Category: Non-fiction


“Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor’s Memoir”

Filed under: Biography/Memoir, Human Rights Issues, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
May 29, 2012

 Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor’s Memoir by David Faber (with Anna Vaisman)

Like My Brother’s Voice, Because of Romek chronicles the events in the life of a young Holocaust survivor, with particular details focused on the survivor’s brother who was killed. David Faber’s brother, Romek (a nickname), was tortured and murdered while David watched. Romek was a Polish soldier and a prisoner or war. He was released from Buchenwald as a POW, but had to go back to the Jewish ghetto in the city of Tarnow with his family. He participated in the Polish Underground, was caught, and tortured for information before he was murdered.

Unlike other stories of Holocaust survivors that I’ve read, more than half of Because of Romek deals with the horrific treatment of David and his family before David is shipped to a concentration camp. The senseless, brutal, and seemingly arbitrary murder of Jews in Tarnow is astonishing, as is David’s ability to live.

What the reader comes away with is just how arbitrary survival was for victims of the Holocaust. Having someone who is shot fall on top of you, her dead body providing a shield; having a gas chamber be too full for you to be pushed in; being given the job of feeding the camp’s dogs and sneaking some of the dog food in order to survive. The list is endless, and the remarkable thing is how often David’s luck turned toward life rather than death. Eventually, that luck ran out for most Holocaust victims.

Of course, luck is a relative term here. All of David’s family is killed except a sister who was in England at the time. Most of the time, David wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to have died as well. In reading Because of Romek, I was again questioning how so many people could become so sadistic all at once. It’s very difficult to understand that there were innumerable Germans who were poking out eyes, burning people alive, gassing them, starving them, having dogs tear them apart, beating them with rubber hoses, hanging them up as examples, gunning them down in droves. How do so many people go completely insane at one time?

A while back I bought a book for the library entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners, about the German people. I’ve added it to my reading list in the hope of understanding the answer to my question.

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“The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie and a World Transformed”

Filed under: Human Rights Issues, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
May 23, 2012

The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed by Judy Shepard 

Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a split rail fence and brutally murdered in Laramie, Wyoming in October 1998. His death became the focal point for gay rights and federal hate crime legislation. Written by Matthew Shepard’s mom, the story evokes the real Matt.—“Matt’s murder wasn’t horrific because it ended an angelic life but because it ended a very human life riddled with all the complexities and contradictions each of us face.” Judy Shepard also discusses her own journey to becoming a gay rights activist.

Since The Meaning of Matthew really is a story about a guy who was quite human, I think you’ll be able to relate to it better than the original news stories that made him out to be a saint, or the later stories that demonized him. As in my last review (Columbine) this is an argument for taking a longer look at a historically important event.

When Matthew Shepard was gruesomely beaten in Laramie, his parents were in Saudi Arabia as his father worked for an oil company there. It took them awhile to get to his bedside after picking up his brother in Minnesota. When they arrived in Fort Collins, they were shocked by the media coverage of their son’s beating. Only then did they understand that Matt was not going to make it. They had so much to deal with—the death of a child is tragic in any case, but when a child is murdered, it must be incomprehensible. The attention of the media and the needs of well-wishers increased the Shepard family’s pain. It took awhile for Judy Shepard to realize why all these people were stricken, and she felt the extra burden of having to deal with their grief.

Both Matt’s parents knew that he was gay and had pretty easily accepted it. What they couldn’t accept was some of his self-destructive behavior at the end of his teens. Matt’s drinking and other problems hadn’t come from nowhere—he was the victim of a terrible sexual assault in Morocco, where he and some school mates from Switzerland were vacationing together. The attack affected his personality and his behavior. Still, his parents practiced ‘tough love’ with Matt, not allowing him excuses, and by the time he was murdered this seemed to have some positive effects.

Judy Shepard shares why her family accepted plea bargains for Matt’s murderers. Some details of the trial are tough to read, particularly because the defense tried to make its case around the ‘gay panic defense.’ In addition, the crazies from the Westboro Baptist Church (that family that goes to the funerals of military personnel killed in service to the country carrying signs such as “God Hates You,” “God Hates Fags,” etc.) was there with signs such as “Matthew in Hell.” Dennis Shepard, Matt’s father, made a lengthy address to the court after the murders’ sentencing. It alone is very much worth the read.

The murder of Matthew Shepard is a historically significant event that became the rallying point of civil rights groups across the country. This mom’s story about her son is an important read.

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“Columbine”

Filed under: Mature Readers, Non-fiction, Over 375 pages by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
May 22, 2012

Columbine by Dave Cullen 

You’re too young to remember the worst high school shooting in the country’s history, but no doubt you’ve heard of ‘Columbine.’

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold begin to shoot—indiscriminately—students and teachers at their high school. As the tragedy unfurled, students trapped on the campus called not only 911, but news stations as well. Some of these students had televisions and were looking at the news while they talked. This led to the mythmaking of what we now think of as the Columbine story. Many who were trapped didn’t know what was going on around them—they had to hide for many hours (even after the shooters had killed themselves), waiting for the SWAT teams to secure the school. They saw what news programs said—school shootings are committed by outsiders, loners with no friends, boys who are bullied, goths in trench coats who are often gay. They then repeated these things back to newscasters and the myth was born. (Why these newscasters were endangering the lives of these students by chatting with them while the tragedy unfolded is beyond the scope of this review.)

In Columbine, Dave Cullen tells us what really happened that day. He disproves the myths of aliened and bullied shooters, the Trench Coat Mafia, and of religious martyrs, instead showing the reader how difficult it is to recognize and stop a psychopath. Using the killers’ diaries and videotapes and interviews with survivors, witnesses, family members, school personnel, local police, the SWAT team, FBI psychologists, and more, Cullen details the worst high school shooting in the country’s history. His research took ten years.

The truth starts with the fact that the killers were not targeting people who bullied them. In fact, they had made and planted several bombs, with the intention of blowing up the whole school and everyone in it. And yet they were fairly popular guys who had friends and dates with girls. They worked at a local pizza place. They actually appear pretty normal to others. Only with a closer look, does one see that Eric was a psychopath—and very good at fooling peers and adults alike—and that Dylan was very depressed, even suicidal, and a follower who did what Eric asked.

Eric and Dylan left many clues to their plans although they didn’t discuss them with others. I think this book is important for many reasons, but one is that it shows us that the troubles these two boys had were the same as the troubles of many teens. But they do a few things that should have set off raging alarms in friends who knew. The problem is that friends don’t imagine that people they know—and have known for years—as the type to become killers. Teen should know, without a doubt, that if friends of theirs start wanting help in buying sawed-off shotguns or are making pipe bombs, there’s a reason for that. And someone—maybe more than one someone—is going to get killed. It’s time to call We Tip Anonymous. Now.

Cullen dispels other Columbine myths as well—Danny Rohrbough didn’t die saving other s students. Cassie Bernall didn’t martyr herself by professing her faith in God and then being shot for it. We have deep sympathy for the family of murdered teacher and coach Dave Sanders (who really was saving others), knowing that he was left for hours to bleed to death and might have been saved if the police and SWAT teams had been more organized. We also find out what Patrick Ireland was thinking when, seriously wounded with multiple shoots (including one to the head), he climbed out a window, launching himself when rescuers weren’t ready to catch him. Patrick’s escape is famous because it played on live television.

This was a very difficult book for me to read. Paradoxically, I was riveted at times and couldn’t stop. But once I got to the end of a section, I had to take a break and had a hard time picking it up again. After all, there was no chance of a happy ending. But it’s important for all of us to read books like this. The fact that this book can dispel myths only after so much research is a general argument for reading books, not just instant news reports. I think the move in education away from deep, sustained reading to cursory looks at ‘passages’ from ‘informational texts’ (there’s a little Orwellian Newspeak for you) is a huge mistake. But that’s a story for another day.

I want to make one more comment on Cassie Bernall. We have the book, written by her mother, entitled She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall in our library. It is now clear that the story of the minutes before Cassie’s death—in which one of the shooters asked her if she believed in God and she answered yes; then, after he asked her why, shot her before she could answer—is not true. Knowing this, do I still think the book is worth reading?

I do think She Said Yes is worth the reading. While many are critical of a segment of the evangelical Christian community for perpetrating the martyr myth, which they knew from the beginning was most likely false, I don’t think Cassie’s last minutes are the real point of the book—or the power of it. Before Cassie became a reborn Christian, she was a pretty messed up teen. Her behavior was strange and the outcomes of her habits and friendships could have been dire. That’s the point that Misty Bernall is making. When kids do strange things, parents have to take action. Cassie’s friend was writing notes suggesting that the two of them kill Cassie’s parents and drawing horrific images of the bloody bodies. Cassie’s parents got a handle on that and helped her to turn her life around. They could only do so by being very involved.

As to what Eric’s parents might have done had they known about his psychopathic nature, it’s hard to say. Cullen argues, citing experts, that psychopaths can’t be helped with therapy; in fact, they learn in therapy how to better fool people, which is something they love to do. Of the ten types of identified psychopaths, two can be murderous, and Eric was one of those—he demonstrated in his secret journals that he was sadistic and had a God complex. All psychopaths think of people as objects and have no empathy. When I discussed this with my husband, who is a psychologist with a Ph.D., he wondered if the book said anything about Eric having been treated as an object himself as a child. I told him no, that the description of Eric’s parents shows them to be pretty normal. He took issue with the idea that a psychopath is just born that way. (I told him he’d have to read the book.)

Sadly, the reader feels that there is one way that the Columbine killings could have been prevented, and that is better police work. The police department knew a good deal about the things Eric and Dylan were doing, knew about website posts with threats etc., but didn’t notify the parents, and later destroyed evidence of their knowledge.

Columbine is an important work that sets the record straight.

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That Used to Be Us–looking outward and forward III

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May 15, 2012

That Used to Be Us—Links on looking to the future

Last thoughts on how the book connects to educators

Places to find more information

I’ve created three posts on where to look while we think about how we are changing—guideposts and cool stuff to use along the way. My goal is to have the positive, the negative, and the truth that lies between them. The first of the three posts was about online resources. The second was on books. This, the third, is a counterpoint to the idea (expressed in That Used to Be Us) that poverty has no effect on educational success—I thought it was important to get the other side of this issue.

Are We Really That Far behind other Industrialized Nations in Educating Our Kids and in Reading?

That Used to Be Us cites a study that others claim to debunk. Concerning poverty, there is much research to indicate that it is the overriding factor in student success. Although I didn’t mention the book Brain Rules in my last TUTBU post of recommended reading, it’s a good one, very worthwhile reading for educators. Its author, John Medina (developmental molecular biologist,  affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine,   director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University) comments on how home life affects learning:

Severe and chronic trauma (such as living with an alcoholic parent, or watching in terror as your mom gets beat up) causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kids’ brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible.

I realize this isn’t news to most of us–but I think it’s good to remind ourselves that experts do agree with the empirical evidence that we find in teaching every single day.

I asked Stephen Krashen (professor emeritus at the USC, linguist, educational researcher, activist) if I could print this statement of his in my blog, and he said yes. If you are interested in some of the research, it follows the statement.

Against National Standards and National Tests
Stephen Krashen

The movement for national standards and tests is based on these claims: (1)  Our educational system is broken, as revealed by US students’ scores on international tests; (2) We must improve education to improve the economy;  (3) The way to improve education is to have national standards and national tests that enforce the standards.

Each of these claims is false.

(1) Our schools are not broken. The problem is poverty. Test scores of students from middle-class homes who attend well-funded schools are among the best in world. Our unspectacular overall scores are due to the fact that the US has the highest level of child poverty among all industrialized countries (now over 21%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5%). Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books, among other things. All of these negatively impact school performance.

(2) Existing evidence strongly suggests that improving the economy improves children’s educational outcomes. Yes, a better education can lead to a better job, but only if jobs exist.

(3) There is no evidence that national standards and national tests have improved student learning in the past.

No educator is opposed to assessments that help students to improve their learning. The amount of testing proposed by the US Department of Education in connection to national standards is astonishing, more than we have ever seen on this planet, and much more than the already excessive amount demanded by NCLB: Testing will be expanded to include all subjects that can be tested and more grade levels. There will be “interim” tests given through the year and there may be pretests in the fall to measure growth, defined as increases in standardized test scores, or “value-added” measures.

The cost of implementing standards and electronically delivered national tests will be enormous, bleeding money from legitimate and valuable school activities. New York City is budgeting a half a billion dollars just to connect children to the internet so that they can take the national tests. This extrapolates to about $25 billion nationally for this expense alone.

This money could be spent to protect children from the effects of poverty, i.e. on expanded and improved breakfast and lunch programs, school nurses (at present there are more school nurses per child in low poverty schools than in high poverty schools) and improved school and public libraries, especially in high-poverty areas.

Rather than spend on standards and tests, investing in protecting our children from the effects of poverty would raise test scores. More important, it is the right thing to do.

Some sources:

“Test scores of students from middle class homes …:  Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13; Bracey, G. 2009. The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report. Berliner, D.  The Context for Interpreting PISA Results in the USA: Negativism, Chauvinism, Misunderstanding, and the Potential to Distort the Educational Systems of Nations. In Pereyra, M., Kottoff, H-G., & Cowan, R. (Eds.). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. In press. Tienken, C. 2010. Common core state standards: I wonder? Kappa Delta Phi Record 47 (1): 14-17.

“Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books”: Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential:  Out-of-School Factors and School Success.  Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential;   Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership  55(4): 18-22.

Improving the economy ….:  Baker, K. 2007. Are international tests worth anything? Phi Delta Kappan, 89(2), 101-104; Zhao, Y. 2009. Catching Up or Leading the Way? American Education in the Age of Globalization. ASCD: Alexandria, VA.; Ananat, E., Gassman-Pines, A., Francis, D., and Gibson-Davis, C. 2011. Children left behind: The effects of statewide job less on student acbievement. NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) Working Paper No. 17104, JEL No. 12,16. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17104

There is no evidence that national standards and national tests have improved student learning in the past: Nichols, S., Glass, G., and Berliner, D. 2006. High-stakes testing and student achievement: Does accountability increase student learning? Education Policy Archives 14(1). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n1/. OECD. Tienken, C., 2011. Common core standards: An example of data-less decision-making. Journal of Scholarship and Practice. American Association of School Administrators [AASA], 7(4): 3-18. http://www.aasa.org/jsp.aspx.

Testing in more subjects: The Blueprint A Blueprint for Reform: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. United States Department of Education  March 2010

In earlier and later grades: PARCC document:  http://www.parcconline.org/sites/parcc/files/PARCC%20MCF%20Response%20to%20Public%20Feedback_%20Fall%202011%20Release.pdf

Interim tests: Duncan, A. September 9, 2010. Beyond the Bubble Tests: The Next Generation of Assessments — Secretary Arne Duncan’s Remarks to State Leaders at Achieve’s American Diploma Project Leadership Team Meeting: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/beyond-bubble-tests-next-generation-assessments-secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-state-l. The Blueprint, (op. cit.) p. 11.

Value-added measures:
http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-statehouse-convention-center-little-rock-arkansas (August 25, 2010). The Blueprint (op.cit.), p. 9.

New York City budget: New York Times, “In city schools, tech spending to rise despite cuts,” March 30, 2011.

School nurses: Berliner, 2009 (op. cit.)

Libraries: Krashen, S. 2011. Protecting students against the effects of poverty: Libraries. New England Reading Association Journal 46 (2): 17-21.

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That Used to Be Us–Looking Outward and Forward

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May 1, 2012

That Used to Be Us—Links on looking to the future

Last thoughts on how the book connects to educators

Places to find more information

“Who knew that being an educator meant you needed to be a student of technology?” Gregg W. Downey, Editor & Publisher eSchool News

I want to create three posts on where to look while we think about how we are changing—guideposts and cool stuff to use along the way. My goal is to have the positive, the negative, and the truth that lies between them. This first of the three posts is about online resources. The second will be on books. The third will be a counterpoint to the idea (expressed in That Used to Be Us) that poverty has no effect on educational success.


Online Items of Interest

The following links are all available on Victoria’s Diigo account, tagged with TUTBU: http://www.diigo.com/user/vwaddle

INTRODUCE YOURSELF

If you aren’t tech savvy and feel like the world is changing around you, and you need a place to grab hold as it spins out of control, this is it. It’s also good for students and teachers who do some social networking and use online tools, but would like to broaden their scope.

Introductions to a variety of useful online tools—these self-paced tutorials are available from the California School Library Association and are linked to and used by folks from all over the country.

For students:

Teen Learning 2.0 – An introduction to digital treats and new technologies

For educators:

Classroom Learning 2.0

The Must-Have Guide To Helping Technophobic Educators | Edudemic (Actually, this isn’t just for technophobes—it has ideas on educational use of Twitter, Google, iPads and more.)

READING

As they say, “reading is fundamental.” How will reading change?

What other media will be fundamental?

Apple and iPads

Justice Department investigating e-book pricing – Los Angeles Times

U.S. sues Apple, publishers over eBook prices | eSchool News

Apple iBooks 2 license agreement gets icy reception in higher education | eCampus News

iBooks 2: Reinventing Textbooks Or Lulu on Steroids?

Other eBook thoughts

Are Teens Embracing E-books? (An earlier study said teens didn’t like them. This one says they do, but, ironically, they want to download ebooks for the immediacy of starting the read, but then will buy a hard copy to keep and share with friends. A fun article.)

Digital textbooks get a boost with new offerings | eSchool News

The Googlization of Books (discussion with the author of the book The Googlization of Everything)

Other Media

Media and Information Literacy Curriculum for Teachers | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Our Media, Ourselves: Are We Headed For A Matrix? : NPR Perhaps we fear technology because it will remove our stuff, reveling the emptiness of our lives?

CLASSROOMS

What will your classroom look like?

Khan Academy: The future of education? – CBS News

60 Minutes – Interviews, Profiles & Reports – CBS News

Online Teacher of the Year: Individualized instruction is key | eSchool News

Diane Ravitch outlines ed tech’s promise, perils | eSchool News

Gooru – Home Page

Gooru – Online learning

Gain a better understanding of how to use Gooru with these tools. Watch a brief video or view a tutorial. Download a PDF presentation and demo script for a step-by-step guide of Gooru product features.

Panarea Digital Debuts Nearpod For Schools

Ten education blogs worth following | eSchool News (good stuff on flipped classrooms, etc.)

Flipped learning: A response to five common criticisms | eSchool News

MentorMob – Learn What You Want, Teach What You Love – MentorMob

2012 Free Education Technology Resources eBook from EmergingEdTech

Considerations Before Deploying iPads and iPods « Socratech Seminars

Four keys to creating successful eLearning programs | eSchool News

Hyping classroom technology helps tech firms, not students – latimes.com

COOL STUFF We Should All be Using Now

Of course, there’s a plethora of cool stuff for specific content areas, but these links contain fun tools for students that are useful in classes now and will help them in using digital tools in higher education.

Top Web Annotation and Markup Tools

School Systems Blog – Four Ways to Use Pinterest in Education

Free Technology for Teachers: Embed Plus – Clip & Annotate YouTube Videos

STUDYBLUE | Make online flashcards & notes. Study anywhere, anytime.

Must See: A New Web 2.0 App Store Just For Educators | Edudemic

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“The Year of Magical Thinking”

Filed under: Biography/Memoir, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
April 30, 2012

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

While this is a book for adults, it’s also a book about grief—the psychology of it, the sense of loss of not just the loved one, but of oneself as well, of the life that has been lived together. It’s a beautiful study of the meaning of memory and of the magical thinking of the title—how completely we forgo logic in order to continue to believe, on some unconscious level, that the beloved will be back. (Didion can’t give her deceased husband’s shoes to the Goodwill because he might need them.)

 

I read The Year of Magical Thinking recently because it seemed to me that we, members of the Chaffey family, have had many good people to grieve this year. Perhaps I’m imagining that this is truer this year than in others, but it’s come to the point where I dread opening an email with someone’s name in the subject line. (“Oh, God, I hope nothing happened to him!”)

 

I know, too, that many of our students are experiencing losses that kids their age shouldn’t have to deal with. I remember when I taught English, before standardized testing was all the focus, I used to keep journals back and forth with students. They would write about their lives, and I would write back. One year, a student’s mother died, and he would often write of how unreal that seemed to him, that he just couldn’t stop thinking about her, dreaming about her coming back. So—I think this adult book about grief might also be helpful for students, who sometimes suffer more than we know.

 

I often don’t like the publisher’s blurb for a book—it’s overblown or doesn’t capture what it should—but the blurb for The Year of Magical Thinking is a good one:

 

“Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later – the night before New Year’s Eve – the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. . . . Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This … book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the ‘weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.’”

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“Thinking Fast and Slow”

Filed under: Non-fiction, Over 375 pages by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
April 27, 2012

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The author is a Nobel Laureate in Economics (2002) and a psychologist by education and training. Thinking Fast and Slow just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest this past weekend. Clearly, this is a very important book. While such a book would be a good read for smart teens who are heading off to college, I don’t imagine too many will have the time to get through it soon—it’s 450 pages not including the notes and index, and the information is dense. But for educators who are looking at a changing world, this study of decision making helps us to understand fallacies in thinking and to avoid them. It’s a great choice for a serious read, and I ‘think’ that’s why it’s been on the bestseller’s list for months running.

For the sake of ease, Kahneman identifies as two systems our fast thinking and our slower thinking. (These are not systems in a real, biological sense.) Mostly, we use the fast thinking—and mostly it is efficient, giving us what we need. But when we don’t understand something automatically, we have to employ our slower thinking, and that’s where problems start. The slower thinking is lazy and can push back to the faster (and incorrect) response jut to get out of a mental workout.

Kahneman uses statistics to show us how we go wrong in many areas. One fun discussion is on whether super successful people are smarter than others or just luckier than others who also work hard but are less successful. (Mostly lucky—very lucky. But also very immune to worry about failure. They are often good at blaming others or the situation, rarely see themselves as at fault, and so will try over and over when logic would tell another person to give up or at least cop to the fact that s/he has been making big mistakes. Kahneman says if there is one quality you could wish for your kids, it should be optimism.)

I don’t agree with everything Kahneman says. (Actually, I never entirely agree with anything that anyone says :)   .) His example of bad thinking in the section “Linda: More is Less” doesn’t take into account that linguistic implicatures are the basis for folks thinking it is more probable that someone is part of a subgroup than part of the larger group. (Example: Linda is involved in women’s rights organizations. Is it more probable that Linda is a bank teller or that Linda is a feminist bank teller?) People really aren’t confused about groups and subgroups just because they were preloaded with information about the subject in question. They’re using the known language patterns of the question to come up with a response.

Honestly, this book is a cornucopia of studies/original research about judgments and choices—political, economic, personal finances, selection of the best candidates for jobs. (Job interviews often lead to the selection of the inferior candidate—but he’ll have charisma. Smart employers look at past performance and hire on that.) It deals with intuition, and how regression to the mean isn’t just about height and smarts. If you read it, you’ll have a new way of thinking about kids, their possibilities (rather than their probabilities); you’ll see who in your class is receiving an unearned ‘halo effect.’ You’ll understand how to question students about their thinking so that they will be more likely to engage in the subject rather than pass it off to their fast thinking when they don’t understand it. As Library Journal says Thinking Fast and Slow is, “a stellar accomplishment, a book for everyone who likes to think and wants to do it better.”

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“That Used to Be Us: Part V: Rediscovering America”

Filed under: Controversial Issue/Debate, Environmental Issues, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
April 26, 2012

Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V: Rediscovering America

The authors reiterate that they are “frustrated optimists” who are inspired by “the number of people and small groups who are summoning themselves with their own trumpets.”

Good Signs

Sacrifice—soldiers who are willing to re-deploy to wars in the Middle East. “Never have so many asked so much of so few—and never have those few delivered so much for so many and asked so little in return.” (Again, a good book on what that sacrifice is like is War by Sebastian Junger.)

Diversity—example of the US military and particularly the Navy. “It’s amazing how you guys can be so many religions, ethnic groups, and still make this thing work, and be the best in the world.” (Authors paraphrasing an Iraqi coast guard officer)

Teach for America—“Kopp said that of all the TFA grads, about one-third stay on as teachers. . . . Not all education experts support the program, because it puts the least experienced teachers in the most challenging classrooms. It will take more time to determine how much of a difference TFA teachers are making in the lives of children . . .”

Inventors—Mike Biddle, founder of MBA Polymers, has invented processes fro separating plastic form pile sof junked computers, etc. and recycling it, using less than 10% of the energy used in making new plastic. (However, he uses plastics from China and the EU because America doesn’t have laws that require manufactures to foot the bill for recycling. According to the authors, manufacturers don’t mind these laws because recyclers compete for the junk.)

Companies that stick it out with American manufacturing and workers. “The role of the CEO now is not to dictate but to empower.” (Robert Stevenson, whose company is the oldest manufacturer in continuous operation in Buffalo, New York.) “Get your people working toward a common goal. . . .I set the goal and show the road and say, ‘How you drive on that is up to you.’”

Last thoughts:

America needs a comprehensive 21st century job strategy. We need to address the “growing mismatch between the needs of the employers and the skills American workers get in school and in the job market.” With this in mind, it’s time to begin again to finance start up companies. (Government involvement, regulations, standards are necessary, but must be clear and simple.)

In the section entitled “Shock Therapy,” the authors say that America needs to understand that it is “’an anchor to the floating world.’ Weaken that anchor and the world will drift in directions we cannot foresee and probably will not like. A declining America will be bad for business—all business, including [that of every country in the world].”

To succeed in a way that will keep the world afloat, America needs a politics of the “radical center.” Moderates are not lukewarm–they are reasonable, and they compromise and get things done. A way of mandating change as a moderate is to have a third party candidate in national elections. Though the candidate won’t be elected, s/he will serve to moderate the opposite ends of the spectrum and influence national policy. S/he will affect the agenda of the two major parties.

The authors claim that voting for a third party candidate is not ‘throwing away’ a vote, and give the (unfortunate) example of George Wallace, but also of Ross Perot, and of the Progressives and Teddy Roosevelt. (I don’t entirely agree that a third party vote isn’t thrown away. I think of the example of Ralph Nader—not in this book. Whether you are a Democrat or not, you’d probably agree that folks who voted for Nader in the Bush v. Gore contest, ended up throwing their votes away by assuring the election of someone whose priorities were far from their own.)

The candidate that America should elect is the one who will specify which taxes s/he will raise and which programs s/he will cut, since both must happen.

Calling America exceptional doesn’t make it so and doesn’t help us. Exceptionalism isn’t a permanent state. We have to make sacrifices and get back on track

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“That Used to Be Us: Part IV–Political Failure” (back to our staff reading)

Filed under: Controversial Issue/Debate, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
April 25, 2012

Back to our staff reading–this is Part IV of fives parts of That Used to Be Us. 

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV: Political Failure

No one ever admits they do anything wrong. At least not on Capitol Hill.

Part IV starts out with several stories of people using ‘newspeak’ with Congress, of saying they want to look forward to the future and not talk about the past—sports stars like Mark McGwire, Wall Street stars like Lloyd Blankfein, once chief executive of Goldman Sachs.

However, it is the American people who are taken to task here because we knew what we agreed to when we went to war on math and physics. We jumped into The Great Recession fighting two wars in the Middle East and not only failed to raise the taxes to pay for them, but we cut taxes. All of our artificially-created wealth disappeared. We allowed educational attainment to plunge. We didn’t keep up the country’s infrastructure. We have a brain drain because we are shutting our doors to immigrants. We don’t spend money on projects for energy breakthroughs—research and development has decreased as a fraction of the GDP by 60% in 40 years.

What we do regulate has adverse consequences. What we don’t regulate has adverse consequences.

Income inequality has become so great that it has thwarted collective action for public good. Columbia University professor and Nobel Laureate in Economics Joseph E. Stiglitz states that the top 1% (in income) of Americans takes home 25% of total of America’s income. In terms of wealth, they control 40%. While middle class income has fallen over the last ten years, for those in the top 1% it has increased 18%.

This situation leads to the wealthy opting out of paying for public goods. They don’t need those public goods because they have their own ‘subsociety’ (country clubs=parks, private schools, private jets, etc.)

The US overestimated the challenge posed by 9/11 and spent on Middle Eastern countries when the real challenge is from Asia and ‘winning’ countries. (Both authors supported the war in Iraq, so they discuss what they got right and what they underestimated.)

While the country appears to be split on opposite poles of the political spectrum, the authors make the case that politicians are the ones who are split, but that Americans are closer to the center than the people they elect to office. According to Morris Fiorina, political scientist and author, “Publicly available databases show that the culture war script embraced by journalists and politicos lies somewhere between simple exaggeration and sheer nonsense.” One reason we elect political purists is as a result of gerrymandering.

We need to stop bouncing back and forth between extreme party positions and accept compromise.

The authors discuss lobbying, lobbyists—what they do and how they do it. (This section would actually be very interesting for students.) An increase in lobbyists affects the country’s growth—interest groups, in lobbying on their own behalf, are, according to Mancur Olson (economist) “overwhelmingly oriented to struggle over the distribution of income and wealth rather than to the production of additional output.” This slows down society’s ability to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources for changing conditions. Some examples of such lobbying are given—the fossil fuel lobby (oil and coal), AARP, etc. (“While reducing Social Security and Medicare may be unfair to older Americans, under-investing in education is harmful to everyone. In this sense, entitlements serve a special interest, while education serves in the national interest. … A dollar wisely invested in early education can do far more to meet the challenges of the world we are living in than a dollar spent on a senior citizen, no matter how deserving he or she may be.”)

The discussion of politics continues with the results of the Citizens United case which struck down the law restricting corporate campaign contributions. Senator Evan Bayh is quoted as saying that hundreds of millions of dollars will be the secret money influencing the elections of the highest offices in the land. Every politician will need a secret group to fight the money of the opponent’s secret group. The authors predict that Congress will simply become a fundraising organization.

Friedman and Mandelbaum turn their attention to media, especially talk radio and partisan political television programming. They feel that ‘narrowcasting’—targeting one end of the political spectrum and then reinforcing the opinions of those in that demographic—contributes to the country’s problems. Having politicians pay attention to what the other guys (even bloggers) say about them is too distracting. In addition, narrowcasters feed their audiences lots of misinformation. Although that misinformation will be corrected, it will happen in another venue, so that the target audience never learns of the correction and believes what it is fed. “’If Walter Cronkite were to be resurrected, nobody would hire him, let alone listen to him.’” (Robert Bennett)

The really frightening part of all this for the rest of the country is that they could end up like California—in deep debt with a crummy educational system—all because of political failure. The state has refused to take collective action to solve its problems and the country needs to see that it will be a ‘California’ if it refuses collective action as well.

The final discussion of Part IV is about the erosion of traditional American values. We don’t have a shared sense of national purpose. In financial markets, we work on the ‘I’ll be gone before this thing blows up’ model. The Boomer generation is blamed for this. (Greatest Generation=sustainable outlook. Boomers=emphasis on short term.) Authority has declined and students don’t accept honest feedback. We are all cynical rather than (healthily) skeptical.

George W, Bush takes a hit for the dissolution of collective purpose. After 9/11, he refused to rally Americans to any collective action (think WW II rationing or a gas tax—‘patriot tax.’) The one place where authority is still respected and earned is the military. (Victoria’s aside: for an interesting/divergent view on this, read War by Sebastian Junger.) We should be willing to pay a war tax, just as previous generations paid for their wars. We should be able to do inspirational things, as were done in the middle twentieth century (e.g., Peace Corps).

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Adult books for teens: “War”

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Historical Fiction/Historical Element, Mature Readers, Movie Tie-In, Non-fiction, Over 375 pages by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
April 19, 2012

Adult Books for Teens: War by Sebastian Junger

In the year between June 2007 and June 2008, the Korengal Valley was the most dangerous place for a soldier to be at war. The daily temperatures of one hundred degrees, the rough and barren terrain, as well as the many unsympathetic locals (many village elders were working with the Taliban) compounded problems for Second Platoon, Battle Company, which was involved in more firefights than soldiers in any other area of the war, sometimes in more than one battle a day.

During this period, author Sebastian Junger was embedded with Second Platoon, Battle Company. He had photojournalist Tim Hetherington with him. They shot 150 hours of videotape and used that for their documentary film Restrepo. War received many notable book commendations and has been a bestseller. Restrepo received the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 2011.

Junger tells us at the beginning of the book that he was wholly dependent on the Army for food, shelter, and protection, but that Army officials never tried to censor what he recorded nor to “alter [his] reporting in any way or to show the contents of [his] notebooks or [his] cameras.” So, this is a true picture of warriors in battle. Although it was published for an adult audience, it’s an important read for students who are considering joining a branch of the military because it does give such a realistic picture of war. And, it’s not a bad read for the rest of us either—Americans who are forgetting that one percent of our population is fighting this war without a whole lot of support from the rest of us.

War has scenes of intense battle and of the subsequent deaths and maiming, of how these losses affect the psyches of the men who are not physically harmed. (Junger is there when Second Platoon members are caught in an ambush and an IEU blows up their Humvee.) It also shows the boredom of the men between battles. And Junger delves into the warrior mentally in a way I haven’t read in another book. “War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them.”

These men are some of the best trained soldiers around, but they are also undisciplined. “O’Byrne’s 203 gunner, Steiner, once got stabbed trying to help deliver a group beating to Sergeant Mac, his squad leader, who had backed into a corner with a combat knife. In Second Platoon you got beat on your birthday, you got beat before you left the platoon—on leave, say—and you got beat when you came back. The only way to leave Second Platoon without a beating was to get shot.”

Junger deals honestly with the fact that a lot of guys in Second Platoon live for the high, for the adrenaline rush, of being in a firefight, of shooting weapons. He shows that returning to civilian life is often difficult for them because they can’t get that rush back. They also can’t duplicate the intense love they have for one another in a situation where each would, without a second thought, sacrifice his life for his warrior brothers. “’I never got in trouble, but Bobby beat up a few MPs, threatened them with a fire extinguisher, pissed on their boot. But what do you expect from the infantry, you know? I know that all the guys that were bad in garrison were perfect f– soldiers in combat. They’re troublemakers and they like to fight. That’s a bad garrison trait but a good combat trait—right?’”

Adults will remember Junger’s work from the bestselling books A Death in Belmont and The Perfect Storm (which was made into a movie). This is an equally good book, and I highly recommend it. It does contain a lot of profanity—perfectly natural as the soldiers are quoted frequently.

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