What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn

Read: 22 September, 2011

I don't think that anyone questions the idea that our public schools are, by and large, failing kids. It's also no secret that programs like No Child Left Behind that require mass standardized testing promote "teaching the test," often at the expense of real learning. But in this collection of essays, Alfie Kohn goes a step further and argues that even grades should be dumped as an assessment tool.

Kohn ranks the evilness of the various assessment methods, with standardized tests at the top, followed by ranking methods (such as class ranks and grading on a curve), and ending with the assignment of grades. But each, he says, causes kids to view learning as a chore to get through rather than something they might choose to do.

The book is a collection of essays, so each chapter is a discrete unit. That being said, they've clearly been edited so that they make sense together, with references to other chapters for more information. The whole is brought together with a well-written introduction that serves to unify the individual essays in support of a common thesis.

I found Kohn's book to be very interesting and well-written. It challenged a lot of my assumptions (such as the bunk-ness of grade inflation), and has left me thinking a great deal about education. Only the chapter discussing Maslow was on the weak side, and I'm not sure what it was supposed to contribute to the thesis of the book.

If I had to find a flaw, it would be that while the current system is heavily criticised, Kohn is very light on the alternatives. I think this is a fairly important failing because he's challenging so many concepts that we take for granted that he absolutely must provide us with alternatives.

I don't know how much I agree with Kohn yet. I think that his arguments were very compelling on first reading, but I need to mull them over a bit longer before I come to a conclusion. He's definitely given me food for thought, though, and done so in a vehicle that was a pleasure to read. On that basis alone, I highly recommend What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated for parents of school-aged kids and anyone involved in education, at any level, formal or otherwise.

Raising a Secure Child by Zeynep Biringen

Read: 13 September, 2011

Raising a Secure Child starts from the same Daniel Goleman research that informed Emotionally Intelligent Parenting. Since the two were so similar in many ways, I can't help but to review the former in light of the latter.

I complained that Emotionally Intelligent Parenting provided sample dialogues to illustrate their points that were clearly idealized and read like something from the Stepford Wives. It was almost creepy. Raising a Secure Child, while making much greater use of dialogues and sample situations, did a much better job. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this was one of the book's most positive features. Every major point was backed up with a short vignette of a family either doing it right or doing it wrong that helped me see what the point should (or shouldn't) look like in practice. I found these to be a huge help in visualizing how I might out the advice into practice.

While Emotionally Intelligent Parenting focused on always saying the right thing, the focus in Raising a Secure Child was much more on the non-verbal interactions between parent and child. In other words, really meaning it is seen as more valuable than always having the right script handy. This made a good deal more intuitive sense to me.

Both books had the same emphasis on being emotionally present for kids (although, again, I felt that Raising a Secure Child made the point in a way that felt more practically applicable), and both talked about the importance of structure and limit-setting.

Raising a Secure Child spent a good deal of time on helping me to analyse my own upbringing to help me see how that might affect how I interact with my son. While it's something I have thought about a lot, I still found it helpful to go through in a more methodical sort of way.

And while it isn't applicable to my family, I do think the sections on children with special needs and getting through a divorce could be very useful.

Both books covered the full range from baby to young adult. I think that both are worth reading, but Raising a Secure Child is by far the better of the two.

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth

Read: 9 September, 2011

There's a trick to reading parenting books: Never read them reactively.

It's a rule I'm normally really good at following, but I broke it when I picked up Health Sleep Habits, Happy Child. To make a long story short, my son sleeps wonderfully at night but is a terrible day napper. This often leads to some horrific bouts of crankiness, so I looked up infant sleep books at my local library to see if I could find something to help.

The central advice of Healthy Sleep Habits is to have babies take regular naps (and he does emphasize the "regular"). Great! I agree! Now how do we accomplish this?

Well, that's where the book starts to fall apart. Weissbluth recommends a sleep routine that may include things like reading a bedtime story (which excites my son because books are OMGWTFAWESOME!!), a bath (which excites my son because water is OMGWTFAWESOME!!), a massage (which excites my son because physical contact is OMGWTFAWESOME!!), and a lullaby (which... Yeah, I think you get the point).

I realize that my son is a bit weird. The grandson of two professional track-and-fielders (one of whom held a world record for a year) and a professional mountain climbing instructor, he's predisposed to some rather heightened energy levels. Not only is he an unstoppable force, he's also hitting all of his physical milestones on the very early end of the spectrum.

So Weissbluth's advice doesn't seem to work for our family (and I refuse to even try the cry-it-out method that he says may help if the stable bedtime routine fails). Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a huge deal. I don't know any adults who need nipples in their mouths to fall asleep, so I can reasonably assume that TurboKid will eventually grow out of his sleep problems, like I did. I could just keep trying with the routine and that would be the end of it.

The problem with Weissbluth is that he peppers his book with comments like:

I think it possible that unhealthy sleep habits contribute to school-related problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities.

and:

Warning: If your child does not learn to sleep well, he may become an incurable adult insomniac, chronically disabled from sleepiness and dependent on sleeping pills.

These sorts of friendly reminders are helpfully printed apart from the text, presented in bold and segregated in little boxes, lest you fail to notice that you are irrevocably breaking your baby.

There were aspects of the book that I enjoyed, such as the breakdown of strategies by age. But these were so overshadowed by the fear-mongering that it's hard for me to write anything other than a negative review. It's bad enough that I'm dealing with a cranky baby and that I can't get the method to work. To add a level of desperation, to make my failure something that will turn my precious babe into a disabled drug user, is just cruel.

Bad, Weissbluth. Bad.

Emotionally Intelligent Parenting by Maurice J. Elias, Steven E. Tobias, and Brian S. Friedlander

Read: 26 August, 2011

Since my son is now moving from the "pooping lump" stage into the "destroyer of worlds" stage, I figured that it was about time I start reading some books to help me control this little monster. So apologies to anyone who isn't particularly interested in parenting books, but I've got a stack to get through. Then it'll be over for a while, I promise!

Emotionally Intelligent Parenting has very little fact in it. For the most part, it's just a discussion of strategies that the authors think are beneficial and how to execute them. I found it rather worrisome, however, that when facts were presented, they were incorrect. It started early, in the introduction by Daniel Goleman, when he says that parents today "have less free time to spend with [our children] than our own parents did with us." I'd say that's intuitively true, one of those common sense things, but it's factually false.

So that made me wonder about the advice given in the book, which, for the  most part, seemed intuitively true. Plus, there was something about the repeated advice to talk about feelings that doesn't sit too well with my old New England Protestant family upbringing!

A lot of the advice was centred around acronyms like FIG TESPN, which is supposed to remind you (and kids) of how to work through problems. It seems to me that this is needlessly complicated and of dubious worth - not to mention absurd to implement on a daily basis.

My final major complaint is that I really wasn't wowed by the dialogues in the book. These were usually there to illustrate how to put the ideas into practice. Thing is that it made the parents sound like robots and I'm pretty sure that any kids subjected to these kinds of speeches would interpret them as insincerity. And then, to illustrate how well the method supposedly works, the  dialogues invariably end with kids saying: "I never really thought about it like that [...] Can we talk later? I have to do my homework now." Yeah right.

That's not to say that the book was all bad, not by any means. There were some gems, such as the parenting Golden Rule to "do unto your children as you would have other people do unto your children." There was also a lot of emphasis on modelling, so making sure that you display the behaviour you want to see in your children. And the last bit that really resonated with me was the advice to focus on goals. For example, focus on specific behaviour that you want corrected and work on that, or think about whether punishment is really the most effective means of prompting change.

Overall, I'd say that this was an interesting read and I did get some ideas, but I found that most of it was not realistically implementable. It also lacked evidence to back the assertions made.

