What I'm Reading Next--Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

I just finished reading El capitán Alatriste. I wrote yesterday about how I may have discovered in it a whole new unit for my Spanish 5 class, so today I'll limit myself to a brief recommendation of the book itself. First of all, for those of you who don't feel up to reading a 200+ page book in Spanish, there is an English translation (Captain Alatriste). It's a very fun read. At the heart it is an entertaining adventure story. Captain Alatriste is a veteran of the Spanish wars against the Netherlands in the early 17th century, now back in a decadent and declining Madrid trying to get by as a sword for hire. He takes a job to ambush and kill two unidentified Englishmen, and soon finds himself way over his head in the middle of major historical and political events, just trying to get out with his skin in tact. Layered over the story is the historical and cultural context of one of Spain's (and Europe's) most interesting periods, as it comes out of the Siglo de Oro and finds its power and influence in the world declining. Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Velázquez all appear as characters, as do various kings and princes. It's just fun all around, especially for fans of historical fiction. Enjoy!

Next up: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Sometimes all it takes to get me to read a book is to hit me over the head with it enough times. I first encountered Carol Dweck's name during our faculty development day back in February. The presenter was Harvard neuropsychology professor Jane Bernstein, and she made extensive reference to Dweck's research at Stanford on achievement and success. Largely because of that presentation, Mindset is one of the two summer reading books for faculty. Then there was this NYT piece about the book, which my wife forwarded to me a couple weeks ago. In the end, I got the message, and I'm reading the book. I'll let you know how it is.



Posts about previous titles:
Watership Down
Three Cups of Tea
True History of the Kelly Gang
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: El Capitán Alatriste

I just finished reading Watership Down. The advantage of reading a book that I first read when I was eleven is that it goes pretty quickly 22 years later. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it is the story of a small group of rabbits who, worried that something terrible is about to happen in the warren in which they grew up, go off in search of a new place to live. The world is a big and scary place, full of predators, men and their machines, and other rabbits both friendly and hostile. It is a great adventure story, and I enjoyed reading it as an adult at least as much as I did the first time through.

Re-reading it with a teacher's eyes, I certainly understand why my teachers assigned it to me in the first place. Interwoven with the entertaining adventure story are all kinds of problems that young teenagers can identify with. There are issues of being outsiders and getting bullied. There are authority figures who won't listen to or believe the younger rabbits. There is the need to declare independence from those authority figures and set out on their own. There are societies with oppressive and unjust rules. I have long since forgotten any class discussions we had about the book when I was a student, but there are so many things to talk about that I wish I could go back and be a fly on the wall while seventh grade Jeff worked through the story with his class.

Next up: El capitan Alatriste
I am not a native Spanish speaker, so my Spanish needs regular maintenance. One thing I try to do is a read a book in Spanish on a regular basis. With the school year approaching, it seemed like a good time to dust off the language skills. The Alatriste series has been incredibly popular in Spain and has already been made into a movie. A number of my English students from our time in England recommended both the books and the movie to me.

While we were in The Gambia, a Colombian friend there lent me another of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's books, La reina del sur. What impressed me the most about that book is that Pérez-Reverte, a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, is able to tell a gripping adventure story without sacrificing any of the literary merit of the book. He is a gifted writer, and I'm looking forward to digging in to his most popular series.




Posts about previous titles:
Three Cups of Tea
True History of the Kelly Gang
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: Watership Down

I'm in the middle of a largely Comcast induced vacation from blogging. It's a long story, but let's just say I'm not recommending Comcast to my friends these days. In the meantime, I've had a chance to finish my latest book, and I have a few minutes at work today to write about it, so here goes.

I've just finished reading Three Cups of Tea. The story in the book is right up the alley of this blog, so I guess it's no surprise to say that I loved it. To give a quick summary of the story, the co-author/subject of the book, Greg Mortenson, goes on an expedition to climb K2. On the way back down, having failed to reach the summit, Mortenson accidentally wanders away from his guide and stumbles into a tiny village in the mountains of northern Pakistan. After the villagers nurse him back to health, Mortenson goes on a tour of the village and is shocked to see the children gathered in an open field, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks, with not a teacher to be found. He promises to come back and build them a school.

The journey that follows is inspiring. One school project turns into a half dozen, and then a dozen, and so on, all in rural villages in Pakistan. As the book concludes, Mortenson is in post-Taliban Afghanistan starting to plan for a whole new series of schools there. As I got to know Mortenson through the book, I found myself in awe that someone could so selflessly, and even naively, accomplish so much good in the world. The world would be a much better place if there were more of him.

The overall message of the book is a simple one. The antidote to extremism is not violence but education. If we help to provide a secular, modern education to the children of the world, we are cutting off the ready supply of converts to extremist ideologies. If we want to be safer here in America, we need to provide social services, education above all, to children around the world. We will be much safer if we are loved for our good works, rather than despised for the death and destruction we cause. The chapters surrounding the events of September 11th and Mortenson's response to them are particularly moving. I highly recommend this book!

Next up: Watership Down
It's time for a re-read again. Watership Downwas my summer reading going into seventh grade. My mom made reference to it while the family was gathered over the Fourth of July weekend, and I realized I didn't remember almost anything about it, other than it's about rabbits. That's a good sign that I should pick it up again. Hopefully I will enjoy it as much now as I did twenty or so years ago.




Posts about previous titles:
True History of the Kelly Gang
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

My Five Favorite Books of All Time

This post by fellow edublogger The Scholastic Scribe reminds me that I have promised on couple of occasions to post my top five books list. Now that we are into summer reading season, it seems like a good time to follow through. I have previously written about the books I think students should read in school. These books are my personal favorites, and not necessarily things I would require in school.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
I know a lot of avid readers who have found this book too much to get though, but every time I read it, I find something new to love about it. It is one of those books that contains something to satisfy every part of my love of reading, and the prose is just magical, even in translation. If I was trapped on a desert island with only one book, this would be it.

Midnight's Children
For me, Salman Rushdie is the best author writing in English right now, and this is his greatest work. Winner of the Booker of Bookers as the best book to win that award in the first 25 years of its existence, it tells the story of the 1,001 children born between midnight and 1:00 on the night of India's independence from Britain, each born with a magical ability; and especially of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight, whose ability is to communicate telepathically with the other 1,000 children. It's another one of those something for everyone kind of books.

The Lord of the Rings
Long before Peter Jackson made them hip, I grew up on the ultimate fantasy nerd classics. I first read these books starting back in elementary school, and have long since lost track of the number of times I have read them. My best association with them is reading them aloud in the car to pass the time as three friends and I drove through much of Italy, Germany and France over a two week period back in grad school. The fact that we were still friends after that many hours in a Ford Focus is a testament to the power of fiction.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
My mom gave me this book this year for Christmas after hearing Junot Diaz interviewed on NPR. Somehow she thought that a book written in a mix of English, Spanish and Spanglish (yes it's a different thing from the first two) about a hopelessly romantic, nerdy kid who loves Dungeons & Dragons and The Lord of the Rings would resonate with me. She was right. Winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize, this is one of the few books I read before it won a major award.

A Prayer for Owen Meany
A small kid who speaks only in capital letters, a love/hate relationship with the game of baseball, life in a New England boarding school, and a narrator who has moved to Canada, but can't break his addiction to ranting about American politics, what more could you ask for. I first read Owen Meany in high school, and it's been up at the top of my list ever sense.

My Ideal Class: World Literature "Transloosely Literated"

If I could teach absolutely anything, I would love to teach a senior English class in world literature in translation. It would blend together my loves of languages and of literature, as well as my general belief that education should serve to expand the world view of students.

One of the major themes of the class would be the challenges presented by translation--the ways in which perfect translations are impossible and all translators are always making their own choices about the works. I would show the funniest scene from Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray is being instructed by the Japanese director of the commercial he has flown to Tokyo to shoot. The director talks and talks, but when the interpreter translates it into English it comes out as just a few words. The scene is Bill Murray at his best.

I would also pick a page or a paragraph from a famous work--Don Quixote comes to mind--and present multiple translations of the same material, in order to talk about the places where different choices were made.

And now I would have the students read this piece from Sunday's NYT Book Review. A classic!

Guest Post: Five Books I've Loved Teaching

The Five Books theme continues to generate a lot of dialogue. I'm happy today to have the second ever guest post to this blog. Today's guest poster is not only an experienced English teacher, but is also the proud mom of the author of the first guest post ever on this blog.



In September 2008, I will begin my 39th year in education. I’ve been teaching English grades 6 – 12 all this time, and I’m happy to respond to Jeff’s blog.


Five texts I’ve loved teaching:


Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
High schoolers of all ethnicities presented with black lit., often appreciate, but don’t always “relate.” Ralph Ellison’s genius was that his prose style allows students to get inside the protagonist, who begins as a student himself and is desperate to get ahead. He’s thwarted left, right and center, ending, up living in a basement with a recording of “Am I Blue” (you can get a cd of it and play in class), busily screwing hundreds of light bulbs on the floor, ceiling and walls to rip off the electric company. I have had many students who have been shaken by this novel, some of them learning for the first time about black on black betrayal. Discussion leads to lessons in social history.


Julius Caesar William Shakespeare
I love to guide my seventh graders’ first reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Seventh graders – who knows more about stabbing one another in the back than seventh graders during the turning point in middle school where they break into the cruelest of mobs/gangs/packs, feeding on the souls of kids who were their buddies in elementary school with.
Antony’s principles are not as familiar to many of the kids. Close reading draws out the merits of keeping faith and loyality, and we get into talks about ethics, “mean girls” and bullies.


Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky
By the tenth grade, most students are excited about having their philosophical discussions. Some of them posture and pose, while others grapple with valid pros and cons and articulating difficult concepts. Crime and Punishmentis perfect for giving students meat to chew, debate and write about.


Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Students learn the painful lesson that, as the famous line from the play goes, attention must be paid. Dramatic tragic hero since the advent of the common man in the U.S.A., Willy Lowman, is a failure in the eyes of almost everyone in the play, and certainly in those wallowing in our neo-gilded age. Students have trouble seeing the nobility in Willy, seeing why his wife knows that attention must be paid even to those who hit the sidewalk and slug it out in the work-a-day world everyday, believing in a personal code of responsibility, dedication and old fashioned ethics that need to be resurrected.


Waiting for Godot -Jean Paul Sartre
Why go on when you can’t? There is no help. There is no reason. Teenagers can connect with this concept, but they can’t so readily relate to Didi and GoGo’s “I can’t go on. I can’t go on. Let’s go on.” Existential as it’s themes are, Waiting for Godot demonstrates that we are not alone, but, in fact we are. Recognize it and, with the knowledge, find a way to deal.

What I'm Reading Next: Three Cups of Tea

I just finished reading True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. I came upon it through my habit of scanning through the lists of award winners on Amazon and picking a couple that seem interesting. In this case, Carey won the Booker Prize for his novel about the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

The premise of the book is that Kelly has written the story of his life to his young daughter in order to explain himself to her, so that she will not believe the lies that established society has spread about him, but will know that her father was a good man doomed by circumstances. In order to create the voice of the uneducated bushman, Carey forgoes the use of much of the punctuation, which takes some adjusting to at first, and would be a great project to teach kids how proper punctuation makes communication clearer; but once the reader gets into the flow of the text, the book is absolutely mesmerizing.

As a protagonist, Ned Kelly is always appealing, always believable, and easy to empathize with. The story of how his life is directed by the poverty into which he is born, and by the corruption that surrounds him, makes for great tragedy. Before we ever start reading Kelly's manuscript, we are shown his eventual capture by the police, and the rest of the novel is like a runaway train, accelerating towards that moment. I finished the book wishing I could reach in and redirect the path somewhere along the line, so that Kelly could find the redemption he is seeking. It's a great book and I recommend it highly.

Next up: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
When I first sent out emails telling all my friends about this blog, my friend Georgia responded that the project was very "Three Cups of Tea" of me. At the time, I was vaguely aware that it was a reference to one of those books that educated teachers all knew about, but I didn't know much more than that. A few weeks ago, my school had its spring book fair, and there it was with the other books for parents and teachers. I bought it, trusting Georgia's taste in books. I'm sure I'll find some blog related inspiration in its pages.




Posts about previous titles:
Lolita
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

What I'm Reading Next: True History of the Kelly Gang

We took the train up to New York this weekend to visit friends from our year on Long Island. It was a beautiful weekend, and great to catch up with people. Back in April we made a similar trip by car, and I have to say I really enjoyed going by train this time. Not having to sit in traffic trying to get out of DC on a Friday evening (or across Staten Island at any time) is totally worth it. Besides, sitting on the train instead of behind the wheel of a car finally gave me the chance to finish reading Lolita and get started on my next book.

It's a stange thing to suddenly find myself reading in public. I have always enjoyed talking about books, but the awareness that I would be announcing my book choices to a largely anonymous audience is definitely an adjustment. When I was choosing what book to read next in my self-imposed cycle (fiction-->non-fiction-->re-read), I went to my bookshelf and scanned through the titles. Lolita immediately popped out as something I wanted to read again, mostly because I had just been skimming through Reading Lolita in Tehran for this blog, and so I had Nabokov's novel on my mind.

At first, I hesitated to choose Lolitabecause I wondered how it would appear to be reading a famously scandalous novel about an older man's relationship with a school-age girl as part of a feature for a blog about schools. Judging from the wink-wink, nudge-nudge tone with which my friends asked me how I was enjoying the book, and the eyebrow-raised curiosity with which my wife watched me answer, I wasn't wrong to think twice. In the end, though, I decided to go ahead and read Lolita, in part because at the time nothing else seemed as appealing, but mostly because I felt that if I started changing my reading habits too much because of the blog, both reading and the blog would start to seem like more of a chore than a pleasure.

So let me adress all those raised eyebrows out there, both real and imagined. I did, in fact, enjoy the book very much. Nabokov is a very seductive writer--a master stylest, even in his adopted language. He plays with language like some combination of magician and matador, drawing you in only to dance away again and begin a new trick. The great accomplishment of the book is that he takes a monstrous character--a pervert and confessed murderer obsessed with pubescent girls--and, without diminishing the horror of his crimes, persuades the reader to empathize with him. We are not asked to forgive him, only to understand him, despite his horrible acts. Lolitais a tragedy in the classic sense, in which a fatal flaw (both in the sense of deadly and predestined) leaves an inevitable trail of destroyed lives in its wake, the protagonist the most destroyed because he must also suffer the guilt for the destruction he has wrought.

Lolitais certainly a sensual book, especially in the first half when Humbert Humbert is in the early stages of his 'romance' with young Dolores Haze, but it is no more an apology for his proclivities than Macbethis an apology for ambition or Oedipus for incest. What it is, is an exquisitely written book that plays on the full range of human emotions, and leaves the reader feeling that he has truly come to understand another human being.

Next up: True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel
Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel about Australia's most famous outlaw, narrated by Ned Kelly himself. Another prize winner, for my list. The Booker rarely lets me down.




Previous titles:

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Guest Post: Five Books Every Student Should Read in High School

Of all the previous posts on this blog, Five Books Every Student Should Read has generated the most conversation--if not actual comments--from my friends and acquaintances who make up the majority of the readership at this point. It has now inspired the first guest post on this blog. Besides being one of my wife's oldest and best friends, and a bridesmaid in our wedding, Georgia is an instructor for Academic Approach in Boston. Next fall, she will begin her first year of graduate school in Human Rights Law. She and I have had many conversations about our favorite books, so I am honored to have her include her thoughts on this subject.

Given I only get five book choices (and lament leaving out 1984and Night), but as I go through the endless list of literary options, I wonder if there is a difference between books I think every kid should read and books I think every kid should be taught. In thinking about "filling holes" in a student's education and thus enabling him/her to participate in the world of academia, these are my five:

1. The Odyssey– I could not agree with you more. As a quintessential part of the Western cannon, a student who misses out on Homer is also missing out on the deeper meanings of and references to some of their favorite stories (The Matrix, O Brother, Where Art Thou? to name a couple). But reading Homer is not only a tool to understanding our favorites, but also a means of arming us against thinking that cinematic atrocities like Warner Brothers' Troyis actually a good action flick...or worse, the actual story of Troy!

2. Harry Potter - I would never have imagined that my belief that we should absolutely be teaching Harry Potter in high school would be controversial, but as several towns in America have banned the series and some communities have even burned it, apparently I am indeed being controversial. Beyond being a great way to get students to admit they enjoy reading (although the movies have not helped my cause - "Why should I read it? I'll just watch the movie."), and besides the multiple lessons that come from exploring the plethora of mythology and folklore J.K. Rowling borrowed from, Harry Potter is about genocide. Voldemort, our half-blood villain, has declared that the wizarding world will be better off once they rid themselves of the "mud-bloods" and establish themselves, the "pure-bloods", as the master race. I would love to see this explored in more classrooms. Lastly, Harry Potter wonderfully lends itself as an introduction to Joseph Campbell's Hero Journey that students almost always find fascinating and want to discuss and apply to their favorite adventure stories. Together Rowling and Campbell offer teachers an attractive and easy platform to do what should be done at least once a year: open the classroom for creative writing.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird- I suppose this one is obvious and can be left to speak for itself.

