Category Archives: reading

Happy Birthday, Wendell Berry

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I just finished reading Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, which I bought, along with Farming: A Handbook, on a recent pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. I followed up with A World Lost, one of Berry’s Port William books. If I had to name one person who most inspires me, I believe it would be Berry. I have only been farming for a few years but I understand his love of the land and how it has informed both his politics and his philosophy. Berry turned 80 today.

In this paragraph from his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, Berry gives homage to others who have shaped his ideas:

As many hunters, farmers, ecologists, and poets have understood, Nature (and here we capitalize her name) is the impartial mother of all creatures, unpredictable, never entirely revealed, not my mother or your mother, but nonetheless our mother. If we are observant and respectful of her, she gives good instruction. As Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund Spenser that she is of all creatures “the equall mother, / And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.”7 Nearly three and a half centuries later, we hear her saying about the same thing in the voice of Aldo Leopold: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

I’ve been curating web resources related to Berry. Some great videos of him speaking and the terrific interview by Bill Moyers last fall.

Lessons in Leadership

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My leadership mentor is Warren Bennis. One of my most highlighted and tagged books is On Becoming a Leader. I was excited to read his memoir, Still Surprised: A Memoir of Life and Leadership. He tells his story honestly, including both his triumphs and his mistakes, both personal and professional. As with any memoir, there seems to be a lot of name dropping but this is a man who was a pivotal figure in many important movements in the mid-20th century so it was interesting to see who he knew.

Bennis encourages leaders to cultivate emotional wisdom that includes empathy, respect and insight in dealing with others. Listening is an important practice.

I feel that I am less a creative thinker than a creative listener. Listening is an art, a demanding one that requires you to damp down your own ego and make yourself fully available to someone else. As listener, you must stop performing and only attend and process. If you listen closely enough, you can hear what the speaker really means, whatever the words. And paying undivided, respectful attention inevitably makes you more empathic, one of the most important and most undervalued leadership skills.

The story that resonated with me, however, was of moving to SUNY-Buffalo as provost. He had been brought in to change the university. However, like many change agents, he failed to get to know the culture and community that he had been asked to change. His work there was essentially a failure. At one point, he describes driving with his colleagues in an expensive sports car, realizing only in hindsight: “The three of us might just as well have carried signs that read CLUELESS, ELITIST OUT-OF-TOWNER.” He goes on to provide the lesson he learned: “Every leader, to be effective, must simultaneously adhere to the symbols of change and revision and the symbols of tradition and stability.”

I have somehow gotten embroiled in a local battle where my outsider status is something of a hindrance. The community has some real divisions and without realizing what I was doing, I got involved with the wrong side. They are good people who have done good work but, it seems, they have done so without involving the surrounding the community so they are often viewed with suspicion by others and accused of only working with a select few. But they showed up with kids at the farm and I saw a way to work with young people again so I dove in.

The questions I ponder now are about the next steps. I have reached out to the other side but been mostly rebuffed. Have I lost the opportunity to be either a peacemaker or a change agent? How can I respect the traditions while also pushing to bring unity to this divided community? For now, I am pondering before acting any further. What would Warren do?

Gamifying My Reading Practice

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Even though I love playing league of legends and getting a lot of lol wins, I consider myself more a collector and avid reader instead of a gamer. I ran a reading workshop for many years in my middle school classroom to both introduce my students to reading and to work my reading time into my day. Since 2005, I have tracked my reading at LibraryThing. I generally don’t have a reading plan past the next one or two books and these are often the ones on the newest pile or that I can get immediately on my ereader. But my shelves are filled with lots of unread books that I’ve collected over the years and one of my goals this year is to read some of them rather than continuing to buy new ones whether analog or digital.

Couple that with a desire to get more involved with online community, and I’ve begun to gamify my reading practice.

I did this by joining the 75 Books a Year Challenge Group. One of the perks is that it includes suggested challenges that help direct you to specific books using a wide range of criteria from book covers to characters to topics. Last month, I read one challenge book. The Red Tent was a book I shared with the LibraryThing user with whom I share the most books. I’ve had Anita Diamant’s retelling of the Old Testament story of Jacob and his family on the shelf for a long time. I’ve always meant to read it but somehow it never called to me. The challenge encouraged me in a way that nothing else has.  I finished on the last day of the month, determined to meet the goal and add “completed” to the challenge page.