How To Have Your Second Child First by Kerry Colburn and Rob Sorensen

Read: 25 August, 2011

As a new parent, it seems that I'm always one step behind my son. Just as I've figured out how to deal with one of his quirks, he passes into a new phase and my awesome new strategy is no longer useful.

That's where How To Have Your Second Child First comes in. The idea is to have parents who've already been through the process 'spill the beans' so that first time parents can avoid making all the mistakes that first time parents always make. For example, how important is it to warm your baby's bottle? Does a household really need to be kept in total silence while the baby is sleeping? Does everything your baby might touch need to be sterilized?

The book is organized like a list of lessons, each with some explanation and quotes from 'experienced' parents. Like most of these books, it's a mix of really good advice and advice that may simply not fit your family. So I'll give the same speech I always give for parenting books: Have a read through and take away what makes sense for you, ignore the rest.

That being said, I do think that the book's underlying message is incredibly important. Don't sweat the small stuff, you won't break your baby.

My son is nearly six months old, so I definitely read this too late for it to be of much help. It would be far better as a baby shower gift, or a 2nd-3rd trimester library take-out. I do think it should be on every parent-to-be's reading list.

The Reasonableness of Faith and Other Addresses by W.S. Rainsford

Read: 13 August, 2011

I have the very good fortune of having been born into a family with solid ties to its history. So this summer, while attending my cousin's wedding in our family's old farmhouse, I picked up a collection of addresses written by W.S. Rainsford, published in 1902. I had to read carefully lest the book fall apart in my hands!

Keeping in mind that this is a collection of addresses and not essays or arguments, I nonetheless couldn't help but judge them as apologetics. Certainly, several of the addresses were clearly meant that way since they claimed to address certain theological issues.

The titular address, "The Reasonableness of Faith," perfectly illustrates my distaste for theologians. Rainsford sets out to prove that faith is perfectly reasonable. How does he do this? By redefining faith as "that which is not unreasonable." It's muddy thinking at its finest. Faith is defined solely by what it is not and never by what it is.

It's all the more a shame because Rainsford is clearly a good writer and a good thinker. He's just suffering from the brain-rot of theology.

It was interesting to see a book from 1902 accept evolution as a known scientific fact - something that many theologians (though by no means all) are still struggling with over a century later.

This made for lovely drizzly summer afternoon in the country reading, but it was vacuous. Beautiful prose and the occasional interesting observation are this book's only saving graces.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Read: 12 August, 2011

Robert Neville is alone, completely alone in a world overrun by vampires.He is alive, but he can't figure out why he bothers.

I enjoyed the recent movie with Will Smith - mostly because I read into it far more than any of its creators intended. When I talk about the movie with others, it's like we saw entirely different movies. Mine was a subtle commentary on racism, or perhaps our relationship with the mentally ill. My movie featured a brilliantly executed unreliable narrator and one of the best ironic endings I've ever seen. What other people saw was yet another mindless monster flick.

I Am Legend the novel is everything I saw into the movie, only better.

Neville is a fantastic character. He's going nuts, making stupid mistakes, and drinking himself silly. But it's never frustrating, and I never felt that I just wanted him to shut up and get on with things. That's because Matheson has perfect timing, he never allows Neville to wallow for too long.

The sense of isolation and loneliness is palpable. As I was reading, I could really feel Neville's despair. This makes the story creepy and even terrifying without ever resorting to monster-in-the-closet gimmicks. Quite the opposite - the vampires' inability to wake during the day give Neville the advantage. He can scavenge safely during the day and then simply wait out the night in his house-come-fortress. The vampires are never the source of terror, the loneliness is.

This was one of the best, most perfectly executed books that I've read in a very long time. I highly recommend it for any fans of science fiction, distopian fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction, and horror fiction.

NOTE: The copy I was reading was a first printing and had a truly creepy portrait of a young Matheson emerging from the shadows on the back. Yikes!