Friday Finds: Stuff I’ve Been Reading Online

This is a new feature: a selection of my week’s readings, much of it originally found via my favorite tool for professional learning, Twitter.

At Hybrid Pedagogy, Kris Shaffer posted “Open-Source Scholarship,” a provocative argument equating scholarship with the open-source software movement and arguing that scholars and teachers are hackers:

This hacking is a core part of what we do as scholars and pedagogues. We are unapologetic tinkerers who neither invent the wheel, nor are satisfied with the wheels already at our disposal.

I find hacking to be a productive metaphor for thinking about what I’m trying to do in the classroom. I first heard it used in connection with teaching by Bud Hunt at his inspiring NCTE 2012 presentation, and at first, I have to confess that I was confused. Hacking’s bad, right? But it turns out that hacking, as Hunt defines it, is actually good: hackers take what exists and remix and repurpose. Hackers make, remake, play. Exactly what I want to be doing in my classroom.

Maria Popova at Brainpickings wrote about “The Pace of Productivity and How to Master Your Creative Routine.” I am far from having a regular creative routine, much less mastering it. It may be for that very reason that I’m so fascinated by the rituals and routines of others.

Since it doesn’t look like a vacation is going to be in the cards this summer, I may need to follow Beth Barany’s 6 Essential Tips for Your Own Stay-at-Home Writing Retreat in order to get anything creative done.

Katherine Arcement wrote an interesting piece about her obsession with reading and writing Harry Potter fan fiction that I might someday use in one of my classes.

Cynthia Leitich Smith writes about what longevity means in the context of a writing career in a post on Writing for the Long Haul.

Starr Sackstein calls Baz Lurhman’s adaptation of Gatsby an “epic fail”.

Rohan Maitzen’s piece, “Before Coursera There Were the Great Courses,” reminded me how much I loved listening to audios from the Great Courses series when I had access to a larger public library. I found her connection between The Great Courses and MOOCs really fascinating.

Finally–and not via Twitter–I really want this Peanut Butter Cup Smoothie for breakfast tomorrow but I’d probably drink the whole 3 servings all by myself.

Abby in a Backpack

The Dumbest Generation?

I read about half of Mark Bauerlein’s bestseller, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, very carefully, and then skimmed the rest.

I wanted to read this book as research for a new course idea I’m kicking around. The overwrought title and cover blurb from Harold Bloom did give me pause, but the author is a professor at Emory and I assumed there would be some cogent, thought-provoking arguments inside the book.

Not so much.  The book is filled with overblown rhetoric and illogical arguments.

I could cite many passages of purple prose but will content myself with just one, from his concluding paragraph: “The Dumbest Generation will cease being dumb only when it regards adolescence as an inferior realm of petty strivings and adulthood as a realm of civic, historical, and cultural awareness that puts them in touch with the perennial ideas and struggles” (236).

I love the definite article there. Not just any perennial ideas and struggles, but the perennial struggles and ideas. Bauerlein never bothers to define what he means by intelligence or knowledge, but there is the occasional rhetoric about our “great American heritage” sprinkled throughout the book, so mostly he seems to be talking about a kind of Allan Bloom/E.D. Hirsch version of cultural literacy where the ability to recall Googleable factoids masquerades as knowledge and intelligence.

Bauerlein loves data and marshals an impressive array to prove that young people are stupid: nearly every page of the book contains facts and figures drawn from score reports from the ACT, SAT, and other standardized tests as well as studies and surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Endowment for the Arts, and many other organizations. We learn that Millennials can’t identify Iraq on a map! They don’t read in their free time! They don’t know who William Rehnquist is, but 98% of them recognize Beavis & Butthead!

Although Bauerlein doesn’t do much with this data beyond wring his hands, he’s still on solidest ground when he’s crunching numbers. When he leaves the stats behind, his evidence and reasoning often no longer even make sense. For example, he bases his claim that the Millennials show a “brazen disregard of books and reading” on the comments one teenage girl made when she called in during one of Bauerlein’s NPR interviews. He decides that Millennials have no use for libraries when he visits the bustling Apple store at a mall, then heads over to the public library, which is comparatively deserted. 

He manipulates and twists evidence that would seem to go against his point. For instance, the Harry Potter phenomenon is not, it turns out, proof that kids read. Instead, it’s proof that kids like to have a social experience: “Kids read Harry Potter not because they like reading, but because other kids read it” (43). How does he know this?? Not a shred of evidence is cited to support this absurd claim. Has he seen the HP novels? Kids don’t burn through an 800-page book in a weekend if they aren’t committed to the book as a reading experience. HP “opens you to a fun milieu of after-school games, Web sites, and clubs. Not to know the characters and actions is to fall out of your classmates’ conversation” (44). What clubs? What games? What websites? I love to imagine the “after-school games” the passionate reader of HP might participate in. Quidditch, anyone? 

Of COURSE kids want to talk about what they’re reading. As an English professor, Bauerlein ought to know that reading is an intensely social activity. Readers may read “alone in an easy chair at home” (43), but passionate readers then want to share what they’ve read with others.

Kids today just don’t realize that books can matter, Bauerlein believes. He quotes Frederick Douglass, John Stuart Mill, Walt Whitman, and W.E.B. Du Bois on the life-saving power of literacy and then claims, “Their testimony sets the bibliophobia of today’s youth into merciless relief” (58). But could Bauerlein really not find examples of “today’s youth” who “profit from books”? He should read about the letters Laurie Halse Anderson receives. He should find out about Nerdfighters. Why doesn’t he have a chat with Nancie Atwell or Penny Kittle or Donalyn Miller about whether “today’s youth” reads and finds value in reading?

At times, I wondered if I was even meant to take the book’s arguments seriously. The title is perhaps more suggestive than I realized about the book’s ultimate agenda–not to identify and explore a serious issue but to provide sound bytes.

Blogging: I’m Doing It All Wrong!

According to The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, I’ve been doing it all wrong. For me, blogs are essays that you craft and polish and worry over and then publish online.

But according to The Huffington Post Complete Guide, you’re better off equating blogs with emails. You don’t “hem and haw” over an email, so why should you “hem and haw” over a blog post? You don’t pause to edit. You barely pause to think. Half-baked ideas, in fact, may be more desirable because then your readers have a place to enter the conversation.

Blogs need to be timely. They respond immediately to exigency. You read something, see something, experience something that makes you want to fire off a response–and so you do.

As Jamie Lee Curtis, a Huffington Post blogger, explains, “I was just expressing an idea, an idea that wasn’t even formed until it made it on paper. No edit. No ‘What does/will this mean?’ Just an idea.”

I don’t work that way.

Or maybe I just don’t make myself work that way.

Which is probably why I have a dozen or more unfinished/half-finished blog posts languishing in the Draft file. I couldn’t get them quite perfect in the time I had to work on them. I clicked Save instead of Publish, planning to get back to it later and polish and perfect. But instead, time passed, and the need to respond passed, and now I don’t even know why I cared enough in the first place to start writing that post.

Or, in the words of The Huffington Post Complete Guide‘s Rule #2: Perfect Is the Enemy of Done:

a bunch of OK posts is probably better than a perfect post that took so long to compose the event was old news by the time you hit ‘submit’

Ouch! And also, the story of my blogging life.

Rule #1 is Blog often. To begin, the editors suggest blogging “at least two to three times a week for thirty days” at minimum, and from the examples they give, it’s clear that blogging five times a week is preferable. Readers want new content “pretty much every time they visit.”

I also find it’s easier to form a habit when you’re doing it more often. Exercising two or three days a week, while still a healthy choice, just doesn’t work for me. Pretty soon, I’m not doing it at all if I’m only prioritizing it two or three times a week. But if I do it six or seven times a week, I struggle much less to get it done, oddly. It becomes part of the fabric of my daily life.

Apparently Gretchen Rubin agrees:

“Weirdly, it’s easier to blog every day than it is to blog three or four times a week. You get in a rhythm, you don’t procrastinate, you load content into your blog, you loosen up, you’ll be taken more seriously by readers, and you stay engaged with your subject and with what’s happening on your blog.”

And so now I am thinking of a new summer challenge: a daily blogging challenge. Well, a five-days-a-week blogging challenge. I like to take weekends off.

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? 5/20/13

The kidlit edition of It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Teach Mentor Texts. Drop by to find out what others are reading or to add your blog to the list.

So far, May #bookaday isn’t going so well. I got off to a great start: 11 books in 9 days. And then…. inertia happened. And also the Internet. So distracting! I am in the middle of reading a lot of books, so if I can just finish some of those, I’m sure I’ll reach my reading goal.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on The Hub 2013 Reading Challenge.

Stargazing Dog is on the Graphic Novels list. I did not like the art in this graphic novel, for the most part. The dog and the sunflowers were nice, but the people were creepy. But I did like the story here: on one level, it’s about how we should all love our dogs more, but on another level, it’s a philosophical story about how we are all stargazing dogs, longing for what we can never have.

Stonewall Honor book Sparks by s.j. adams comes with a mouthful of a subtitle: The Epic, Completely True Blue, (Almost) Holy Quest of Debbie. Debbie has long been in love with her best friend, Lisa, and has finally decided to confess all–on the same night that Lisa and her blah boyfriend may be planning to consummate their relationship. But Debbie’s quest is much bigger than the pursuit of Lisa. The story is really about making new friends and figuring out who you are. This book reminded me a bit of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and a bit of Weetzie Bat–very good company. It’s not as good as those two books, but it was an enjoyable story.

The last book I read for the Hub Challenge was Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. For whatever reason, I wanted to be able to resist its charms, but I couldn’t. It’s a delightful story. I don’t think a summary can really do it justice, but I liked it and the other book I’ve read from this year’s Alex Award winners (books written for adults with appeal for teens) so much that I now want to read all the books that won the Alex. Well, except for the Jeffrey Dahmer graphic novel. I don’t need to read that one.

 

Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading brought back many, many memories of the reading I did from ages 10 to 16 or so. Though it turns out, I remember most of the books really wrong. Maybe that’s because I was reading Happy Endings Are All Alike (you can read Skurnick’s original column on that 1978 YA classic here) when I was 10. In this novel, two lesbians come out and one of them gets raped by a guy who hopes to “cure” her–at least according to Skurnick’s summary, and I’m going to have to take her word for it, because I remember not one bit of this. How much of that would have been over my head at age 10? All of it. And then some. My Barbie and Ken dolls didn’t even have plastic doll sex when I was 10.

 

Finally, we listened to Anastasia Krupnik on audio as the family drove to a soccer game almost 100 miles away. (Fun fact about living in South Dakota: you think nothing of driving 200 miles round-trip for an hour-long soccer game.)  First published in 1979, this is another book I do remember reading around age 10 (and probably understanding a lot more than Happy Endings or Go Ask Alice or Flowers in the Attic). There is some dated dialogue, but it holds up remarkably well. The writing is very strong. Anastasia just might have the best parents in all of children’s literature, too.

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? 5/6/13

The kidlit version of It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by TeachMentorTexts.

For May, I have decided to try for a #bookaday challenge. Here’s what I finished this week:

This is the version of The Cat Ate My Gymsuit that I obsessively read and reread when I was 10 or 11. Don’t pay any attention to those pretty pink new covers that feature a skinny girl and a white cat. There’s no cat! And Marcy couldn’t be any less pink. The Cat Ate My Gymsuit was Danziger’s first novel, published in 1974. I was afraid this book wouldn’t hold up very well, and sure,there’s some dated dialogue here and there, but for the most part, this is still a powerful story of what it means to have principles and stand up for them–and to keep believing in your principles and acting on them even after things don’t work out the way you’d hoped. What most surprised me about the book is how effectively it tells the story of its particular time period. The context–the Vietnam War and feminism–was entirely lost on me when I first read this book in 1981 or 1982. Danziger doesn’t ever mention either the war or feminism by name, I think, but the larger political protests of the 60s and early 70s clearly inform what she’s doing. This is a much more ambitious novel than I remembered it being–and also quite well-written. Like my rereading of Harriet the Spy last week, this rereading was inspired by Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. (Her original essay on Cat is available online.) Next up for my teen classic project is Ellen Conford. Will it be Hail Hail Camp Timberwood or We Interrupt This Semester for an Important Bulletin??

I love Frindle–and really all of Andrew Clements’s books. I read this one out loud to my kids, who also loved it. The one thing I do consistently like about parenting is sharing books with my kids.

I found How Children Succeed to be an incredibly interesting read–and also a frustrating one. First, the interesting. Here’s the big premise: success is about character, not cognition. Paul Tough argues persuasively that cognitive interventions may have short-term success but do not lead to lasting change and long-term success. Intelligence and cognition ultimately matter much less than non-cognitive qualities such as grit, determination, resilience. Tough brings in a wide variety of scientific research and profiles many different school intervention programs to try to pinpoint what actually works.

And now to the frustrating. I often felt that he was profiling so many different programs and interviewing so many different scientists and educators and students that he was never able to go deeply enough into his findings. Just when things get really interesting, Tough is off to the next interview. At first, I thought he was going to weave all of these different strands together into some really insightful whole. But ultimately, the book is more suggestive than anything else, touching on many, many different interesting things but always skimming the surface and never relating one set of understandings to another. In the end, I don’t have a much better sense of how children succeed than I did when I started the book, though I do have an idea of some interesting research I’d like to explore more.

But reading this book did lead to one important personal insight for me as a parent. Tough writes about how cognitive abilities are actually compromised in children who have experienced severe or repeated trauma early in their lives. Their brains are so busy dealing with stress that they actually can’t learn. I see this every day in my older son. My two kids, who are adopted, are both English Language Learners, and my older son has been unable/unwilling to learn to read. I have been worried about this and thinking that we need to add all kinds of cognitive interventions to help him. But now I suspect that once my son has regulated his emotions more and can get through his daily life without experiencing so much stress (both residual post-traumatic and new), he’ll probably be able to read just fine.

I very nearly abandoned The Running Dream, which I read for the 2013 Hub Reading Challenge, when I came to this snippet of dialogue:

“Gavin may not be a jock, but he is the mayor’s son, and he’s hot. Especially since he grew that chin scruff.”

No human being has ever or would ever say these words.

Aside from this minor false step, I did enjoy the writing quite a bit in this novel. But  overall, I felt like things worked out just a little too well. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of drama here. Track star Jessica is injured in a bus accident and has to have part of her leg amputated. Running is who she is; without it, she doesn’t know how to go on. But very quickly, she figures it out: she can get a running prosthetic and start running again! Before you know it, Jessica’s friends are holding bake sales and car washes to raise money for her $20K running prosthetic. And Jessica has an even bigger goal: she wants to find a way for her new friend, Rosa, who has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair, to experience the excitement of racing. So she trains to push Rosa 10 miles in a race. It’s all very inspiring and I appreciated Jessica’s can-do attitude, but I’m not sure how realistic it was. I was also disturbed by the lack of attention paid to the aftermath of the rest of the bus accident. Another girl on the track team dies in the accident, but no one seems to be too concerned about that. There’s a scene late in the novel when Jessica goes to visit Lucy’s grave and talks to Lucy’s mom. It’s clearly meant to be touching and to resolve some of the emotional aftermath of the bus crash. But it really just raised more questions for me, and I thought the lack of attention paid to what would be a devastating loss to a team and a school was really odd. Still, I enjoyed this book and think it would be a good choice for the Sarah Dessen crowd.

October Mourning is another book I read for the 2013 Hub Reading Challenge. I was moved by Leslea Newman’s “Afterword,” where she traces her connection to Matthew Shepherd and the ways that his brutal murder continue to inspire her activism. I really wanted to like this book, and I do admire what Newman is trying to do. There’s a strong concept at work here: the book is a collection of poems about Shepherd’s murder, told from various perspectives, including inanimate objects. The fence to which Shepherd was tied and left to die seems to have particularly inspired her: there are at least four poems told from the fence’s perspective, plus a poem about people’s pilgrimages to the fence, and there is also a photograph of the author standing next to the fence.  Newman channels the voices of a bartender, an onlooker at the bar, the killers, the biker who found Shepherd, police officers, the parent getting the call, and others (though never Shepherd himself, which I think is an interesting and respectful choice). But unfortunately, most of the poems are simply not very strong. As I was reading October Mourning, I kept thinking of Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till. The two books share a similar purpose, I think, but Nelson’s is a work of beauty, subtlety, and impressive craft. October Mourning is very teachable from a social justice perspective, and it’s a book I will be sharing with my pre-service teachers. But I do wish it were stronger as a piece of literature.

My favorite book this week was Gregory Michie’s collection of essays, We Don’t Need Another Hero. I enjoyed this book so much that I breezed through it in an afternoon, and now I want to go back and reread more slowly. Michie is one of my favorite writers on teaching. He brings so many specifics from his own experiences in the classroom, first as a Chicago public school teacher and then as a teacher educator, and he never shies away from writing about the difficult stuff. Many of these pieces, it strikes me, are actually rooted in classroom failure of various kinds. Teaching is such a strange vocation, because so much of what we do fails. There is a great deal of mediocrity and drudgery in even the best teacher’s classroom. And there are failures both spectacular and humdrum. Very few teacher narratives manage to convey the complexity of teaching. Narrative, by its very nature, imposes structure and order and causation; it selects and simplifies and builds to a closure that is more or less tidy. A classroom that invites real learning is never like that. There are no pat conclusions in this book and few unambiguously feel-good moments, but it’s still a book full of hope.

What I’ve Been Reading

My Father’s Dragon won a Newbery Honor in 1949. Unlike most of the older Newberys I’ve read, it didn’t seem like a book published 60+ years ago. It looked and felt like a book that could have been published much more recently. Which I guess is why it has such staying power. It’s a very simple story: Elmer learns that a baby dragon needs to be rescued, so he packs a knapsack and heads off to the island to rescue it. Along the way, he meets many other animals who want to impede his progress, but he pulls out just the right item from his knapsack to distract each of them. I read it as part of a challenge to complete all the books on SLJ’s Top 100 Children’s Novels list. My Father’s Dragon comes in at #49. The illustrations were probably my favorite part of the book. I read it aloud to my two sons, and they were absolutely captivated by the story and eager to read the two sequels.

I read this study of how academics balance motherhood and work responsibilities for a book club on my campus–only none of the academic mothers in the club could find a time to meet to discuss the book. As I always say to my kids, I’m pausing to enjoy the rich irony of this moment. I am sure that I had many thoughts about the book when I read it, but that was three weeks ago, and one of the by-products of motherhood is that I no longer have much in the way of a working memory. So. Inside Higher Ed published an interview with the authors that summarizes the main findings of their study.

After reading Trinity and Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb,  I’m starting to feel like a bit of an expert on the history of the atomic bomb. At first, I felt like there was too much going on in this book. Too much information, too much science, too many illustrations. But as I continued to read, the style grew on me. I realized I was understanding more about the science behind the bomb from looking at Fetter-Vorm’s illustrations than I did from reading Sheinkin’s descriptions. I also gained a greater appreciation of the book’s artistry as I got closer to the end. There are some really powerful images later in the book that explore the devastating consequences of dropping the bomb. This is one I’d like to include in my Graphic Novels courses. Very glad to have read it as part of The Hub’s Reading Challenge.

I was inspired to reread Harriet the Spy after reading about it in Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, one of the many, MANY books I’m currently in the middle of reading. At least I think it was a rereading. I am sure I must have read Harriet when I was a kid, but not a single page of it seemed familiar to me. Harriet is #17 on SLJ’s Top 100 Children’s Novels list, and deservedly so. The writing is very strong, and it’s a sophisticated story about a girl who refuses to conform on any level. It’s also, and maybe for that very reason, a discomfiting story. Harriet is horrid to everyone, and she’s absolutely unrepentant, even after her friends find and read her notebook, which is filled with often cruel observations about them. But that’s actually the beauty of the story, I think. Harriet refuses to compromise her vision and her way of getting along in the world just to achieve social acceptance. In the end, her friends seem to be the ones who relent. A strange book, not what I was expecting. I’ll be reading the sequels soon. And in typical Newbery fashion, Harriet the Spy wasn’t even an Honor Book, even though it’s hard to imagine a more distinguished contribution to children’s literature. The 1965 winner was Maia Wojciechowska’s Shadow of a Bull. Which I just started reading. Only I got hung up on this horrible illustration:

And I had to stop reading. On page 5. WHAT IS UP WITH HIS EYES? This illustration is going to give me bad dreams.

I enjoyed Barbara O’Connor’s How to Steal a Dog, which I read on the recommendation of my librarian, but I didn’t find it a particularly special book. Still, I think it will make a nice read-aloud for my kids if we ever finish the two books we’re currently reading (Frindle and the first Clementine).

I thought Linda Urban’s The Center of Everything was a special book, distinguished in setting, theme, and point of view. Kate Messner’s “not quite” review posted at The Nerdy Book Club captures many of the qualities I appreciated in this story. Mostly, I loved Urban’s sentences, and I’m excited to read more by her. I had been in a reading slump before I read this book, but I read it in one sitting and felt like I was loving books again. So, thank you Linda Urban!