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Beverly Daniel Tatum, ”Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeandink was very positive about this, so I got a copy. It is straightforward about racial divisions and how they play out in adolescence as a means of self-construction. I was hoping for a little bit more that would be useful to someone teaching graduate school, but Tatum focuses on earlier years – as well she might, because that’s when a lot of attitudes are hardening. Oh well.
Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do: This was closer to my interest in improving my own teaching, but the message is a little depressing: The best teachers are just awesome, and it is a full-body commitment, not something you can achieve through tips and tricks. When you’re trying to get better – maybe not to best, but to better – tips and tricks are helpful! Probably the biggest-picture idea is that the best teachers see education as a process of learning how to acquire and interpret information, rather than a process of pouring information into students’ heads. Information without understanding is easily forgotten and useless, like a Yellow Pages with no index. But that’s just to say that doing it right is really hard, since you have to teach both information and how to use it. I feel like that’s how I think about my classes, at least in the abstract; maybe in the day-to-day it’s easy to get caught up in the particular information at hand and lose sight of how it fits into the larger structure.
Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance: v. 3 of his history of the Second World War. Things go pretty badly for the British Empire during most of this, just hanging on against the German onslaught. Germany turns on Russia, but it is only after Pearl Harbor that things really show the prospect of change. Churchill, of course, always insisted that Britain could and would win; but after Pearl Harbor, it was more would than could, and even in hindsight his glee shines through his obvious understanding that acknowledging that glee was inappropriate, or at least inexpedient. “No American will think it worng of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. … [N]ow at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! … I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” Perhaps amusingly to the American reader, he doesn’t even give us FDR’s “live in infamy” line when describing the President’s message to Congress. We do get gems like, “But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite,” a sentiment my Lex Luthor shares.
Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate: v. 4. Russia and the U.S. are in the war on Britain's side, but the first half of 1942 saw a series of grave defeats before the tide began to turn, as Churchill was always confident it would. A bit of Churchillian wisdom: "There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool's paradise." As usual, Churchill isn't the best historian of his own deeds, because he reproduces many of the infinite numbers of memos and telegrams he generated, losing the scope in the detail. But he's still Churchill.
Eric Schlosser & Charles Wilson, Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food: In a sentence: its economic, environmental, health, and animal welfare impacts. Written at a high school level, the book is a depressing catalogue of costs, enlivened only by the colorfulness of the descriptions of destruction and taste manipulation.
coffeeandink was very positive about this, so I got a copy. It is straightforward about racial divisions and how they play out in adolescence as a means of self-construction. I was hoping for a little bit more that would be useful to someone teaching graduate school, but Tatum focuses on earlier years – as well she might, because that’s when a lot of attitudes are hardening. Oh well.Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do: This was closer to my interest in improving my own teaching, but the message is a little depressing: The best teachers are just awesome, and it is a full-body commitment, not something you can achieve through tips and tricks. When you’re trying to get better – maybe not to best, but to better – tips and tricks are helpful! Probably the biggest-picture idea is that the best teachers see education as a process of learning how to acquire and interpret information, rather than a process of pouring information into students’ heads. Information without understanding is easily forgotten and useless, like a Yellow Pages with no index. But that’s just to say that doing it right is really hard, since you have to teach both information and how to use it. I feel like that’s how I think about my classes, at least in the abstract; maybe in the day-to-day it’s easy to get caught up in the particular information at hand and lose sight of how it fits into the larger structure.
Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance: v. 3 of his history of the Second World War. Things go pretty badly for the British Empire during most of this, just hanging on against the German onslaught. Germany turns on Russia, but it is only after Pearl Harbor that things really show the prospect of change. Churchill, of course, always insisted that Britain could and would win; but after Pearl Harbor, it was more would than could, and even in hindsight his glee shines through his obvious understanding that acknowledging that glee was inappropriate, or at least inexpedient. “No American will think it worng of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. … [N]ow at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! … I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” Perhaps amusingly to the American reader, he doesn’t even give us FDR’s “live in infamy” line when describing the President’s message to Congress. We do get gems like, “But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite,” a sentiment my Lex Luthor shares.
Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate: v. 4. Russia and the U.S. are in the war on Britain's side, but the first half of 1942 saw a series of grave defeats before the tide began to turn, as Churchill was always confident it would. A bit of Churchillian wisdom: "There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool's paradise." As usual, Churchill isn't the best historian of his own deeds, because he reproduces many of the infinite numbers of memos and telegrams he generated, losing the scope in the detail. But he's still Churchill.
Eric Schlosser & Charles Wilson, Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food: In a sentence: its economic, environmental, health, and animal welfare impacts. Written at a high school level, the book is a depressing catalogue of costs, enlivened only by the colorfulness of the descriptions of destruction and taste manipulation.
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