Gang Lit

Request for ideas:

One of my third graders came to school with a broken arm.  The official story told was that it was from a biking accident.  I have come to find out that a gang member twisted it until it broke.  After they revealed this, my third graders when on to tell about the two main gangs in their trailer park and which ones they wanted to be in when they were old enough, though I think some of them might already be participating.

It was all very depressing but I'd like to know more.  I'd like to read them a good chapter book to get the discussion going, but is there anything suitable for their age group?  Is there a Scorpions or Buried Onions for them?  Those are more for the YA crowd.  I'm stumped and don't have much time to devote to digging around.  Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Info. Tech and Learning: What's the Connection?

That's the topic for the next two weeks in one of my grad. classes. We're to read this news article and interview our Media and Tech folks and observe what's going on with technology in the Media Center.

I find the article depressing because these people are blowing a ton of money on stuff they'll have trouble keeping up to date and I seriously doubt all of it is even being put to good use. I hope I'm wrong about that.

I would also like to see some rigorous studies that prove this is even a good thing. There are many many studies that prove more books and more access to books improves student achievement. Are there any solid studies showing the same thing for the technology? I do know that when I lived in the county referred to in the article, the graduation rate was hovering around 50%. Has it improved since this infusion of technology (assuming that's the only big change)?

Are we throwing good money after bad?

$1.6 million for tech. That's equivalent to 80,000 $20 books.

I'm just sayin'.

The Book Thief

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.  Simply put, this is a masterpiece.  A big, overarching tale including many characters and, well, WWII, but presented in an intimate and absorbingly detailed way.  I both read it (there are many visual elements) and listened to the amazing audio adaptation.  Even though the narrator (Death himself) lets you know early on what's going to happen--"I'm spoiling the ending," he says somewhere in the middle--I found myself weeping as that ending came.  A beautiful, cathartic work.   A celebration of the power of words, which if you think about it, is everything.

Maurice Sendak In the NYT

I love this grumpy old man and all of his wondrous art.

Open Wide, Look Inside

These folks are awesome. Here I am, home again with my sick daughter, thinking I better start on next week's plans. I introduced the five senses but what should we do next?

Found my answer, to be sure.

The Planets

The Planets by Dava Sobel is a hybrid of a book. Not straight out science, not exactly fiction, but definitely new and, as always, interesting. I'll read anything by the author of Longitude, one of the best nonfiction books ever. In that book she combines history, science and great writing to give us a concise and breathless tale of something that could have been mind-numbingly boring, the search for a way to accurately determine longitude.

Her follow up was another well-written science/historical, but somewhat rehashed, telling of the life of Galileo, this time told through letters from his daughter.

When I first heard of The Planets I didn't care that it seemed to be another well-worn topic. It's a cliche to say she could publish her shopping lists, but I'm sure they're better written than mine. Her angle? She takes us on a tour through, yes, the history and scientific discoveries related to the planets but uses each as a jumping off point for meditations in other realms from geology to geography to astrology and beyond. It's, of course, brilliantly written and each chapter has a fresh slant. Some of the conceits could be found a little precious, Mars from the point of view of one of it's rocks pushed the line for me, and no, that letter from the discoverer of Uranus' wife is fiction, though factually correct. But these are minor quibbles when you are dealing with a writer that can breathe life into such a cold and distant solar system.

First Six Weeks of School

This is the book to get to help you have a great new year whether you are new to teaching or not. It tells a lot more than just seating and greeting. It has great ideas for getting into the curriculum, for student interaction, even for handling the lunch room and recess. This will make you a teacher ninja. Not this drivel. You know which other book I mean. Don't get the wong book.

What's With All the Saints?

Two saint book reviews in one morning? The Patron Saint of Butterflies from propernoun and The Possibilities of Saithood from Library Stew. The papists are running amok! Looks like a trend Jacket Whys should look into...

Epileptic

This is a graphic novel by the French artist David B. It's the story of his childhood and what his family endured because of his older brother's terrifying and incessant epilepsy. He, his brother and his younger sister have a wonderful time for a few years until the seizures hit. It takes place primarily in the 60s and 70s and the medical doctors suggest sketchy and dangerous surgery. David's brother, Jean-Christophe decides he'd rather try macrobiotics because of an article he's read. The family begins a journey down the rabbit hole of woo including acupuncture, massage, even exorcisms. They join colonies and cults. Nothing works and of course much of it even crushes their hopes. Jean-Christophe becomes lazy in David's eyes, but how can he function when a bone-rattling seizure is always just around the corner? He becomes violent, full of rage.

