Summer Reading Progress

Usually, I bring a dozen books home for my summer reading with the best of intentions, and I actually read my way through two of them.

This summer, though, I'm a machine.  I started off reading Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital.  It was excellent.  I'm going to be a better teacher (more effective and engaging and relevant this fall because of it).

Then I was finally able to read a book that one of my former students at the U of M bought me (and he was able to get the author, Thomas Friedman, to even sign it when my former student attended Friedman's talk at the U of M book store) entitled, That Used to Be Us.

This book also will make me a better teacher.  There is so much to put into play in both my College Comp class (when we write our how-to essay in which we analyze how to improve not only LHS but American education in general) and College Comp II (when we do our Sticky-Note Book Report and when we do our career project) and even Lit & Lang 9R (the book stresses the importance of getting not just a basic education, but a quality education that will allow you to be a created and not just a routine server).

Though the report, How the World's Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, was not on my summer reading list, but when it was mentioned in Friedman's text, I couldn't help but go out and download it.  

This might not make me a better teacher next year, but it will surely make me a more informed one.

Next up is a text I purchases a few years ago but have never had the chance to read.  And it is totally blowing me away:  The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Educaiton by Diane Ravitch.

For most educators, this might be kind of dry.  It's a history of reform efforts in American education.  And it's very thorough and it looks at both sides of school reform.  What I like about Ravitch is that she does a great job seeing both sides of the argument and she is a tireless advocate for teachers.  She worked under the first President Bush to develop the legislation that would eventually become - gulp - NCLB.  But soon she became disillusioned with her efforts and quit.  Now she works and speaks out against much of what she helped usher in.

I also like Ravitch because she is a supporter of national standards.  Which I have grown to believe in too.  She talks often about how the problem with reform is that it's not about the only thing that can really enact change: curriculum.  What is really being taught?  Let's get down to brass tacks and examine that.  Only then can we be sure we are being fair to our students and giving them the educations they deserve.

While I didn't intend to read the seminal report, A Nation At Risk, published under President Reagan in 1983, Ravitch talks about it in such a way that it's now next on my reading list.

When that is done, I have three texts that arrived in the mail this week: Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finald? by Pasi Sahlberg, Building Parent Engagement in Schools by Larry Ferlazzo and Lorie Hammond, and The Passion-Driven Classroom: A Framework for Teaching and Learning by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold.