Monica raised an objection (or perhaps better, voiced a caution) about my last post: i suggested offering kids timelines at the start of social studies units, she said — well who gets to pick what is on the timeline. Of course that can be a vexing question for teachers and administrators every period in the history of India, China, Pre-Columbian America you add is a period of, say, European history you subtract. But it strikes me that for students that very fact makes for a great educational opportunity. What if, as I suggested, at the start of each year students… Read More

Sasha, at 10, has fallen in love with Civilization — the computer game. We bought to while away the long car trip up to Montreal, but it really took hold since we’ve been home. The other night we ran into two old friends — twins who grew up in a UN family in New York, then went to Yale together. One is now getting a masters, the other is reporter for a national magazine. I’ve known then since they were, well, Sasha’s age. When I told them he is playing Civilization they both said they had grown up with it, loved… Read More

Last night my men’s reading group met to talk about Daniel Okrent’s Last Call http://tinyurl.com/2dum37p — a new book on Prohibition. We all felt pretty much the same way — the book brings many new inights (in particular how the move for Prohibition was closely tied to two other key reforms of the era: women’s suffrage and income tax), and line by line it was well written, but it was also disappointing. That was because the author marches ahead profilling key players (always very nicely and with compelling anecdotes), explaining what happened next. But all of those moments, those… Read More

Yesterday Mockingjay, the third book in the trilogy that began with The Hunger Games, was released in stores. Earlier this summer the CCBC listserv turned to the many dystopian YA novels that have proven to be so popular with readers, but thus also with publishers, thus authors — the more there is a clear trend in reader appeal the more quickly you will see shelves full of books in that genre. The topic of dystopian fiction itself proved popular, and the discussion turned to the question of why — why is the dystopian future coming up so often these days — rather… Read More

Yesteday, admidst driving rain, Marina and I drove an hour to my mother’s house,then took her on a 2-hour drive up to Bard College. Bard holds a summer music festival, http://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/2010/, and this year the focus is on Alban Berg. As it happens, my grandfather knew Berg quite well, and my mother wanted to come to hear the music. In the long car ride, she began to tell us stories about being a young girl who had the giants of early 20th Century music come to her home — The Great Man, Arnold Schoenberg and his two eager disciples… Read More

I’ve been thinking about the comment about the Imam’s comments on 911 and I realized that the poster’s objection relates directly to the larger theme of my post. In fact the imam in question is a Sufi — and, as the two articles I cited make clear, the Sufis have themselves been the target of attacks from the very kind of Islamic extremists who killed so many at the World Trade Center, and against whom we are now fighting in Afghanistan. Now that fact that he is a Sufi does not mean we all will necessarily agree with him, and it is perfectly… Read More

School is starting just as the issue of building an Islamic Center close to the site of the 9-11 terrorist attacks is sweeping through the political landscape. I can imagine that many school may want to avoid talking about the controversy, and they have a full year of challenges ahead without mentioning it. And yet it is, in two crucial ways, a perfect educational opportunity. On the one hand, any class that is going to study government, the constitution, religious freedom, separation of church and state, immigration, prejudice, even the Japanese internment camps, later in the year has a perfect… Read More

I’m late posting today because I spent most of the day in a car — the part when I wasn’t in Cooperstown with Sasha (10) at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Sasha is an avid Yankee fan as well as baseball player and has read a great deal about baseball history. He was quivering with excitement at getting to visit the Hall. He was, though, also tired, and so we were only there for a couple of hours — which meant we rushed through many parts. He liked some more than others — seemed more drawn to exhibits with films… Read More

The other day we picked up an appealing graphic novel version of the Odyssey — put out by Sterling, the All Action series. My boys have seen various versions of parts of this story over the years — from Usborne, the classic collection by the DèAlaires, as woven in to the Percy Jackson books (and thus the handy guide to statues related to the Lightning Thief that the Metropolitan Museum in New York cleverly puts out). But the Sterling is one step more detailed than anything they had seen before. I read the Odyssey in school in 6th grade, and… Read More