This month, I signed up for four challenges and am meeting all of them by reading books that I already own. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin is going to be the biggest challenge as it is a long book: the challenge was to read a chunkster. LibraryThing provides stats about your reading including average pages. The challenge requires that you choose a book that is higher than your average by at least 50 points. At close to 751 pages of text (you can’t count the appendices and bibliography which, in Team of Rivals, get you to almost 1,000 pages!), this book is far above my average of about 300 pages. I’ve already started, and it is wonderfully readable as it describes Lincoln and four of his main rivals who also came to work with him. My plan is a chapter a day, which leaves a few days at the end of the month in case I fall behind the pace.

I’m wondering how I would translate this to the classroom reading workshop. We did a little of it by having them read books with Accelerated Reader…sometimes I’d ask them to read a book at the high end of their score. And some of the students found it fun to take a quiz and earn points but others struggled just to find a book. Giving them some kind of guidelines, even if it that the title has to be red (I’m reading All the King’s Men to meet that challenge this month), can help get them to pull a book off the shelf that they would normally skip. Then, and this is the most essential point, they need time to read and it can’t just be on their own time. If we value it, we need to make time for it. 

 

More On Making Learning Relevant

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Sometime after I posted the last entry on the relevance of Algebra, I was paging through a book catalog and it seemed like each page had at least one book that focused on how and why literature mattered. Here are just a few of the titles:

I haven’t ordered any of them. I’ve already read Moby Dick and W.H. Auden and spent a lot of time teaching children Shakespeare. At some point I realized I was trying to turn them into English majors, when what I really wanted to do was help them learn to love reading the way I did. If, eventually, they found Melville and Auden and the Bard, so much the better. But to force it upon them meant it only led to the inevitable question of why they needed to read it in the first place.

It is an interesting side note that the authors of these books are writers who were probably English majors at some point in their lives so perhaps the lesson here is that, if you plan to become a writer, then reading literature is part of the career path.

And then there’s this blog entry from Edutopia just published today: Why Do We Need To Learn This? Allen Mendler offers strategies for answering the question that might diffuse the immediate situation but never gets to the heart of the answer which is that someone, somewhere decided that “this” was important for everyone to know and, as Mendler does point out, it is going to be on a high-stakes test:

Upon hearing the “When will I ever use this?” refrain, a high school teacher I work with tells her students, “I’m not sure because I don’t know what you want to be in your life. But if you give me a list of everything you plan to do and accomplish, I’ll do my best to let you know when we cover something that I think you might use.” When kids say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” her response is, “Exactly. You might need it next week, next year or never. But it is going to be on Friday’s test, not because I want to make you miserable, but because at the end of the year, it is going to be on the state test, and if you want to pass, you need to know it.”

So, you have to know it because I’m going to test it and later someone else is going to test it? I think this is probably the worst answer to the question but the most relevant in our high-stakes world and that just makes me sad.

 

The Right Book At The Right Time

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If you haven’t discovered Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore yet, add it to your reading list, or better yet, go get a copy and read it now. For me, it was a fabulous find at the local library. A bit surprising since my local library is tiny…I may actually own more books than they have in their fiction section and much of the shelves are filled with popular fiction and mysteries.

I went to pick up a book I requested. The library makes up for its small size by being part of system so I can usually get most any book I want delivered to my branch. But, I always take some time to browse as well, just to see what books might call to me. Browsing shelves is one of the joys of the bibliophile not really offered by ebooks. You can browse electronically, of course, but you can’t pull the book off the shelf and touch it, see how it feels in your hands, really interact with it in a way you can’t electronically. During this browsing adventure, I found two surprises: a new Joanne Harris novel called Peaches for Father Francis, the third in her series about Vianne, who first appeared in Chocolat. I stayed up well past my bedtime finishing it.

But it was the second book that was the real surprise since I wasn’t familiar with the author, Robin Sloan, but I took the book home with me purely because it has “bookstore” in the title. It turns out Mr. Penumbra was Sloan’s first novel. It was the best of the bunch and may be one of the best books I’ve read this year, no mean feat since I’m getting close to 70 books this year. The story included ancient books, a secret society, cryptography, technology, and a bit of fantasy thrown in. The main character is on a quest, aided by friends who just happen to work for legendary companies like Google and Industrial Light and Magic. The story is formed around nuggets of history with Aldus Manutius playing a role. (For my grammarian friends, Manutius is credited with creating the semicolon.) There is some discussion of old knowledge (OK) and what we’ve lost in our increasingly digitally mediated age. And, did I mention that the cover glows in the dark, something I discovered after I turned off the light one night.

