Begin the Week with Words

One of my favorite quotes about education because it speaks to what education should really be about...inspiring life long learners.

Bookish Shirts I Love

The weather here in Ohio is playing back and forth between summer and fall, which means I end up in nice cotton T-shirts most of the time. Like any other type of clothing, I have my favorites, worn repeatedly before I'll even touch the rest of the stack. Of course, they are book related shirts! Why else would I be telling you all of this? And of course I have pictures!

My oldest and most favorite bookish shirt, which is also my favorite color, blue. It reads "Life is simple. Eat. Sleep. Read." That says it all!

PJs my sister bought me Christmas a couple years ago. The shirt begs of others what any book lover wants to discuss - his/her current read! "Ask me about my book" shirt comes with lightweight pants adorned in mugs, stacks of books, and words like "travel" and "literature."

A special, one-of-a-kind shirt custom designed specially for a group of blogger friends and myself. The picture is half book, half laptop. It reads "Rocking the Book Blogosphere" and I can tell you that is exactly what the bloggers I follow do! Love you all! (Oh, and I also have this shirt in a dark gray long sleeve, so I can wear its awesomeness year round!)

This is my newest! I chose red because it's my school's color. The front reads "English Teacher" and the back reads "Only Because Freakin' Awesome Is Not An a Official Job Title." You better believe it! This was one of those specialty shirts that shows up as an ad/post on FB. After seeing it numerous times, I just had to have it.

We have dress down day every Friday at school. Teachers pay $2 to wear jeans and a comfy shirt. The money goes toward many good causes within the school, usually helping students in need. And who doesn't want to wear comfy clothes to work AND proclaim truth at the same time?! You know I'll be sporting these the next few weeks before the cold settles in and the snow flies!

 

How We Learn

Source: NetGalley.com

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, by Benedict Carey
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: September 9, 2014
Category: Parenting & Families, Science
Source: I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Being in the "learning business," I couldn't pass up a book about how people learn. So, because of the title alone, How We Learn, I requested it. It turned out to be one of those books where you pick through the table of contents to read the portions that are most relevant to you. After reading the first two parts, I realized I was waiting to read the parts that sounded more interesting to me and I skipped to the following sections:

"The Hidden Value of Ignorance," which was about testing.

"The Upside of Distraction," which discusses how ideas and solutions appear when we are not thinking on the exact topic.

"Learning Without Thinking," about learning through associations.

"You Snooze, You Win," discusses the role of sleep in the learning process.

Overall, about half the book was relevant to me as an educator, although I feel it was dense, factual/scientific reading (for me anyway), so I didn't read it straight through. Once I began picking and choosing parts I wanted to read, I liked the book better. People with science/biology interests will like this book.

Have you read any books with topics that would interest a random audience?

Begin the Week with Words

This sentence on the very first page of Juliet's Nurse, which I haven't read far into, but am already highly interested in with the little I've read!

"Two nights before Lammas Eve, I go to bed believing myself fat and happy. You will think me a fool for being so deceived, at my age. But in our hearts, we all wish to be fooled. And so we make fools of ourselves." Juliet's Nurse, by Lois Leveen

The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

Source: Amazon.com

The Teacher Wars, by Dana Goldstein
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: September 2, 2014
Category: Nonfiction, Education
Source: I received this e-galley from the publisher, via Edelweiss, in exchange for my honest review.

I am a teacher, so reviewing The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession, by Dana Goldstein, was inevitable, self assigned, summer reading homework. I made so many highlights on my e-galley to help write a good summary and then read Amazon's perfect sum-up and thought, "Why reinvent the wheel?" The summary of The Teacher Wars, from Amazon:

"Teaching is a wildly contentious profession in America, one attacked and admired in equal measure. In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been similarly embattled for nearly two centuries. From the genteel founding of the common schools movement in the nineteenth century to the violent inner-city teacher strikes of the 1960s and '70s, from the dispatching of Northeastern women to frontier schoolhouses to the founding of Teach for America on the Princeton University campus in 1990, Goldstein shows that the same issues have continued to bedevil us: Who should teach? What should be taught? Who should be held accountable for how our children learn? 

She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change. And she also discovers an emerging effort that stands a real chance of transforming our schools for the better: drawing on the best practices of the three million public school teachers we already have in order to improve learning throughout our nation’s classrooms."

Okay, so it looks like I've cheated, using Amazon to make up most of my review, but before you give me detention, the hallmark of a good teacher is seeking out and using good materials wherever possible! This summary is good material.

To be quite honest, it took me a good amount of time to read The Teacher Wars and I read many other books alongside it. The Teacher Wars provides the details of the historical figures and accounts that moved education forward, which sometimes gets dry or just needs broken up to keep the reader's focus. If your interest doesn't lie in education, this is obviously not the book for you. Even if you have some interest, this still may not be the book for you. This book is for those who are really interested in educational policy, where it's been and where it's headed; specifically, how these two things are connected.

I found the last three chapters the most interesting because they deal with the past thirty years, which are the policies I have dealt with as I've earned my degrees and started my career. The epilogue was also useful, with a rundown of what would help education the most, based on the accumulated research, along with brief explanations.

As a young teacher with many years left in my career, the panicked talk of Common Core and new teacher evaluation systems stirs more feelings than many people realize, so it was crazy that this book connects today's issues facing education to those that have been around for almost the entire 175 years of American public education. It seems appropriate the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald would come to me here: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Crime and Punishment

My Pevear and Volokhonsky edition.

I love classics. Of course I've run across a few unsatisfying classics, but for the most part I enjoy them...or more so the challenge of them. Last year I tackled The Count of Monte Cristo and the year before that Les Miserables, loving both. Both of them were imposing classics for me, so this year I had to up the ante, so to speak. An author whose books I have, but have not yet read: Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot among the two I've heard discussed the most. However, a friend of mine just read Crime and Punishment, so I figured I might as well read one I can discuss with someone personally and picked it up instead of The Brothers Karamazov. And, what better timing for a decision than while picking books for the TBR Pile Challenge last December?! It's extra satisfying to have it read from my TBR pile.

Crime and Punishment is a murder story. Afterward, murderer Raskolnikov endures fits of guilt induced illness and paranoia. His story becomes one of cat-and-mouse, where neither he nor the reader is quite sure who knows what or how much. Will Raskolnikov completely unravel?

I can't tell you how it ends, but I can tell you I enjoyed the story and was relieved to find it easy to follow. I may have to credit this to the translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. All of my Russian translations come from this pair, who have won numerous awards for their excellence in keeping so closely to the original meaning in their translations.

Crime and Punishment is another positive checkmark on my classics list. Any tough classic you are proud to have read? 

Begin the Week with Words

Although it was a so-so book, I found this snippet to be true:

"This is what parents do: shape the emotions that will color memory." The Story of Land and Sea, by Katy Simpson Smith

While on the topic of parents, here's another parent related quote, from This Is Where I Leave You:

"Of course, there was a lot more to [dad] than that, it's just that none of it is coming to me right now. At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues." This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper