Bibliography
Jul. 18th, 2009 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyA rather epic one, I'm afraid, as I had some backlog from pre-Aruba and then holiday reading...
Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom - Daniel Willingham
This chap had an article in one of the AARF magazines, and it seemed worth following up. It most definitely was. Willingham is a cognitive scientist; his aim was to take things that cognitive scientists know about the brain, explain them (with very clear examples), and apply them to classroom teaching. Now, his application of this stuff was limited to the primary/secondary (or up to K12) level, but that didn't mean that the general thrust of his comments were inapplicable to college level teaching. Far from it. This kind of stuff is exactly the sort of thing college level teachers should be considering, because the nature of the human mind doesn't change - it wants to problem-solve, it wants to be challenged but not too hard, it has to think with things in order to be able to remember them. In organising assignments and giving students ways to process material and retain it, we need to consider exactly the same basic facts about the mind. The information is also presented in a general way rather than a highly specific one, so precepts are easy to apply to one's own field rather than having to take them out of how to apply them to science or history, for instance.
The nine basic facts about the brain Willingham points out are: people are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking; factual knowledge must precede skill; memory is the residue of thought; we understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete; it is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice; cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training; children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn; children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work; and teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved. He also gives detailed suggestions of ways to incorporate these ideas into your teaching. The book is well-written, interesting and well-targeted in its tone; I enjoyed reading it, and am going to be referring to my notes from this book when I come to construct a new syllabus.
Summer Lightening - P G Wodehouse(Fish Preferred in US)
The next of the Blandings Castle saga. The general thrust of the material here once more involves someone wanting to marry someone else whom they shouldn't do, and a prize-winning pig who mysteriously goes missing - the idea being that, by revealing the location of said prize-winning pig, the young man will be able to convince Lord Emsworth to back him in his marital pursuits. There is a wonderful sub-plot about Lord Emsworth's brother, Galahad, who is writing his racy memoirs that are sure to embarrass the entirety of the upper-class of England, as he has a wonderful memory and did various naughty things with them while under the influence. And has no sense of what he should and should not leave out. Eventually, he agrees not to publish in order to let someone else marry yet someone else unsuitable, but the various hints that are allowed to drop are rather good.
I have to say that I was a little worried after Leave it to Psmith that we were going to hit formulaic, but here, we seem to pick up. Yes, the main plot is focused around people wanting to marry other people upon whom their families are not keen, and an important role is played by a robbery, and other people pretend to be other people. But it doesn't feel quite as same-y as Leave it to Psmith did to Something Fresh, possibly because of the interest generated by Galahad, and the interest that Wodehouse starts to take in the social relations between the upper class in a new and interesting way. So we shall see what happens next - I think, for the time being, I am willing to stick with this.
Saturnalia - Lindsey Davis
The latest novel in the Falco series, of which I am very fond. This one definitely improves over See Delphi and Die - the kind of cloying interest in family relations that irritated me there has, thankfully, been worked through, and I think Davis is balancing it better. We still have some family/romance business, as the plot is largely motivated by the hunt for a woman with whom Falco's brother-in-law had an entanglement right at the beginning of the series; this incident has caused nothing but grief ever since, so I think Davis is taking the opportunity to tie things up. There's also some good political meat in this, in ways that weren't present in the last novel, and I think Davis feels more comfortable writing things with politics involved.
My one quibble would be that the detail of medical schools and their doctrinal differences can, from time to time, get a little heavy-handed. The distinctions are important, as a major plot point hinges on them, but it does sometimes feel like you're reading a textbook. This is, however, a minor complaint, and I'm glad to see the series back on form.
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
I don't think this deserves the hype it gets, but it's not bad. The set-up is that America is full of two types of gods - the old gods, who came over with immigrants from the old countries, and the new gods, like Media, Technology and so on. These two groups are gearing up for a bloody big battle to settle who will be in charge in the new world - or, as it turns out, are being marshalled for such a battle, but let me not spoil the plot points. There are some nice thematic ideas here - things like why America is a bad land for gods as compared to Europe, some good character development around Shadow, the protagonist, some nice ideas about how gods might adapt and develop over the years to fit in. But ultimately, the problem with this book is that it wants to be a comic book. It feels like a written graphic novel, and that is really, really odd.
The Return of the Caravels - António Lobo Antunes
Lobo Antunes is a Portugese novelist, in the school of what G calls Iberian magical realism - think Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Borges. The Return of the Caravels is based around the fall of Portuguese colonialism and the return of the Portugese to Lisbon, where they don't feel at all comfortable and have to adapt to this new foreign land which is supposed to be theirs. Lobo Antunes takes a handful of stories, four or five, and weaves them together, strands touching each other, each life strangely, sadly infinite and detailed. The writing is highly intellectual and complex, but poetic and flowing. The imagery is beautiful. I think you need to have a bit of experience with the magical realism tradition to be able to quite get it, but not having the historical background didn't get in the way of my understanding (although it pointed out how woefully inadequate it is that I had no idea that Portugal even had an empire).
It's a novel about loss, adjustment, the exotic in the everyday, about the way we carry our colonies with us, about social change, about the fear of in-comers, about exploitation even when the colonial system appears to be collapsing. It's beautiful. Take some time and read it, slowly, enjoying every word.
Nine Tailors – Dorothy L Sayers
This is a novel about campanology, or the science of bell ringing. I don't know enough about it to quite understand all the tricks and turns, but I got enough of it to be able to understand the main drive of the plot. A man is discovered, buried in a grave freshly opened to take another body. Nobody knows who he is or where he is from - or how he was killed, or why his hands were cut off. It falls to Lord Peter Wimsey, aristocratic detective, to sort the matter out, which takes a long time and a trip to France, and turns out to involve escaped convicts, sailors and bells. And a flood.
I very much enjoyed this, but I suspect you have to have the taste for this sort of thing - if you don't have much patience for bell ringing or pastoral country life, you probably won't like it. I suspect there are other Wimsey mysteries which are rather less knowledge-specific, although what they are, I don't yet know. The characters here did feel a little thinner than they had in the later Wimsey novels I've read, but the complexity of the plot made up for it.
Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom - Daniel Willingham
This chap had an article in one of the AARF magazines, and it seemed worth following up. It most definitely was. Willingham is a cognitive scientist; his aim was to take things that cognitive scientists know about the brain, explain them (with very clear examples), and apply them to classroom teaching. Now, his application of this stuff was limited to the primary/secondary (or up to K12) level, but that didn't mean that the general thrust of his comments were inapplicable to college level teaching. Far from it. This kind of stuff is exactly the sort of thing college level teachers should be considering, because the nature of the human mind doesn't change - it wants to problem-solve, it wants to be challenged but not too hard, it has to think with things in order to be able to remember them. In organising assignments and giving students ways to process material and retain it, we need to consider exactly the same basic facts about the mind. The information is also presented in a general way rather than a highly specific one, so precepts are easy to apply to one's own field rather than having to take them out of how to apply them to science or history, for instance.
The nine basic facts about the brain Willingham points out are: people are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking; factual knowledge must precede skill; memory is the residue of thought; we understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete; it is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice; cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training; children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn; children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work; and teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved. He also gives detailed suggestions of ways to incorporate these ideas into your teaching. The book is well-written, interesting and well-targeted in its tone; I enjoyed reading it, and am going to be referring to my notes from this book when I come to construct a new syllabus.
Summer Lightening - P G Wodehouse(Fish Preferred in US)
The next of the Blandings Castle saga. The general thrust of the material here once more involves someone wanting to marry someone else whom they shouldn't do, and a prize-winning pig who mysteriously goes missing - the idea being that, by revealing the location of said prize-winning pig, the young man will be able to convince Lord Emsworth to back him in his marital pursuits. There is a wonderful sub-plot about Lord Emsworth's brother, Galahad, who is writing his racy memoirs that are sure to embarrass the entirety of the upper-class of England, as he has a wonderful memory and did various naughty things with them while under the influence. And has no sense of what he should and should not leave out. Eventually, he agrees not to publish in order to let someone else marry yet someone else unsuitable, but the various hints that are allowed to drop are rather good.
I have to say that I was a little worried after Leave it to Psmith that we were going to hit formulaic, but here, we seem to pick up. Yes, the main plot is focused around people wanting to marry other people upon whom their families are not keen, and an important role is played by a robbery, and other people pretend to be other people. But it doesn't feel quite as same-y as Leave it to Psmith did to Something Fresh, possibly because of the interest generated by Galahad, and the interest that Wodehouse starts to take in the social relations between the upper class in a new and interesting way. So we shall see what happens next - I think, for the time being, I am willing to stick with this.