Sloan calls himself a media inventor who worked at Twitter and because of this, there is great web support for the novel that allows a digitally-inclined reader like myself to spend happy hours exploring, a practice that helps extend my enjoyment of the original book. I’ve pulled together a few resources that you’ll find in the next post.

The last paragraph doesn’t reveal anything but seems to describe the sometimes magical experience of being a reader:

A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

You can get a digital copy of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but I don’t think the experience will be the same.

 

 

Consumed 10/15/2013

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  • Taxonomy: The spy who loved frogs : Nature News & Comment

    An intriguing story of a complex man.

    tags: spy nature consumed

    • Brown’s reassessment could prove crucial. Since Taylor’s time, taxonomy has become more than just a naming exercise. Designating a group of organisms as a new species, or lumping it in with an old one, can affect the animals’ legal protection and influence the allocation of scarce conservation resources.
    • Designating a group of organisms as a new species, or lumping it in with an old one, can affect the animals’ legal protection and influence the allocation of scarce conservation resources.
      • Just like humans…it matters what we call you.
    • Taylor had other demons. He had voiced support for eugenics programmes and reportedly refused to take on Jewish students. Brown makes no apologies for the man, but Taylor’s reputation — for good or ill — is intertwined with the history of the Kansas museum. “In the end, we consider him our own,” says Brown.

  • Meet the Craftsman Who Makes the World’s Coolest Globes | Wired Design | Wired.com

    In the Google Earth world, there is still a place for globes. Not to mention all the math and science involved…what a potentially great project for kids!

    tags: design consumed

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Consumed 10/12/2013

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Good Book, Good Life

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That’s the saying on a t-shirt I bought at the Green Valley Book Fair near Harrisonburg, Virginia. It’s so true for me. I don’t feel complete if I’m not in the middle of a book. My favorites are well-written fiction books like Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters that I bought and finished in two days. Stories of love, loss, and learning that stick with me even after the book has ended. Complex characters who don’t always do the right thing or make the best choices as they struggle to live happy full lives. I read mysteries but often for the historical setting (Maisie Dobbs and Maggie Hope are two current favorites set in war-time Britain) where the murder almost happens off screen and the plot is about the critical thinking that goes into solving problems rather than the grisly details of torture or killing. The most violent I get is Bernard Cornwell but there’s something about his swashbuckling storytelling that makes up for the battle scenes.

So, Paula White’s post about Sharing Books really resonated with me this morning. Paula has been reading the books on the Virginia Young Readers list so she can share them with her students and I am eager to get started on them myself. But, she finds herself unwilling to share some of them with her elementary school children and even questions the content for the older kids. Paula writes:

Just finished Okay For Now by Gary Schmidt.  I’m trying to remember back to my middle school years and what in the heck I read beyond science fiction.

NOT books like this one…where the main character has what could be considered to be an awful life.  I don’t remember reading books where parents wouldn’t let their hard of hearing kids learn sign language (Hurt Go Happy) or kids killed other kids (Hunger Games) or kids committed suicide (13 Reasons Why).

I asked myself the same question as, like Paula, I was a voracious reader, always bringing home stacks of books from the library, a book hidden behind my social studies textbook, a book squirreled away in my purse for odd moments in the car or even church.  I remember loving The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and climbing into the back of my own closet to see if I could find a magical world. One summer, I read every Nancy Drew mystery. E.L. Konigsburg was a favorite, especially From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler. I dabbled in science fiction from the Dune series to Mrs. Frisby and The Rats of NIMH. And so many more…too bad there wasn’t a Librarything back then where I could track them all.

And I also wonder, as Paula does, about the diet of violence on which we all seem to live these days. In my antenna driven world, I get to see all the old shows from my childhood and while they seem hokey, I’m glad I grew up with the Brady Bunch and MASH rather than CSI and Criminal Minds. They portrayed a view of the world where honesty and kindness were valued and, while the world wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t as dark and evil as it seems now.

I also love sharing books and am hoping to get involved with a book group at my local library this fall. I’ve been sharing books with a friend’s daughter and can’t wait to get home and read The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, a loaner from her that I forgot to bring with me on vacation. I sent her home with a box of Nancy Drews and a few other favorites and am looking forward to chatting with her about them. I also share books with an old teaching friend in Pennsylvania with whom I exchange “real” letters about reading. Finally, I blog about books on my personal blog In One Place.

Postscript: Paula has been blogging faithfully every day about her reading and her adventures with her students. Amplifying Minds is definitely worth adding to your aggregator.

 

Timely Reading

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While I am a little embarrassed to admit that I have only now gotten around to reading Cory Doctorow’s books, I couldn’t be reading them at a more perfect time. Little Brother and Homeland deal with the privacy issues that are in the headlines as we debate whether Edward Snowden is a patriot or a traitor. Doctorow would argue for the former and provides powerful examples of what happens when innocent people think it’s okay to give up some of their privacy rights in the mistaken belief that by doing so, they help the government catch terrorists. In a conversation with my husband last night, I found myself giving those examples. Doctorow calls these books science fiction but when matched to the discussions on Meet the Press this morning, I would argue that they aren’t fiction.

There is a lot of science in the books, however. The young people are tech savvy and use their skills to protect themselves in smart ways. The books include extensive bibliographies and I added lots of RSS feeds to my aggregator. There are also articles from leaders in the field encouraging readers to consider careers in computer programming and security. And I gasped a bit when I saw the Afterword to Homeland written by Aaron Swartz, whose suicide in January shocked and saddened and led to many questions about the way he was being persecuted for his stance on freedom. A very special light went out. Here’s Swartz’s message to the readers of Homeland after he describes the fight he led against SOPA:

This is your life, this is your country–and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved…The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won’t win every time–this is real life, after all–but we finally have a chance. But it only works if you take part. And now that you’ve read this book and learned how to do it, you’re perfectly suited to make it happen again. that’s right: not it’s up to you to change the system (pp. 389-390).

If you haven’t read these books, you should. And there’s no excuse. Doctorow provides free downloads of all his books in a variety of digital formats. I’m happy to say I bought the analog copies to help contribute a bit to this voice of freedom. I’m also glad there are lots more to read from this prolific writer. My next read is Makers.

When It Comes to Reading: No More Guilty Pleasures

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I am a lifelong bookworm, always in the middle of a book, sometimes several. I was excited to hear that what I always suspected was true: my reading habit is good for my brain. As a classroom teacher, one of my goals was to encourage my students onto the path of the bookworm or at least let them discover some pleasure in the act of reading. (I blog about my book reading and buying habits at In One Place.)

So, it was with great sympathy that I read Andrew Carle’s post about his young cousin’s reaction to the summer reading requirement. Essentially, by being required to read at a certain reading level, the cousin was left with nothing of interest to read.

This is an experience that I understand. In my middle school classroom, I ran a reading workshop ala Nancy Atwell. One of the guidelines was that students were allowed to choose what they wanted to read. I offered support for those efforts with a large classroom library, book circles where students shared their reviews, and my own suggestions. But I made every effort not to dictate. After all, I spent an entire summer reading every Nancy Drew mystery I could get my hands on even though they were probably way below my own reading level. My mother might have rolled her eyes but she just kept making trips to the library with me, feeding my love of Nancy but, even more so, my love of books and reading.

Then, my middle school adopted Accelerated Reader. The up side was that it came with a special quiet reading time every afternoon. Coupled with my own reading time, it meant that some of my students might spend as much as 45 minutes a day with their noses in a book. The down side was that it came with a scale. That same Lexile Rank that Andrew talks about. Now, almost every book in the library was color coded based on its scale. Every child was tested, and the goal was to have them choosing books either on level or one level below or above their tested level. So much for personal choice. As the AR bandwagon rolled out, language arts teachers began requiring an AR book each marking period. In order to count towards the requirement, it had to meet those levels. So, readers like Andrew’s cousin found themselves tackling Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice, books that were never really meant for 7th graders. They would have been happy with Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.*

Forcing anyone to do anything is a surefire way to lead them to hate it. Andrew’s conclusion echoes my own experience: strong readers who who hate to read. UPDATE: I reread the title of this post and realized it probably didn’t make sense. Here’s the context: on my reading blog, I often refer to some books as “guilty pleasures.” They are books that I perceive as “pop fiction” or less serious reading. But, in the spirit of choosing what I want to read, I’m going to stop feeling guilty about them.**

*Mrs. Piggle Wiggle is actually on my own reading list, loaned to me by a young reading friend. I’m looking forward to it even though most of the plot has already been shared with me by my friend. I won’t tell her that it ranks above Huck Finn.

**One of my very serious undergrads once chastised me because I was talking about how much I was enjoying the Twilight series. I got very defensive, describing how I had read Chaucer in the original Middle English along with most of the traditional canon as though somehow I had earned the right to just have fun reading a book.