic. But what the textbook was describing was all of the fossils found in this one layer of the canyon. And then it was describing, we found this, that, and that fossil and these sediments. Therefore, we believe that this was an estuary environment, and they were describing what direction they thought the shoreline was at, what different species were there. And I was reading this, and I started to imagine this environment, and that made it cool. I was like, oh, that's really neat. We know not kind of what it was like. We know exactly what it was like because we know exactly what we know kind of was like. Plus, we have these very specific details. We know exactly which species of fern was there, we know exactly which species of tree was there, and so forth. But it was that transition from gaining information to imagining this environment that excited me. So, going back to what we were saying before, I like to see when kids learn some facts in, say, the classroom and then go to the art room and are asked to, like, make some art based on what they've learned.
[34:20] Dr Diane: Very cool.
[34:21] Jason: And the artwork, the art is, they're free to do it, but it's exciting.They're free to do what they like because they get to make their own picture, but it's exciting to see it. That reminds me of this letter. After school visits, often the whole class will write thank you letters. So I was reading a whole batch of thank you letters from this one school, and there was a really cool one where the girl who wrote it wrote about Your Place in the Universe, the book about the size of the universe. And she drew this picture. It was, like, in colored pencil, black and blue colored pencil. It was just like a really dark circle. Okay, scribbled in very careful. Not carefully, but very spent a lot of time making it really dark. And then she wrote all around the outside of it in a circle, like in the words going all the way around the circle. The observable universe is a lot bigger than this. And I thought that was great.
[35:40] Dr Diane: That's fabulous.
[35:41] Jason: I was like, that's fantastic. The design was there, like, the concept was there, that this is really big thing. And the joke was there. It's a lot bigger than the circle that I drew. She put humor into it, and that's exciting. That's something that she got to do. I imagine they had half an hour to write their thank you letters or whatever, and she got to inject that. So that was really cool. So, I don't know. Finding ways to express what they've learned in art class is great.
[36:30] Dr Diane: Absolutely.
[36:30] Jason: There's another project that I liked that these teachers did. They were teaching sentence structure. They were teaching different types of words. So nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and also compound sentences. So they did it in a the whole lesson went like this. They read the book and then said they said, write down one fact that you learned from the book. Crabs are red. Okay? And then they said, okay, now we need to add in a verb to your sentence. So it became the red crabs were on the rocks. Okay. Or, I don't know, ate something.
[37:31] Dr Diane: Sure.
[37:32] Jason: On the rocks. And then they said, okay, now we have to add in some adverbs and adjectives. And so the sentence expanded with each round.
[37:41] Dr Diane: That sounds cool.
[37:42] Jason: And then they were paired up with partners, and they took their sentences and made them into compound sentences. So it was like the one kid wrote about red crabs, and the other kid wrote about seagulls, and then it became and the angry seagulls flew in circles, whatever. And then they went to the art room and illustrated their sentences.
[38:08] Dr Diane: I love the way they continued the whole idea.
[38:11] Jason: Yeah. So the lesson went across two periods, but it was like one period of or maybe three periods because they had to read the book and library, and then they did the sentence lesson, and then they went to the art room. And there was some collaborative nature. Because once they got to the art room, the two kids who had made the compound sentence had to create this scene. So they're engaging their imagination, right?
[38:41] Dr Diane: Sure.
[38:42] Jason: Because they had to then take what they had written, the words they'd written, and visualize what they'd written. And it was really cool. And I was like, oh, that's what I do for a job.
[38:55] Dr Diane: I love it.
[38:55] Jason: I learned some facts. I write some words, I draw some pictures. And then the next iteration, I guess the thing that is different, which some schools do with older students, is then they go back and they iterate it, right. Like they say, okay, now you've done your one idea. Let's go back and see if we can make it better and improve the sentence and improve the art and do a second round. So some schools with older kids have done I've seen some of that design process stuff. It's cool to see those tie ins, but I don't know.
[39:44] Dr Diane: I love all of that. I'm going to share some resources in the show notes for teachers, too, just about some of the STEM challenges that they might be able to take on in connection with your book.
[39:56] Jason: Yeah. Your Place in the Universe. In the beginning of that, the book is all it actually was, a book about scale and measurement. So it was like, if you haven't read the book, it starts with an eight year old is as tall as five of these books. Your average eight year old. I designed the book to be right ten inches tall, and the average eight year old is 50 or 51 inches tall. So about as tall as five books stacked. And then two kids are about as tall sorry, the tallest bird, ostriches, about as tall as two eight year olds, and then four eight year olds about as tall as the tallest giraffe, and then it multiplies. And as I was creating the book, I was like, well, this is going to be great for classrooms. But then I thought, well, let's just keep going all the way to the biggest thing in the universe. Anyways, classes have done that project where they stack up the books, they get five copies and they see how they use the book as a way to measure. They use themselves as a way to measure, and that's pretty cool. And then this one class tied inRedwoods, so they used themselves to measure the height of the redwood, which is right 380ft tall. So it's a lot of kids stacked up.
[41:32] Dr Diane: We used to use the unit of preschooler to measure how big a dinosaur was. So we were combining passions of self and dinosaurs together, and we would go head to toe and figure out how many preschoolers were the size of an apatosaurus.
