For information about the Steve Cotler Scholarship Fund at the Summer Science Program, please visit this page.
I am an author and an educator. My Cheesie Mack series is funny, engaging, and stealthily pedagogical. And that’s who I am when I visit schools. Since its 2011 publication by Random House, I have taken Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything to over 225 schools across the country, encouraging and challenging more than 50,000 students (grades 3-5) to connect with its fictional, 11-year-old narrator. Teachers and librarians seem to love the book. It has been nominated for best-book-of-the-year awards in four different states!
In an authentically fifth-grade voice, Cheesie brings alive, with buoyant energy, unstoppable curiosity, and great humor, those anything-is-possible years between the dependency of little kids and the awkwardness and insecurity of adolescents. And there's plenty of totally excellent, school-worthy vocabulary words. Plus laughing...lots of laughing. It all starts with Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything. Want to read an excerpt?
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I am a
singer/songwriter. Pobba is Steve Cotler, and every tune on the My
'Magination CD tells a story from a child's point of view. My songs are targeted
at kids 4-9. They're funny, stimulating, and catchy. They encourage—as the CD's title
promises—imagination, visualization, and super-fun participation.
Pobba's songs are picture books for the mind...with lyrics by Steve (I can go
anywhere. I can be anyone. I can do anything. My life is so much fun!) and music by Grammy
award-winner, brother Doug Cotler. Want to listen?
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"I am an
eggman. My name is Steve Cotler. Each week I go out to a ranch in the country and
pick up fresh eggs and deliver them in this neighborhood at a price within a penny or two of store
prices. Of course, these eggs are much fresher than store eggs because I pick them up and deliver
them the same day. This week, as I finish my route—I deliver to Mrs. Jones across the street
and Mrs. Brown down the block—I find that I have a few dozen left over. Since I only want to
sell the freshest eggs, I'd be happy to offer them to you at half-price. Would you like to try some
really fresh eggs?"
This was my pitch. I was 15. When I left for college, my father quit his job and took over my egg route. Like Cheesie Mack, my life is one adventure after another. Want to know more about them?
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I was a nerd. Now I am an
educator. The Summer
Science Program found me when I was 16. SSP was one of the USA's positive and
extraordinarily successful reactions to Sputnik shock. We were high school juniors—future rocket
scientists—sequestered for six weeks and intensely challenged with cosmology, astrophysics,
spherical geometry, and the like. In that techno-world decades before iPhones, Internet, and PCs, we
were, I suspect, the only teenagers in the world with daily access to a real computer. (See what one
looked like in 1960.)
SSP changed my life. Over a half-century later, I served as chairman of its Board of Trustees (I'm now emeritus), helping to change the lives of today's brightest teenagers. Want to know more about SSP?
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In September, my granddaughter Rhiannon (then 13) made an aggressive and courageous mathematical decision. Coming off acing ninth-grade Algebra 1 the previous year, she convinced her middle school to let her double up in math: her eighth grade schedule would include both Algebra 2 and Geometry.
