Books: Education (Opposing Viewpoints)

For a book less than two hundred pages long, this took me a long time to finish (and not only because I mislaid it for two weeks). The subject is interesting and relevant, and each viewpoint is short enough to finish easily in one sitting, even with a dog whimpering for attention (or maybe it’s the food I’m eating while I read) and staring at me with her big dark eyes. But as with the previous book that I read in this Opposing Viewpoints series (on Islam), I felt that the viewpoints were addressing various aspects of the issue without answering the points made by other writers.

Partly that is a result of these books being compiled from previously written materials, rather than essays written for the purpose of the book. The best books I have read that present opposing viewpoints allow each author to directly address the points made by other authors in the same volume – and better yet, to respond to their responses. One article did directly criticize the views expressed in the previous one, which had been written by then-President Clinton and was no doubt widely distributted. But its objection was that too many people would jump on what Clinton said to do without noting that he said one had to go about it the right way.

That probably applies to just about everything written on the subject of education, and accounts for a great many of the problems in the system at all levels. It is folly to take any one recommendation about education and try to apply it across the board, without consideration for how it will work out in a specific situation, and often without heeding the cautions that accompanied the initial recommendation. The best piece in the book, I think, is one that emphasizes the need for each local community to have authority for and take responsibility for implementing educational programs that meet their needs and their goals. That author also stressed that it is a long, difficult process, with no quick or easy fixes.

There are some places where bilingual education is done well. One of them happens to be in a community near ours, where elementary students (whose parents choose to have them participate in this program) learn to be fully bilingual, regardless of whether their first language is English or Spanish. Other bilingual programs have been found to be dismal failures. It is a mistake to say that bilingual education is best based on the success in West Liberty. But it is even more mistaken to say that the whole idea is flawed because of the places where it has been done so badly.

Books: Paths of Glory

Until I picked up this audiobook by Jeffrey Archer (the author’s name alone was enough to recommend it to me), I had never heard of George Leigh Mallory. He was, I know now, one of the greatest mountaineers in history, and according to this site also “perhaps the most famous mountaineer in history.”

Ten years ago, Mallory’s body was found high on Mount Everest, where he and his climbing partner Irvine had perished 75 years earlier. I read many stories of adventure as a child, and one of my favorite books was James Ramsey Ullman’s Banner in the Sky. So why had I never heard of Mallory, whose story would no doubt have greatly intrigued and inspired me?

Probably because there is no solid evidence that he ever made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain. People remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (my uncle’s family named one of their cats Tenzing, because he climbed everything), because they made it to the top and then back down to tell the story. But no one knows for sure if Mallory and Irvine died trying to reach the top, or on the way back down.

Archer happens to be of the opinion that they did reach the summit, and tells a very plausible account of how it was done. But that comes very late in the book (one knows from the prologue what Mallory’s end will be, so the suspense is only in when and how it will happen), and I would not have been eager to get that far if Archer had not drawn me fully into the story with his engaging account of Mallory’s life and character.

Happiness is a new book

The school gymnasium was generally not one of my favorite places as a child. (Outdoor gym class wasn’t as bad, as I could handle kicking a ball and running. Indoor gym class, however, meant gymnastics or volleyball, or “Mr. King Soccer,” which involved trying to knock down the other team’s bowling pins while keeping your own from being knocked over.) But when it was set up for the annual book fair, it suddenly became the best place in the whole school.

Across the street, the public library usually had the best selection of books at a price I could afford (free). But the book fair meant a smorgasbord of new books that the library didn’t have yet, and at prices reasonable enough that I could always count on my parents to get me at least one. (At the supermarket not a penny could be spared to buy name brands, but they were pretty generous when it came to buying books. They always let me purchase books from the monthly Scholastic take-home flyers, and they also let me buy all the books by L. Frank Baum and Marguerite Henry that I could find.)

I still have a pop-up book that I’m pretty sure came from a book fair in the New Meadow Elementary gym. What Do You Get? asks riddles like “What do you get when you cross a duck with a cow?” (milk and quackers) or “What do you get when you cross a blackbird with a mad dog?” (a raven maniac). I’m not sure if the jokes are all that funny except to kids (my son does crack up over most of them, though he’s not sure why crossing a worm and a porcupine should produce barbed wire), but the implausible pop-up pictures add a lot to its entertainment value.

And the tradition continues. This week is the Scholastic Book Fair at my younger son’s school. Monday he announced that he needed $5.99 for Tentacles. I always like to check out his book choices myself, both to know what I’m getting him, and because even at age 47, I still love browsing at a book fair. I like seeing what books kids are reading, getting ideas for possible Christmas presents, and checking out the bargain table. I didn’t end up getting there when the book fair was open, but fortunately I could check out the book just as easily online. (Perhaps even more easily, because at amazon.com I can get the opinions of other children and their parents.)

I quickly decided this was a book we could both enjoy. Mystery, legendary animals – and a reading level high enough to challenge him a little and be enjoyable for me also. It also turned out that he had more than enough money saved up to buy it, even without my giving him the proceeds from selling his Leapster on ebay.

The one problem was that Tentacles turns out to be a sequel, and I always like to read books in order if I can. But the internet again helped me, as I looked up our local library’s online catalog and found that I could (and did) go pick up Cryptid Hunters at lunchtime. Now the question is just who gets to read it first.

Reading Buddies

I am now a Reading Buddy.

Considering that google reported approximately 21 million hits when I searched on “reading buddies,” it’s hardly a new idea. Somewhere in those 21 million pages, I might possibly find who started the first program, whose success was copied over and over again in schools across the country. At least one of them has been around since 1994. So I’m somewhat surprised I never heard of it before.

I have known of programs pairing adult volunteers with students who struggle with reading. When we moved to Michigan in the fall of 1998, I volunteered in such a program at a nearby school until I found full-time work. But there, it was the students who did the reading, and our role as volunteers was to listen, help with difficult words, and ask questions to check for comprehension. I’ve no idea how much my participation helped the girl I worked with – six weeks is probably not long enough to make a big difference. (They assured me before I started, though, that they were glad to have me even for a limited time.)

In this program, though, I do the reading – at least most of the time. According to the school principal, who presented the idea of the program to our church a few weeks ago, many of the children in his school have no one read to them at home. Most of the children live in poverty, and statistics show that they get read to about a tenth of a percent of the time a middle class child is read to. One of the many websites I looked at said that in households living in poverty, there are often no children’s books in the house, and often no adult able to read them anyway.

I’ve no idea how many hours I read to my boys over the years, or how many hours my father read to us as children, but it’s sad to think of a child getting only a tiny fraction of that time. My own boys are long past the age when I sat and read to them at bedtime (though once in a while my younger son does ask me to read something). I’ve always felt a bit awkward with children until I get to know them (I was very relieved to discover that I didn’t have the same problem with my own children because I’ve known them since birth), but I love books, so I decided this was a program I had to get involved in.

Books: The Fairy Tales Detectives

Having never seen the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show as a child, my introduction to fractured fairy tales was James Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I was on a business trip in St. Louis, and I had an extra night at the hotel before the conference started (in order to take advantage of Saturday-stayover low fares). I was doing a bit of Christmas shopping when I came across this slim volume in the bookstore. I was going to buy it for my husband, but it was so good I read the entire book before going to bed.

From then on I was hooked. I bought Garner’s Once Upon a More Enlightened Time and Politically Correct Holiday Stories when they came out the following year, along with Chris Fabry’s Spiritually Correct Bedtime Stories. Later I added David Fisher’s Legally Correct Fairy Tales to the collection – though I don’t think any of the latter books were quite as good as the first one.

When Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs came out in 1996, we bought a copy, and enjoyed it so much that we kept it on the coffee table to share with guests. I still think it’s one of the best in the genre. Of course, by then the idea of fractured fairy tales was getting so popular that they started springing up all over the place, many of them not nearly so funny.

My initial impression of the Sisters Grimm, based on the first book in the series, was that it belonged to the “not nearly so funny” class. As another disappointed reviewer on amazon.com points out, it begins with a compelling premise (which is why I happily picked it up from the children’s section in the library). Orphaned sisters Sabrina and Daphne Grimm find themselves in the home of a strange woman who claims to be their grandmother, in a small town in New York where all the fairy tale creatures from the old stories (which turn out to be true history) now live.

Unfortunately, Sabrina is not a particularly likable character, and the rest of the characters in the story aren’t much better (some are more appealing, but not developed well enough for me to care much what happens to them). There is a mystery to solve, related to a farmhouse flattened by a giant, but the eventual solution does not seem all that satisfying.

Of course, the books are written for children, not adults. But I often enjoy children’s books. (I’m looking forward to reading Alcatraz versus the Knights of Crystallia once our library get a copy.) Some parents do very much enjoy reading these books along with the children – there are hardly any critical reviews at amazon.com from either children or parents. The one critical review I mentioned above does point out that the first book seems to be a setup for future books in the series.

As my 10-year-old is in the target age range, I’ll have to see what he thinks of it (when he finishes the Harry Potter book he’s reading now).

Books: The Bone Garden

This is the first book I have read by Tess Gerritsen, and from the reviews I have read it is not one of her best. Since I did enjoy this one, though, I look forward to reading others by the same author.

The Bone Garden is a combination of mystery and romance, historical fiction, social commentary (on Boston in 1830), and a detailed picture of the state of medicine in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The romance is the weakest part, in my opinion, but then I wouldn’t have picked up the book if that had been its primary element. I was more interested in the mystery, and while one customer review at amazon.com claims that the solution was clear from about a quarter of the way through the book, I certainly did not see it until much closer to the conclusion.

The novel attempts to intertwine the mystery/romance of 1830 with one in the present time, as a young divorcee named Julia attempts to learn the story behind a skeleton found in the garden of the house she just bought. Together with a crotchety old man whose cousin previously owned Julia’s house, she gradually unravels the story by reading letters written by “O. W. H.” to “Margaret,” letters found in boxes in the old house when its elderly owner died.

I agree with other reviewers at amazon.com that this part of the novel, set in the present, is weak and could easily have been left out. The real story takes place in 1830, and after a while I was glad the present-day chapters were as short as they were, because I wanted to get back to where the real action took place. Here in Boston in 1830, the lives of several characters are increasingly intertwined, all somehow involved in a mystery that involves a serial killer.

The science (and fiction) of H.G. Wells

I’ve enjoyed reading science fiction since I was in about fourth grade. As an adult, I’ve enjoyed even more reading about where science fiction gets it wrong, and where it gets it right. I have two books discussing the science in Star Trek (one on physics, the other on biology), and we enjoyed watching a TV special a few years ago on the science of Stargate SG-1.

Science fiction is often a mix of inventions which remain far in the future (robots that are barely distinguishable from humans, flying cars) and others that have now been far outstripped by reality (think of the size of the modules that had to be removed from HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, compared to the size of memory and storage modules actually used in this century). I occasionally work on one of my own science fiction story ideas, but then I start wondering how ridiculous some of my ideas might seem within only a decade or two.

One comparison I hadn’t read before is between the ideas of H. G. Wells’ novels and science as we know it today. I have read a few of his books, but had only a vague notion of when he lived. He was born 143 years ago today, I learned from nationalgeographic.com, and pretty much defined the genre of science fiction with his literary output.

Did you know the U.S. military now has a heat-ray gun? It doesn’t kill, or even cause physical harm, but it does produce a burning sensation and can be used to help disperse crowds. Wells envisioned automatic sliding doors, but he got the direction of the movement wrong (he had the door moving up into the ceiling instead of sideways into the walls).

It may not have taken a visionary to predict attempts to combine features of different animals, though Wells could not have imagined the mechanics of genetic engineering. People have been cross-breeding animals and plants for ages, within the limits of their technological abilities. Going beyond those limits waited only on the necessary scientific discoveries.

Time travel remains one of the most intriguing (to me) plot enablers in science fiction. The linked article quotes a physics professor who states that time travel has not actually been proven impossible, contrary to what many physicists claim. Since most time travel stories I have read deal with the problems created by time travel, rather than the opportunities such travel would create, I rather hope that the ”many physicists” are correct.

Books: Islam (Opposing Viewpoints)

I always appreciate books that present a range of viewpoints on controversial topics. Some books by a single author attempt to do this, but I always find myself wondering how fairly the author has presented views that he himself does not hold. Even if he intends to be fair, he is unlikely to be able to put forward an opposing view as effectively as his own.

I was happy, therefore, to discover a series of books called Opposing Viewpoints, published by Greenhaven Press. Each book is a short anthology of differing views on various aspects of a controversial issue, such as the death penalty, abortion, and animal rights. I doubt I’ll read the one on sports in America, but I’m very interested in learning more about the range of views on criminal justice, education, genetic engineering, health care (especially in light of current events), human sexuality, illegal immigration, mass media, and women in the military. (I’ll skip the one on vampires – though I’m curious now just what the controversy is about.)

It was the one on Islam that interested me first. I’ve read a couple books by Muslims, acknowledging the problems with radical Islamists but presenting a favorable view of Islam as a whole. And I’ve followed the many discussions over at worldmagblog where certain commenters regularly point out books, events, and verses from the Koran as evidence of the great danger the West faces from Islam. Having a variety of views presented side by side seemed like a great way to get a better perspective on the matter.

It’s quite a short book, only 150 pages including an introduction to each author/viewpoint, and a periodical bibliography for each chapter. It is divided into four sections:

• Are the Values of Islam and the West in Conflict?
• Does Islam Promote Terrorism and Violence?
• What Is the Status of Women Under Islam?
• How Will Islam’s Future Be Shaped?

One thing I noticed was that the viewpoints arguing that the values of Islam and the West are in conflict were all written from the perspective of the West. I suppose that Muslims who see their culture as opposed  – and superior  – to the West likely do not write their views in English. But it would have been interesting to read that perspective also.

Books: Liberty and Tyranny (part 3)

[continued from previous two posts]

Levin covers a number of different areas of conservative thought, but important to all of them is the idea of limited government. There is a need for government to perform certain essential tasks – but no more. And as much as possible, the best level of government to handle these responsibilities is the one closest to the situation. That is why education is best handled at the local level. Very little was originally intended to be handled at the federal level.

Growing up in Connecticut, I was puzzled by the slight differences in laws between different states. When I went shopping in or near my hometown, I knew how to calculate the sales tax and thus the total I would need to pay the cashier. But when we did any shopping during camping trips elsewhere in New England, my calculutions were always off, because I had forgotten that other states had higher or lower sales tax, or includes/excluded different items.

There were also different traffic laws. Most other states allowed right turn on red, before Connecticut adopted the practice (it was the next to last state to do so). Speed limits were different (until President Nixon imposed the nationwide 55 mph speed limit in 1973). I think I was also vaguely aware of different state laws as to the sale of such things as alcohol, firecrackers, and lottery tickets.

None of the differences seemed huge. As far as I could tell, from visiting relatives in different states, there was not a lot of difference between living in one state or another, except those that had to do with by physical laws (climate, topography) rather than manmade law. As I studied history in school, I learned how and when different states had been added to the Union. But the reason why they each had a state constitution and their own set of laws remained a mystery to me.

Books: Liberty and Tyranny (continued)

[continued from yesterday's post]

One thing I liked about this book was that it discussed conservatism primarily in the abstract, citing examples more from history than current events. That way you can focus on the concepts themselves, without the emotional baggage the accompanies current manifestations of conservatism, either in personalities or programs. Discussions on worldmagblog so often become mired in specific details of what some well-known conservative or liberal did, or anecdotal evidence of the success or failure of some particular program.

Since no one is perfect and no one’s program is perfect, there will always be places to find fault, and somehow the faults of one’s political opponents always seem somewhat worse than those of people on the same side. Even when this is admitted, however, such fault still end up being used as evidence of the perversity of the opponents’ political views. This tendency is less pronounced when it comes to discussing history – though it’s hardly absent.

On the other hand, discussing conservatism in the abstract makes it hard to envision how it can be put into practice in the real world. And it paints a picture of the conservative as the paragon of moral clarity, while his opponent is a tyrant, the source of unmitigated evil. There may be people in the world who fit those two extremes, but most people are much more a mix of noble and ignoble thoughts and motives.

Who is this Statist, anyway? Levin explains right at the beginning that he will use the term Statist rather than Liberal, since Liberal should rightly mean broad-minded, and Levin considers today’s “liberals” to be the very opposite. They want to control people’s lives by government regulation that reaches into just about every aspect of people’s lives. What products you are able to buy, how you can use your money, how you can use your own property – these are just a few of the ways that your liberty is abridged by those who call themselves liberals. Therefore, Levin calls them Statists, to emphasize their use of government power.

While it is true that liberals generally favor regulation far more than do conservatives, I have trouble with the idea of assuming to know their motives. Levin says, “But it is the Statist’s purpose to make as many individuals as possible dependent on the government.” I have known quite a few liberals, and they are variously motivated by concern for the poor and oppressed, protection of the environment, or reaction against what they perceive as the moral code that conservatives seem to be attempting to impose on society. The result of their efforts may well be dependence on the government, but that does not mean it is their purpose. If Levin thinks that all or even most liberals are Statists in the full sense he describes, he is blinded by his own ideology.