This is the perfect medium. If you enjoyed MAUS or Persepolis you'll love this. David B. was actually a mentor to Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis. If it had been another Dave Eggers/Augustin Bourroughs tale of a screwed up childhood it wouldn't have been as remotely interesting. The art and the visual metaphors David B. has created are amazing. The ghost of his grandfather is the long-beaked black bird on the cover. The epilepsy is a black and spiky dragon slithering through the house.

I'll add two more images, dark but undeniably powerful. Click on them to see them bigger. David B.'s thought of what a medical procedure might be like and the family reacting to strangers when Jean-Christophe has a seizure in public. Powerful stuff indeed.

Science for English Language Learners

Subtitled K-12 Classroom Strategies this excellent professional
resource is put out by the NSTA Press. Edited by Ann Fathman ans David Crowther, it's actually written by many top educators. It's short and easy to read with just the right combination of theory and nitty-gritty classroom techniques.


They get right to the point in Chapter One and this goes for more than just ELLs: "The science process skills--including observing, predicting, communicating, classifying, and analyzing--are almost the same as language learning skills--seeking information,
comparing, ordering, synthesizing, and evaluating."


ELLs are often denied content area instruction and there should be no real reason for this. If
you use an inquiry-based style of science teaching with a lot of hands on experiences and problem solving, then students at every level should be engaged and have something to contribute.

The book is packed with great references and links. If you teach science at all to any grade this book will be helpful, even if you don't have ELLs. I mean, be honest, aren't they all English Language Learners? Just for the methods on differentiating instruction in a content area with a lot of content are language, this book would be valuable for any teacher's professional library.
Highly recommended.

Read!

Awesome, really. You've probably seen this by now, but man I love it. Chad nailed it. And hey, bathroom reading is something pushed by Jim Trelese in his Read-Aloud Handbook. I know my daughter already sees it as the perfect reading spot.

Gaming In the Media Center

HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!

That's hilarious. I read this and thought the guy just must be crazy. Better keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn't hurt anyone. Then he posted this "research" and I started to get grumpy. A million counter-arguments filled my mind. I began sharpening my blog knives so I could properly cut him to ribbons. Then I read this and realized it must all be a joke. Pretty good satire too!

He gives three reasons for putting video games in school media centers: Individualization of learning, Simulation of authentic experience, and Intellectual complexity.

He's not talking about spending actual money on expensive and soon-obsolete video games at all. He's talking about books. He's cleverly disguised it as a push for wasteful and pointless video games when he really is telling us NOT to do such a stupid and pointless thing. He wants us to quit wasting our time and money on silly and distracting technology and buy more books. They're the perfect thing. What else offers the individualization of learning so well? What else could possibly simulate authentic experience so well (I'm remembering crying for Charlotte in E.B. White's classic right now), and what else offers just the right amount of intellectual complexity?

They almost had me going there for a moment. Now I know what to do. Buy more books!

Sheer Brilliance. Up there with Swift's A Modest Proposal.

Thank you so much for a good laugh Justin Ashworth and Scott McLeod. I'm wiping a tear from my eye in appreciation.

eBooks: Nick Hornby's Take

Nick Hornby has, as always, a funny and insightful take on things. Here he is in his new blog on some reason why books "will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons..."

Some of these include the fact, "Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs..." and that, "when we bought our iPods, we already owned the music to put on it; none of us own e-books, however." He also mentions that since Apple isn't designing an eBook, they aren't very cool yet.

His last point is that people just don't read as much as they listen to music:

"But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people don’t like reading books much anyway: a 2004 survey of two thousand adults found that thirty-four per cent didn’t read books at all. The music industry’s problems are many and profound, but you never see advertisements asking us to listen to more music; there are no pressure groups or government quangos attempting to ensure that we make room in our day for a little Leona Lewis. The problem is getting people to pay for music, not getting people to consume it. Can you see every teenager in Britain harassing their parents for a Kindle? Me neither."

I don't know that the reading issues are as bad as all that, but he does have a point.

Microcosm

Carl Zimmer's new book Microcosm is so awesome, they created an online book club for it. I know I'd just read his Evolution and had other things in my stack, but there it was at the library in the New Books section, taunting me with it's shiny newness.

He uses the study of E. coli as a springboard for the study and questioning of life itself. It was great because it brought all the stuff in Evolution up to the modern microbiology and beyond. Did you know microbiology isn't much older than I am? In 1967, scientists cracked E. coli's genetic code. That was the first species we did and it led to some Nobel prizes and the creation of microbiology as a science.

The history is covered in the first chapter, but the last two chapters, in which Zimmer discusses the ethical quandaries and possible future of out microbiological work, get mind-blowing. They take us all the way up to an even newer science, astrobiology. This is something our Phoenix explorer on Mars is working on as you read this.

How cool is that?

Seabiscuit

I read this one for the book club and was mightily surprised. I know next to nothing about horse racing and don't read much in the way of sport books. So a sports book about horse racing held little interest.