[41:50] Jason: There's so many ways you can do that. I went to one, this was cool. One school — this was a long time ago, because Redwoods had just come out — there’s a page in Redwoods shows a car driving through the tree. So there's a tunnel cutting the tree, and it's to show how wide the trunk is. And so the librarian got a whole bunch of brown paper and created a 30 foot wide redwood trunk on the wall and put the doorway to the library in the middle of it.
[42:32] Dr Diane: That's cool.
[42:33] Jason: And so the kids helped measure out 30ft and the whole hallway, 30ft of the hallway with the library doors in the middle were a redwood trunk. That was really cool. The students on the ceiling, they hung I don't think it was pine cones, I think it was redwood branches. And pretty sure that this was the same school. Anyways, they each wrote one fact that they had learned about redwoods on the above, like, from the hallway. So you walked through a redwood tree.
[43:25] Dr Diane: That's amazing.
[43:27] Jason: Yeah, it was a really cool project.
[43:29] Dr Diane: Well, I think you've even influenced NASA. I saw the other day that they were comparing the size of an asteroid to number of groundhogs, like there was an asteroid coming towards earth. That was the size of 350,000 groundhogs or something crazy like that. And I thought about your book and thought, well, you know, it's making measurement real for people.
[43:50] Jason: Yeah, right. Well, as long as you know how big a groundhog is…
[43:53] Dr Diane: Exactly, you’d have to have a frame of reference.
[43:58] Jason: Are they this big?
[43:59] Dr Diane: So think like the size of your…
[44:03] Jason: Okay, just to put it in some perspective, Punxsutawney Pete always looks bigger.
[44:08] Dr Diane: Well I think Punxsutawney Pete is a groundhog on steroids.
[44:13] Jason: Yeah. Well, maybe they put a small hat on him.
[44:16] Dr Diane: Could be.
[44:17] Jason: Makes him look bigger, I don't know.
[44:19] Dr Diane: So you're working on a book about hurricanes. What other books are coming out?
[44:24] Jason: Yeah. So next summer, I guess it's June 6, a book called Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall is coming out. And so that's very exciting. It's about a blue whale and it's about a whale fall.
[44:45] Dr Diane: And what is a whale fall?
[44:47] Jason: A whale fall is what happens after a whale dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, to the deep ocean, where there is not a lot of life. And so there are a lot of scavengers down there, but they're really spread out because there are not a lot of nutrients in the deep ocean. But when a whale carcass falls, a whole lot of energy gets injected into the system in one moment, and hundreds and thousands of creatures come and feed on the carcass and it can last a really long time. So the Whale Fall in our book — sorry, the book is written by Lynn Brunelle, I should mention that Lynn wrote it, and the Whale Fall in this book lasts for a hundred years. So there's this whole succession of ecosystems that exist in this oasis on the seafloor. And it's fascinating. And gory, and it's a beautiful story about the cycle of life, because all of these nutrients are cycled through these ecosystems on the seafloor, and at the end of the book, upwelling brings them to the surface, they feed the phytoplankton, which feed the krill, which feed the next blue whale a century later.
[46:25] Dr Diane: Wow.
[46:26] Jason: That's kind of the story. I've given it all away.
[46:31] Dr Diane: Yeah, but you still have to go out and get it.
[46:34] Jason: If teachers are watching this, it's good to know what's in the book. And if you do any work with ecosystems or food chains or cycle of life work, cycle of energy through a system, stuff with your kids, this is going to be a good book for that.
[46:57] Dr Diane: It sounds perfect for that.
[46:59] Jason: And it's got really cool, really cool facts about the size of blue whales. That's very it's got the big extreme facts, the extreme facts in it, which we all love.
[47:15] Dr Diane: Did you get to go up close and personal with whales to do something?
[47:18] Jason: I did. Our book is set on the West Coast. It's not specified in the book, I don't think, but a lot of the research on whale falls was done in Monterey, Monterey Bay, the Aquarium Institute, anyways, the research institute there. They did a lot of the research. So we set the book there, and I went on a whale watch there. It was amazing. But we saw humpbacks and no blue whales, which I knew I wasn't going to see blue whales because it was the wrong time of year and we were not going out that far. But it was really great to see them. And I did get to see a blue whale skeleton there's one in Santa Cruz. Mounted it's outdoors because it won't fit indoors.
[48:18] Dr Diane: Right.
[48:19] Jason: A really big building for that. So I got to go see the blue whale skeleton and talk to some of the scientists out there, and it was great.
[48:30] Dr Diane: That's amazing. So, last question I'm going to ask you today is, what brings you hope for the future?
[48:40] Jason: What brings me hope for the future is going to schools and meeting hundreds of kids who are all curious, who all have who are all excited to learn and curious about science and nature and all sorts of other things. And I think that curiosity is the cure. In many cases, for many things, curiosity is the cure. Whether it's not getting along with other people well, if you show some curiosity about their perspective, then that is often the cure for conflict, whether for climate change or any of these big challenges we face. If we can harness our students’ curiosity and keep it going, I think we're going to be okay.
[49:49] Dr Diane: Well, thank you. I love the idea that curiosity is the cure. Jason Chin, thank you for joining us on the Adventures in Learning podcast. It has been great to be able to spend this time with you.
[50:00] Jason: Thanks for having me. It's been really great.
[50:04] Dr Diane: You've been listening to the Adventures in Learning podcast with your host, Dr. Diane. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, download and let us know what you think and please tell a friend. If you want the full show notes and the pictures, please go to drdianaadventures.com. We look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.