Deeply ho hum. The author told stories to a journalist and it was lightly massaged into this. Everything is wonderful, the hard times are seen in softDeeply ho hum. The author told stories to a journalist and it was lightly massaged into this. Everything is wonderful, the hard times are seen in soft focus. The only interesting bit was where he discussed his first relationship with his first wife, who is a psychologist. The only introspection and reflection is actually provided by her analysis of where they went wrong together....more
A good history of who banged whom, but my lasting takeaway is that there's not a lot of substance to Stevie Nicks. Don't @ me.A good history of who banged whom, but my lasting takeaway is that there's not a lot of substance to Stevie Nicks. Don't @ me....more
One of the best books I read last year. Put the history of digital computing, time sharing, interactive computing into perspective. All the names thatOne of the best books I read last year. Put the history of digital computing, time sharing, interactive computing into perspective. All the names that bounced around as I was learning UNIX and networking now have context and personalities. Very well written and highly recommended....more
Would be a conventional "oh no there's a crazed Mastermind on the loose" except it's set in China. But even then there's nothing that this adds to theWould be a conventional "oh no there's a crazed Mastermind on the loose" except it's set in China. But even then there's nothing that this adds to the story other than color. Enjoyable enough....more
A light (deft even) touch marks Scalzi's space opera series. And then the heavy stuff lands. Intricately plotted, with a lot of moving parts and enougA light (deft even) touch marks Scalzi's space opera series. And then the heavy stuff lands. Intricately plotted, with a lot of moving parts and enough reveals to keep you guessing. I'm all in on this series....more
A review of decision making techniques mixed with some literary appreciation. Left me wanting more, but perhaps for readers who haven't already mined A review of decision making techniques mixed with some literary appreciation. Left me wanting more, but perhaps for readers who haven't already mined decision-making literature, this book holds more wonder and appeal....more
So good. I loved all but one of RKM's books and this delivered in spades. Hard boiled and Mars. Two great tastes that leave blood on the regolith togeSo good. I loved all but one of RKM's books and this delivered in spades. Hard boiled and Mars. Two great tastes that leave blood on the regolith together....more
Underwhelming. Which itself is unnerving: to have gone from "oh my God there are super rich people and they do weird shit" to "yeah, of course this isUnderwhelming. Which itself is unnerving: to have gone from "oh my God there are super rich people and they do weird shit" to "yeah, of course this is in the world."...more
Easily the best book I read in 2017. John Egenes rode his horse across America, West to East, in 1974. He was nearly struck by lightning in the desertEasily the best book I read in 2017. John Egenes rode his horse across America, West to East, in 1974. He was nearly struck by lightning in the desert, hit by cars in the Smoky Mountains, locked up by a Boss Hogg-style hillbilly country politician, courted by maidens, and feted by a celebrity. While those things happen to him, the real story is his relationship with his horse, Gizmo. I am not a horse person, but I cried for the love John had for his horse, and the way they learned each other and kept each other going through this adventure cum ordeal. Fantastic book that I'm pressing into the hands of everyone I talk books with....more
I reread the original Northern Lights series before starting this. Pullman has great ideas and can work your heart for a sympathetic character like DiI reread the original Northern Lights series before starting this. Pullman has great ideas and can work your heart for a sympathetic character like Dickens, but I feel like his version of the fatal flaw is "being young and impetuous". So much of the last half of the Northern Lights drama was driven by a protagonist doing plot-creating things against their self-interest with the only explanation being the impetuosity of youth. La Belle Sauvage didn't have the same degree of that flaw, but nor it didn't set my world on fire the same way that Northern Lights did. I'll keep reading this series, but it isn't one of my desert island books....more
Cardboard characters, two-dimensional at best, "strong woman lead" = man with periods. Would have been great sf in 1948, but I wanted more in 2018.Cardboard characters, two-dimensional at best, "strong woman lead" = man with periods. Would have been great sf in 1948, but I wanted more in 2018....more
What should our children learn in school? That is the question this book challenges. What is WORTH learning? Their time is precious, the future uncertWhat should our children learn in school? That is the question this book challenges. What is WORTH learning? Their time is precious, the future uncertain. Perkins puts a box around many different strains of educational change, framing it as moving "beyond" where we are right now.
Although in most settings curriculum trundles along its traditional tracks, many teachers in many schools have gotten uppity, pushing hard on the boundaries of what’s usually taught. There are at least six broad trends—I call them the six beyonds: Beyond basic skills—twenty-first-century skills and dispositions. There’s a global trend toward cultivating critical and creative thinking, collaborative skills and dispositions, leadership, entrepreneurship, and related skills and dispositions that speak strongly to living and thriving in our era. Beyond the traditional disciplines—renewed, hybrid, and less familiar disciplines. Here we find attention to such themes as bioethics, ecology, recent ideas from psychology and sociology, and other areas that address the opportunities and challenges of our times. Beyond discrete disciplines—interdisciplinary topics and problems. Many curricula introduce students to daunting contemporary problems of an emphatically interdisciplinary character, for instance, the causes and possible cures of poverty or the trade-offs of different energy sources. Beyond regional perspectives—global perspectives, problems, and studies. Here we find attention not just to local or national but also to global matters, for instance, world history or the global interactive economic system or the possible meanings of global citizenship. Beyond mastering content—learning to think about the world with the content. Educators are encouraging learners not just to master content academically but also to notice where content connects to life situations, yields insights, and prompts productive action. Beyond prescribed content—much more choice of what to learn. In some settings, educators are supporting and coaching learners in choices about what to study well beyond the typical use of electives.
He is a store of great quotes and lines:
John Dewey in his 1916 work, Democracy and Education: “Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
(When we consider subjects and skills to learn, we shouldn't be distracted by All Possible Futures but instead focus on those subjects and skills that are) likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live.
I found this point particularly strong: It depends what we mean by worth. Maybe they are worth learning in some intrinsic sense, that is, good to know in principle. But that answer works only if they stay known. The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives—personal, artistic, civic, something else. Overwhelmingly knowledge unused is forgotten. It’s gone. Whatever its intrinsic value might be, it can’t be lifeworthy unless it’s there.
He talks about "acquaintance" knowledge ... the kind of "I think I remember that" which most of us have just a few years after leaving school. [T]oday’s world does not seem very friendly to an encyclopedic education that has little time to do much more than build acquaintance knowledge.
As someone whose children are taking maths and science and English at high school, this rang true: To generalize, multiyear curricula tend to be constructed as journeys toward expertise, with little effort to ask what topics within the discipline speak most powerfully and directly to the lives learners are likely to live.
I really liked his take on "expert amateurism": Basic education should build expert amateurism more than expertise. The expert amateur understands the basics and applies them confidently, correctly, and flexibly. So rather than know all of calculus, we know that rates of change and accumulated progress are important and we can do some basic work around those to answer common questions from real life. (Which calculus problems rarely reflect)
His challenges to the status are so well-phrased. Achievement focuses on performance without differentiating much between knowledge with clear and important lifeworthiness, like basic numeracy and literacy, and knowledge with questionable lifeworthiness. Information honors only one kind of knowledge, slighting the importance of powerful concepts and general skills, cultivates it in ways that may not stick well, and overinvests in memory in an era of fingertip information. Expertise builds sophistication in the disciplines without considering which ideas speak most powerfully to the larger lives people live.
He advocates structuring education around some big questions. Integrating different strands of learning and making it relevant. But which things are big enough? He proposes: Big Understandings are (*)Big in insight: The understanding helps to reveal how our physical, social, artistic, or other worlds work. (*) Big in action: The understanding empowers us to take effective action professionally, socially, politically, or in other ways. (*) Big in ethics: The understanding urges us toward more ethical, humane, caring mind-sets and conduct. (*) Big in opportunity: The understanding is likely to come up in significant ways in varied circumstances. One might say, a little more playfully, “big in comeuppance."
There are LOTS of references to intriguing avenues for further reading, e.g. Of course, there are many accounts of transfer and its difficulties. To mention one more with a particularly broad moral for practice, Randi Engle and colleagues contrast two instructional styles: bounded framing and expansive framing. In bounded framing, teachers implicitly and explicitly frame the learning agenda as for now, for this class, for this unit, toward the homework and the test. In expansive framing, teachers implicitly and explicitly frame the learning agenda as for later, for sustained meaning, for diverse connections. Engle and colleagues offer several lines of evidence suggesting that bounded versus expansive framing makes a big difference.
I found this very useful to help me frame what I think is important to learn. In the context of the teaching for understanding framework discussed in chapter 5, Veronica Boix Mansilla and Howard Gardner formulate four dimensions of understanding in a discipline: knowledge (good understanding of content), methods (how the discipline builds and tests knowledge), purposes (the discipline as a tool to explain, interpret, and operate on the world), and forms (facility with the symbol systems important to the discipline—for instance, the kinds of mathematics or writing or artistic expression).
I love this: In The Disciplined Mind, Howard Gardner proposed an especially broad tripartite perspective on disciplinary learning. He suggested organizing education around three grand themes: the true, the good, and the beautiful.
I recommend this if you're bumping against an educational system and want to fire up your sense of potential and help you question what's worth covering in that system. If you aren't into education, this probably isn't for you :-)
This book challenges us to understand what we really want to get from our hospitals and our rest homes, because we may not like what we're actually geThis book challenges us to understand what we really want to get from our hospitals and our rest homes, because we may not like what we're actually getting. Most of us don't encounter hospitals and rest homes on a daily basis, so Gawande's revelations are as uncomfortable as they are backed-up by data.
Doctors find it hard to recommend palliative care, but those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer.
Rest homes are a recent construction, and often accelerate declines rather than delaying them. Those that permit the elderly to live life on their own terms, rather than institutionalising and removing agency, are those that lead to longest happiest lives for the residents. The more that the home is organised for efficiency and for the convenience of the operators, the less likely it is that the residents will enjoy a long life. The private rest home industry rarely acts in its customers' interests, in short.
Gawande mixes personal stories (his father) with professional stories (from his time as a doctor) and research. It's always interesting and constantly surprising. As with all his books, utterly recommended....more
Thin and fast read. Basic thesis is that conversations aren't effective when people are emotionally triggered, judging, or generally not listening. PuThin and fast read. Basic thesis is that conversations aren't effective when people are emotionally triggered, judging, or generally not listening. Puts forward the value of curiosity ... genuinely seeking to understand, rather than presuming and rushing to judgement.
1. Be present so you're able to actively listen; 2. Choose how to listen so you're ready to learn about self and others; 3. Ask curious open questions so you're seeking to understand others.
To be present: [A]ttention, [B]ody language and tone of voice, [S]top and focus, [O]pen to understanding not judging, [R]epeat through paraphrase, [B]ecalm the gremlins. All are pretty straightforward: the "gremlins" refers to internal self-talk that can be distracting or damaging to focus.
When we listen, we make choices about how to do so. We can: (1) Ignore the speaker; (2) Focus on Me, ie compare the speaker to us, judge the speaker with our context; (3) Focus on You, ie jump to solutions and judging the speaker's situation without regard to what the speaker wants us to do; (4) Focus on Understanding, listening and exploring, but taking no responsibility for the outcome of the conversation; (5) Focus on Us, which is 4 but remaining invested in the outcome of the conversation. Each has their uses, but obviously 4 and 5 are likely to be more successful for most collaborative situations.
The authors also talk about being curious about ourselves. Basically: know what we value, know our boundaries, and watch for how our emotions spike when those values or boundaries are violated. Most people haven't thought about values and boundaries, so find themselves put upon and put out without being able to clearly put their finger on why. Once you know what you value, and you can put boundaries around it ("nope, I can't watch your children after school because that'd mean backing out of something I'd agreed to with my children").
Nothing terribly new. I took away the difference between being invested in the outcome, vs simply understanding. Both are powerful, now I can choose which type of conversation I'm in....more
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