You are here: Home / Archives for books

Summer reading (colleges hope)

September 25, 2010 By

Ninety-three percent of top universities assign a “common reading” to new college students, reports the National Association of Scholars in Back from the Beach: 100 New Books by Ashley Thorne.

President Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, selected by Quinnipiac University and the University of Washington in 2009, was dropped in 2010.

§ The book with the biggest leap in popularity from June to September is Outcasts United, a story about a group of refugee boys from different countries in Africa and the Middle East who settle in Clarkston, Georgia and are discovered by a Jordanian woman who forms them into a soccer team.

§ Two other top books had a spike in popularity: This I Believe (and This I Believe II), the NPR-assembled anthology that was already the most frequently selected book for common reading; and Persepolis, a graphic novel (comic book) about a girl living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The society/poverty/women category surged with a number of books exploring “social justice.”

Here’s the recommended reading list from NAS. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop left me cold. O Pioneers! is a good feminist novel. I should read The Blithedale Romance.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , ,

Summer reading

August 17, 2010 By

While teachers are going back to work, August is vacation time for policy analysts, says National Journal. The Education Experts’ question of the week: What education-related book are you reading or would you recommend?

I’ve been rereading Mary Renault: The Persian Boy (eunuch’s view of Alexander the Great), The King Must Die (Theseus) and The Bull From the Sea (more Theseus).

Alexander Russo is reading The Corner, about a drug-dealing corner in Baltimore. The writers went on to write the brilliant TV series, The Wire.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

A Kindle for every kid in Ghana

August 8, 2010 By

A non-profit called Worldreader is giving Kindles to students in Ghana to encourage reading, reports the Wall Street Journal.

(Worldreader co-founder David) Risher says he thinks e-books will let the developing world skip the paper stage, in much the same way cell phones have helped countries skip the landline stage. E-readers, he says, are more akin to cellphones than laptops — and are well designed for the developing world because they don’t consume much power and they use the universal GSM network.

Worldreader will study whether junior and senior high school students read more and improve their reading skills if they have a Kindle preloaded with “public-domain books, as well as contemporary international and local books (which the organization is helping to get published in digital form for the first time).”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Free books end 'summer slide'

June 3, 2010 By

When low-income students are given books to read during the summer, they read more, a Florida study found. This summer a large-scale study in seven states will look at whether book giveaways can stem the usual “summer slide” in reading skills. USA Today’s Greg Toppo asks: “Can a $50 stack of paperback books do as much for a child’s academic fortunes as a $3,000 stint in summer school?”

Low-income students have few books at home. Walking to a public library may be dangerous. The result is a “summer slide” in academic skills that may account for 80 percent of the achievement gap by sixth grade, says Richard Allington, a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Researchers note that low-income students lose about three months of ground each summer to middle-class peers.

“You do that across nine or 10 summers, and the next thing you know, you’ve got almost three years’ reading growth lost,” Allington says.

For three summers, students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida got 12 books on the last day of school. After three years, book recipients had “significantly higher” reading scores,  showed less of a summer slide and read more on their own than classmates who didn’t get free books, Allington and colleagues reported.

Donate your old books and your children’s old books, writes Erin O’Connor on Critical Mass. If you’re not going to read the book again, get it off the shelf and into the hands of somebody who doesn’t have books. Since writing about Downtown College Prep in Our School, I’ve been dropping off boxes of books at the school every now and then.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Farewell to 'Farewell to Arms'

June 2, 2010 By

It’s Farewell to “A Farewell to Arms” in Douglas County, Nevada, reports Teaching Now, an Ed Week blog.

English teachers are protesting district plans to introduce College Board’s Springboard textbook set and curriculum, complaining it eliminates classic books in favor of short readings. From the Record-Courier:

(Douglas High teachers) argued SpringBoard prevents students from being exposed to classic, challenging texts with rich vocabularies. Rather, they said, students are stuck with one novel a year and random excerpts, some of which deal with movies and television shows, resulting in a loss of the English literary tradition.

More specifically, teachers argued that SpringBoard lacks rigorous grammar, vocabulary and writing instruction.

Sophomore Taylor Gray said her ninth-grade honors English class, which piloted Springboard, didn’t teach her how to write an essay, because “I was spending time learning about ‘Edward Scissorhands’ cinematic value.”

Middle school teacher and supporter Susan Van Doren thinks the curriculum could serve as an academic equalizer. “SpringBoard makes it possible to throw open the doors to Advanced Placement that have long been closed to all but the elite.”

Springboard’s thematic approach is supposed to prepare students for AP classes. But many Hillsborough County, Florida teachers complain it lacks substance, contains too much pop culture trivia and repeats material taught in lower grades. Some call it SpringBored.

There are fans. Sylvia Ellison, an English teacher at Brandon High in Florida, taught the American Dream theme to 11th-graders, many of whom were low achievers. “They like the variety,” Ellison told the Tampa Tribune.

Her class took about seven weeks to cover Jon Krakauer’s biography, “Into the Wild,” about a 24-year-old man’s adventures and death in the Alaska wilderness.

“We listened to the whole book on iTunes,” Ellison said. “Last year, they read ‘The Great Gatsby.’ I think they got more out of this one.”

And this will prepare students for AP English?

Update: James Elias of Common Core piles on, asking Where’s the Beef? and linking to reading lists.

In 12th grade, for instance, SpringBoard replaces a unit on the English Renaissance (Spenser, Raleigh, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible) with a unit on My Fair Lady, The Manchurian Candidate, Nine to Five, Cinderella, and The Legend of Bagger Vance. 12th grade Victorian literature (Tennyson, the Brownings, Kipling, Dickens, Bronte) is replaced by a current events unit focusing on the Waco massacre, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” and newspaper editorials.

A SpringBoard supporter says, “If you can read, you can read the classics on your own.” Oh, OK. No problem.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Non-fiction students should read

February 22, 2010 By

What non-fiction books should students read? Jay Mathews is looking for suggestions.

Elie Wiesel’s Night, about his boyhood in the Holocaust, and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, about his childhood abuse, are the only non-fiction books on Accelerated Reader’s list of  top 20 books read by high schoolers, Mathews points out.

Will Fitzhugh, who publishes student research papers in the Concord Review, complains that students have little exposure to non-fiction.

A relatively new trend in student writing is called “creative nonfiction.” It makes Fitzhugh shudder. “It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in ‘essay contests’ by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as ‘How do I look?’ and ‘What should I wear to school?’” he said in a 2008 essay for EducationNews.org.

Students have trouble understanding non-fiction because it “requires more factual knowledge.” Channeling E.D. Hirsch, Mathews writes:

Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read non-fiction and they can’t read non-fiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.

On my father’s recommendation, I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima when I was in high school. I also read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman and a lot of American history.  But I don’t think teachers assigned non-fiction ever.  My daughter was assigned Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters First 100 Years, which she thought was added to the reading list for diversity rather than literary quality.  Memoirs seem to be the only form of non-fiction that students are asked to read.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

E-readers unfair to blind?

January 18, 2010 By

Accused of discrimination against the disabled, three universities have agreed to stop testing Kindle e-readers until they’re fully functional for blind students, under a deal with the Justice Department.

Pace University, Case Western Reserve and Reed College are participating in a Kindle pilot. While the Kindle has a text-to-speech function, the menu does not, “so it is impossible for blind students to navigate through different electronic books or within an electronic book,” reports AP.

This is not as silly as it may seem: Blind people can use scanners to “read” printed books.

Amazon is working on an audible menu, and predicts electronic readers will be a “break-through technology” for the blind.

Via Political Correctness Watch.

In a pilot project, 12 Indianapolis schools are replacing textbooks with digital content from Discovery Education.

Filed Under: College, technology Tagged With: , ,

The N-word of The Narcissus

January 9, 2010 By

Yes, a Christian publisher has renamed Joseph Conrad’s novel to avoid offending readers. Why not call it The Narcissus?

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: ,

Build a library for $2

December 22, 2009 By

You can help the Book Wish Foundation build a library for refugees from Darfur. A $2 donation buys a brick. The library will require 5,000 bricks.

Filed Under: Giving Tagged With: , ,

Bored of darkness

December 21, 2009 By

In Heart of Darkness on the NAS Blog, David Clemens, a literature professor, wonders why each year more students complain the same readings — Hawthorne, Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Sophocles, Phillip Larkin, Tobias Wolff, and J.G. Ballard — are too dark.

. . . If such authors do anything, they force us to face existential questions. Once, students went to college to experience just this sort of perennial questioning. Today, questioning is a nonstarter having been replaced by what Phillip Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic” and, as he predicted, by students preoccupied only with themselves and with attaining a “durable sense of well-being.” This ends any interest in reading about what Victor Davis Hanson calls “the tragic limitations of human existence and how to meet them and endure them with dignity.”

The “Facebook and Twitter crowd” think medicine will postpone their senescence indefinitely, Clemens writes. “With death no longer inevitable, they find that a literature based on the tragedy of mortality is both archaic and irrelevant.”

BTW: Library Examiner has literary vampire links.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »