Content tagged with “education” under

“The title is accurate: this is a meditation (an ‘observation’) about making art. It’s not a practical book, it’s just a series of thoughts about the struggle of people who make at to do it in spite of their fears. This is the source of the anecdote about two groups in a pottery class that were…”

“This a lovely, coffee table-ish book about the Bible. It’s a sequential tour through the Bible, story by story. Every story you’ve ever heard from the Bible – they’re all in here. The chapter header explains the characters in the story, the themes, the timeframe of the events, and the verse…”

“A good examination of why people spit BS, and how to debunk it. It drifts into a standard list of cognitive fallacies and statistical mistakes somewhere in the middle. But still, it’s generally very good. The author makes a point that some people’s identity hinges on their BS (like any member of…”

“This is essentially a long-form rant against the fact that (1) people think they’re experts when they’re clearly not, and (2) they tend to look down on actual expertise and distrust experts. It was both inspiring and infuriating. The author writes well, but he offered no solutions. So, take it for…”

“I love Davis’s ‘don’t know much about’ books. He takes BIG subjects and writes about them in interesting ways. Kind of a frequently-asked-questions mode. He starts nowhere in particular, and meanders around, in a good way. His writing style is engaging and interesting. He can make any subject…”

“I love Steven Johnson, but this one was rough. It was…muddled. I’m still having trouble figuring out what his core premise was. He weaved in an out of it, and the book never seemed to have a central pillar to rally around. Then, at the end, he goes into a 20-page examination of the novel…”

“This is my sixth Potter novel – I’ve read them all in order. Like the last one (‘The Order of the Phoenix’), this was long: somewhere close to 700 pages. And like that one, the book seemed to meander a lot. I said of the last one that Rowling could have cut 200 pages from the middle and no one…”

“A good installment in the series, but overly long. At 900 pages, it was the longest so far. She could have cut a third of the book out and told the same story. There were hundreds of pages in the middle where not much of anything was happening. I enjoyed the characterization of Umbridge. Also, I…”

“This is a classic instruction manual that does what it says on the cover – it explains the different ways one might read a book. Specifically, there are four levels: Elementary Reading Inspectional Reading (divided into Skimming or Prereading, and Superficial Reading) Analytical Reading Synoptical…”

“This is a hard book to find. It’s out of print, I gather, so I could never find the Fourth Edition, but I did manage to somehow track down a PDF of the Third Edition, which had to suffice. It’s a solid, broad overview of the scholarly research process, from picking a topic, through doing the read,…”

“This is a book about the state of American education, written by a famous movie director. As he tells it, when he went location scouting for one of his movies, he visited several high schools, and was shocked by the disparities. What followed a couple of years of research, and the result is this…”

“Let me first say this: my review here is not necessarily an endorsement of Sam Allberry’s specific views. But I am saying that this is a very well-written book, from an objective stance. Allberry is an English pastor who ‘experiences same-sex attraction’ (SSA). Those are his words. He doesn’t refer…”

“For the record, I didn’t read the raw play, but rather the book ‘The Merchant of Venice’ by Modern Library. This book has the script, a scene-by-scene analysis, and about as much commentary from directors and actors who have staged the play. I supplemented this by watching the 1974 TV special with…”

“One of my daughter’s friends left this in my car after she borrowed it to drive to a Pitbull concert in Omaha. So I read it. Five students get mysteriously pranked into serving detention together. One of them dies from an allergic reaction. Who did it? The format of the book is interesting. Each…”

“I think I need to read this again. It’s complicated. The author is attempted to explain why war is so prevalent and violent in the Old Testament, but – on first reading, at least – it sounds like a very delicate skirting of the issue. If there was a central point or excuse, I missed it on the first…”

“Interesting book about how generalists have value, and there might be a myth about those single-minded people who start in one discipline and stay there. It’s good, but the different chapters are not well-differentiated – the titles are vague, and I had trouble following the development of the…”

“This is a good and practical book about teaching. It’s meant for school teachers, but I read it for tips on communicating ideas. The title refers to the scope of teaching – there are large-scale strategies to improving teaching across groups. But this book is about small teacher – how to improve…”

“This is simply the text of David Foster Wallace’s famed commencement speech given at Kenyon College a few years before he took his own life. What’s interesting is the format – it’s a tiny book (the speech is fairly short), and each sentence is on it’s own page. Seriously – an entire page is each…”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t like this book, and it pains me to write this, since I had just finished ‘On Writing Well’ for the third time, and it’s amazing. But this book…it just didn’t do anything for me. Zinsser presents this as an examination of writing non-fiction, and how this type of writing can…”