// For teachers, librarians and parents
Everything on this page is free. The educator’s guide is the one promised on the copyright page of all three books — discussion questions, eight classroom activities, and a standards table you can hand to whoever has to approve it.
Download the educator’s guide (PDF)See the three books
13 pages · 8.5 × 11 · free to copy for classroom use · ages 10–13, grades 5–8
// What is in the guide
English Language Arts for informational text, grades 5–8, strand by strand, plus the C3 social studies framework. Built for the approval that has to happen before the reading does.
Grouped by chapter for each book, and written to ask for inference and argument rather than recall. Several ask a student to answer first, then compare with what the book knew.
Each uses a method the officers in the books actually use — the arithmetic of what can and cannot be inspected, a two-question interview, mapping one problem across all three borders.
Students check the author’s own claims against the agency that published them, including whether any number in the book goes further than its source supports.
The guide deliberately does not repeat what the books already carry. Each book has its own glossary, a quiz with a full answer key, a decision scenario called You Make the Call, and a cited source list for every real case.
// The idea underneath all three books
A mismatch is a place where two things that should agree, don’t. A suitcase that measures bigger outside than in. A container of patio chairs that weighs three tons too much. A trailer declared full of avocados that rides high on its springs.
Officers do not mostly catch things by recognising contraband. They catch things by noticing that a story and an object disagree, and then asking one more question. That is a transferable habit of mind, and it is why this series works in a classroom that is not studying trade at all.
// Check our work
Each true case sits in a box marked This Really Happened or Case File, and every one of them names an agency and a year, with the full citation in Real Cases: Where to Learn More at the back of the book. A student can go and check the author, which is exactly what the sourcing activity asks them to do.
The officers who walk a reader through the cases are composites with invented names, because working customs officers are rarely named in public. The author’s note on page seven of each book tells the reader that before the first chapter starts.
The photographs are not illustrations and not stock images. Each was taken by a working U.S. agency — Customs and Border Protection, USDA APHIS, NOAA Fisheries, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — and is credited on the photograph credits page of the book it appears in. From the copyright page of each book: “This book contains no AI-generated illustrations.”
// The three books
How does anyone catch the one bad box when millions of good ones go past every week? A seaport answers it with machines, an airport answers it with people, and a land border answers it in two seconds at a car window.
Book One
The slow, heavy door, where the cargo outnumbers the people who could ever open it.
Book Two
The fast door, where the thing being read is a person, and the line behind them never stops.
Book Three
The busiest door of all, and the only one where the officer and the traveller are a car’s width apart.