As teachers move away from hefty textbooks in the classroom, a group of northwest suburban teachers has banded together to write a workbook series that shows step by step how to teach practical skills to students.
Called Teaching Ink Inc., owned by Educational Aids Inc. of Schaumburg, the 3-year-old company has produced thousands of workbooks on more than 30 topics. Kindergartners through 8th-graders can learn art, test taking skills, ecology and how elections work.
Most of the more than 20 teachers involved in the project are retired and hail from Elgin, Libertyville and Palatine. The majority have worked in Palatine Elementary District 15, a recruitment ground culled by Teaching Ink editor Mary Lu Muffoletto, a former teacher and administrator at Central Road School in Rolling Meadows.
The company is the brainchild of Jack Cerman of Educational Aids, also a former teacher, who saw how teachers are increasingly required to create their own materials in the classroom.
After a decade running Educational Aids, Cerman discovered that teachers needed materials that are relevant to what’s happening in the world, a tall order in a constantly changing environment.
“Education is a fickle industry. We have to have a crystal ball to see what is going to be hot next,” he said.
What is hot in workbooks is back-to-basics tips on teaching the fundamentals of problem solving, language and basic math. With phonics making a comeback, any material for teachers on the subject is eaten up quickly, Cerman said.
“Two years ago, you couldn’t sell a phonics book to save your life,” he said.
During the summer Olympics in 1996, an Olympics-based workbook sold out. The presidential election the same year had teachers clamoring for the Teaching Ink workbook that explained to students what elections are all about. Teaching Ink sold more than 5,000 election books and had more printed up, Muffoletto said.
The average press run for each workbook is between 2,500 and 5,000, and each takes about three months from conception to printing.
Orders for the $6.95 workbooks have come in from California, Canada, Europe, and even Saudi Arabia.
The Educational Aids catalog features a variety of classroom products, but has a special, two-page display for Teaching Ink. Released five times a year, the catalog is the main tool for long-distance buyers.
Local buyers can find the workbooks at the three Learning Post stores, located in Buffalo Grove, Glenview and Bloomingdale.
Retired District 15 teacher Marion Rochelle said that in writing the Teaching Ink book “Child-Side Economics,” the challenge was to make a heavy subject palatable.
“We wrote about a little fella named Adam, and his experiences with his allowance and budgeting, opening a lemonade stand and selling cookies,” she said. “It helped to make it into a story line; it was sugar coating the pill.”
Karla Dencker-Koenig, a 6th-grade teacher at Central Road, has written three books for Teaching Ink. She squeezed writing books on test taking skills into her summers off, while taking classes for an administrative certificate.
Like the other Teaching Ink writers, Dencker-Koenig received a small stipend for her work, and she gets royalties for any books that sell more than a few thousand copies.
But she said her real reward came after seeing the finished book.
“I was amazed that it all came together so quickly,” she said. “It was neat to see it with illustrations, tables, graphs and maps and all of that.”