Saturnalia - Lindsey Davis
The latest novel in the Falco series, of which I am very fond. This one definitely improves over See Delphi and Die - the kind of cloying interest in family relations that irritated me there has, thankfully, been worked through, and I think Davis is balancing it better. We still have some family/romance business, as the plot is largely motivated by the hunt for a woman with whom Falco's brother-in-law had an entanglement right at the beginning of the series; this incident has caused nothing but grief ever since, so I think Davis is taking the opportunity to tie things up. There's also some good political meat in this, in ways that weren't present in the last novel, and I think Davis feels more comfortable writing things with politics involved.
My one quibble would be that the detail of medical schools and their doctrinal differences can, from time to time, get a little heavy-handed. The distinctions are important, as a major plot point hinges on them, but it does sometimes feel like you're reading a textbook. This is, however, a minor complaint, and I'm glad to see the series back on form.
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
I don't think this deserves the hype it gets, but it's not bad. The set-up is that America is full of two types of gods - the old gods, who came over with immigrants from the old countries, and the new gods, like Media, Technology and so on. These two groups are gearing up for a bloody big battle to settle who will be in charge in the new world - or, as it turns out, are being marshalled for such a battle, but let me not spoil the plot points. There are some nice thematic ideas here - things like why America is a bad land for gods as compared to Europe, some good character development around Shadow, the protagonist, some nice ideas about how gods might adapt and develop over the years to fit in. But ultimately, the problem with this book is that it wants to be a comic book. It feels like a written graphic novel, and that is really, really odd.
The Return of the Caravels - António Lobo Antunes
Lobo Antunes is a Portugese novelist, in the school of what G calls Iberian magical realism - think Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Borges. The Return of the Caravels is based around the fall of Portuguese colonialism and the return of the Portugese to Lisbon, where they don't feel at all comfortable and have to adapt to this new foreign land which is supposed to be theirs. Lobo Antunes takes a handful of stories, four or five, and weaves them together, strands touching each other, each life strangely, sadly infinite and detailed. The writing is highly intellectual and complex, but poetic and flowing. The imagery is beautiful. I think you need to have a bit of experience with the magical realism tradition to be able to quite get it, but not having the historical background didn't get in the way of my understanding (although it pointed out how woefully inadequate it is that I had no idea that Portugal even had an empire).
It's a novel about loss, adjustment, the exotic in the everyday, about the way we carry our colonies with us, about social change, about the fear of in-comers, about exploitation even when the colonial system appears to be collapsing. It's beautiful. Take some time and read it, slowly, enjoying every word.
Nine Tailors – Dorothy L Sayers
This is a novel about campanology, or the science of bell ringing. I don't know enough about it to quite understand all the tricks and turns, but I got enough of it to be able to understand the main drive of the plot. A man is discovered, buried in a grave freshly opened to take another body. Nobody knows who he is or where he is from - or how he was killed, or why his hands were cut off. It falls to Lord Peter Wimsey, aristocratic detective, to sort the matter out, which takes a long time and a trip to France, and turns out to involve escaped convicts, sailors and bells. And a flood.
I very much enjoyed this, but I suspect you have to have the taste for this sort of thing - if you don't have much patience for bell ringing or pastoral country life, you probably won't like it. I suspect there are other Wimsey mysteries which are rather less knowledge-specific, although what they are, I don't yet know. The characters here did feel a little thinner than they had in the later Wimsey novels I've read, but the complexity of the plot made up for it.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-18 09:01 pm (UTC)I think you've caught what struck me as odd about American Gods. It's always felt a bit off to me, and I could never quite figure out why. (I quite like it's quasi-companion book Anansi Boys, though; that one worked much better, I think)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-18 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-19 01:00 am (UTC)Your point that American Gods feels like a written graphic novel might spring from that: it's not the intensely visual character of his writing (a thing that doesn't jar at all to an intensely visual reader who 'sees' what he's reading and finds it difficult to engage with a book that does not create visual imagery in the writing), taken to a near frame-by-frame cinematography - it's the sense that his writing (but not his ideas, nor his characters!) lacks some depth, or draw, or the life that is breathed into inanimate matter to make it a living creature, so we're left with a sense that the book needs pictures or maybe a fully-scripted movie with a soundtrack. A criticism that might just ring too true when you read Anansi Boys and lead you to put down the book unfinished.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-19 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-19 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-19 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-19 07:23 am (UTC)It also has a focus on K-12, but is certanly "The book is well-written, interesting and well-targeted in its tone."