4. Song of Solomon- In the 21st Century no student should leave high school without a sound dose of Toni Morrison, and Beloved is one of my all-time favorites. However, as a bi-racial student in the New York City public school system during the Giuliani Administration with countless and repetitive African-American curricula and lesson plans behind me, Song of Solomon was the first African-American book to move me and resonate with me. Thus, I mention it here as more of a personal plea. (I would teach this book in conjunction with Jacqueline Woodson's Behind You- the greatest piece of fiction I have read in a long time. I cried for hours and now pray the book, and its author, will become a household name.)

5. Much Ado About Nothing- Shakespeare was funny. Let's prove it and bring Kenneth Brannagh in to help.

Last point: as I was thinking about this question I discovered I was categorizing, or blatantly choosing from pre-established genres, and thus thinking "inside the box." Although the challenge of "filling gaps" in preparation for understanding our Western world demands we focus on our classics, there is something to be said for the old adage: moving beyond the cannon, moving beyond the genre, moving beyond ethno-centricity.

Thanks again to Georgia for putting together this post. If anyone else out there wants to put in their choices, or their ideas on any subject, just send me an email, and I will happily include your post on this blog.

Five Books Every Student Should Read in High School

This week is shaping up to be very book themed here at Build a School. Since I've been mostly focused on English issues recently anyway, I might as well keep it going.

I've already made the case that there is a certain amount of cultural knowledge that students should acquire during their English studies. For me, this includes having first-hand experience with certain works, so that they feel ownership of the knowledge, not just that they have acquired facts about titles and authors. So here they are, five books every student should read before finishing high school.

The Odyssey

For me, The Odyssey is the prime mover of all of Western literature. The story of Odysseus' long and troubled journey home has directly or indirectly inspired so many great authors (Joyce, Frazier, The Cohen Brothers) that it is impossible to imagine the course of Western literature without it. In addition, it is relatively easy and fun to read, full of all kinds of memorable twists and adventures. It presents students with many literary ideas that will help them understand other works: epic poetry, metaphor and simile, etc.. I think if I had to choose just one book, this would be the one.

Hamlet

Shakespeare gets a pretty bad rap in the world of high school. Students tend to take one look at the old fashioned poetic dialogue and decide that it must be boring, and certainly not worth the hard work of trying to understand it. In the hands of a great teacher, though, one who can break through those initial barriers and get students to see the beauty of the language and the universality of the emotions, reading Shakespeare in school can be a life changing experience. I had a hard time deciding which play to choose for this list. In some ways, Romeo and Juliet is the easier choice, with a lot more that the students are likely to identify with. Fundamentally, though, I just think Hamlet is a better play, and there is still plenty there for teenagers to latch onto.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Probably the biggest hole in my own education was that I didn't read Huck Finn until well after graduating from college. By then, I knew a great deal of the story anyway; it's so much a part of our culture. I include it on the list because I can't think of a more American book. So much of our national identity relates to themes of this book--the legacy of slavery, the pioneer spirit--that it's hard to think about being American without including the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the picture. There are also great opportunities for drawing connections, both within English studies (here comes The Odyssey again), and to history class.

Fahrenheit 451

Within the limit of five books, I was trying to get a variety of genres and time periods. I wanted a Sci-Fi book in the group, because I think they are a great way to see how fiction can help us think through real-world questions. I picked Fahrenheit 451 because it's about the importance of books. There's a lot to talk about related to the power of fiction, the influence of TV, the role of government in society, etc.. I had a couple more possibilities for this spot, but I'm sticking to this one.

Beloved

I wanted to finish off the list with a contemporary author. For my money, Toni Morrison is the best American writer working today, and Belovedis her masterpiece. I can't begin to do it justice in a couple sentences, so I will just say that it is one of the finest and most powerful books I have ever read. Again, there are all kinds of tie ins to history and to other literary works, and plenty of things to get students talking.

There it is, five books I think every high school student should read. Obviously in a four year career, they are going to read a lot more than five books, so I'd love to hear from everyone else.

What would your top five list be?