This was one of the most compelling books I've ever read. It's about an interesting historical period full and full of some of the most over-the-top colorful figures I've read about. It's too crazy not to be true. Hillenbrand has had some criticism for her "purple prose," but I think it fits the time period perfectly.

There are so many great moments in this book, I hesitate to mention them. The stuff about how the jockeys lost weight for their rides was amazing. These guys were worse than ballerinas and supermodels. They did everything to lose weight fast, including the purposeful ingestion of tapeworms.

Way better than the movie.

Science Reading

PodBlack Blog, which I've mentioned before, has a great list of popular science books you might want to check out. It's in response to the new Entertainment Weekly "100 Best Reads" (which I won't link to here) that does not include any science books. My only quibble: I'd exchange Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything with the Natalie Angier book mentioned on the list.

Check it out.

Iraq Needs Books

Donate now.

In this column,"Book Drive for Iraq," the creation of a new University in Iraq is described. You can do your part to send books to build democracy.

"Among the projects already underway are an M.B.A. program in concert with Hochschule Furtwangen University in Germany and an English preparatory program run jointly with the American English Institute at the University of Oregon. An environmental-studies department is envisioned, with money from the government of Italy, to address the recuperation of Iraq's southern marshes, the largest wetlands in the region, which were subjected to deliberate destruction by the regime of Saddam Hussein. The University of Vermont is hosting videoconferencing sessions in political science on such topics as federalism and church-state separation."

They are looking for up-to-date books in English.

"Get some decent volumes together, pass the word to your friends and co-workers to do the same, and send them off to:

Nathan Musselman
The American University of Iraq—Sulaimani
Building No. 7, Street 10
Quarter 410
Ablakh Area
Sulaimani, Iraq
(+964) (0)770-461-5099

It's important to include the number at the end."

I've already grabbed a stack to send off and will hit the post office later today.

Thanks!

god is not great

Picked by someone in my book club. I laughed when I heard I had to read this because even though I am atheist, I don't really see the point of reading all these books about the subject. I already blogged about may favorite one here. This was a fun one, though. I got it on audio and the man himself reads it. It was like having Richard Burton in my head--not a bad think at all.

I agree with Ophelia at Butterflies & Wheels:

"Christopher Hitchens is a standing reproach to people who write the odd essay now and then. He is like some sort of crazed writing machine, he seems to average three or four longish essays a day, along with reading everything ever written and remembering all of it, knowing everyone worth knowing on most continents, visiting war zones and trouble spots around the globe, going on television and overbearing even noisy Chris Matthews' efforts to interrupt him, and irritating people. And what's even more painful is that this torrent of prose is nothing like the torrents of people like Joyce Carol Oates or Iris Murdoch, badly written in proportion to the torrentiality - no, this is a torrent of learned, witty, informed and informative, searching, impassioned history on the hoof. If Hitchens is a journalist then so were Gibbon and Thucydides."

It was a treat to read this coming from my Lit. major background. I don't necessarily agree that religion poisons everything. I think it's more that ignorance and dogmatism and fundamentalism and superstition poisons everything. But even as virulent as his rhetoric can get, he is still respectful. He covers his head when in temple, removes his shoes in mosques. He has good things to say about Dr. King and the Dali Lama (but bad things to say about the Dali Lama's feudal state).

I especially liked that when he went on tour for the book in his adopted homeland of America (he's an American citizen and lives in Washington, DC) he specifically asked to tour the south and to have theologians invited to debate him at every stop. He was appalled at the lack of biblical literacy he encountered in these debates. The guy knows chapter and verse and puts on an impressive display. Kudos!

Robert Ingersoll!

Wow, this is a fun, short, breezy read. It's completely brilliant and, unfortunately still quite timely. Robert Ingersoll was a massively popular speaker for his day. Mark Twain and Thomas Edison were big fans of his. He's slipped into obscurity because he didn't write much and his collected speeches are voluminous. This short--130-some pages!--collection is just the ticket for a good overview of some compelling arguments. What a great American!

Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea

Took me long enough to read it, but I kept putting it down for other things. It's not because the book is difficult or dry or anything like that. No, I think it's just that Carl Zimmer, being a magazine science writer first lends to being read in sips and chunks. I also wanted to process each section before going on to the next one. The book is actually a spin off of a larger Evolution Project by PBS including a television series now on DVD. I picked it up after reading Bryson's fantastic and funny A Short History of Nearly Everything and finding this great list by Phyrangula and his legion of knowledgeable commenters. Yes, I want to read them all!

My daughter calls it my "eyeball book" and often took it off my nightstand to look at all the eyes and ask me to name each one.

Most highly recommended.