David Burgess offers Teach Like a Pirate to educators wanting to up their game and make attending class a memorable experience. He encourages experimentation and a willingness to fail in an attempt to make class entertaining and informative.
He rejects the notion that classes have to be rigorous in the strict definition of the term. These classes make learning hard, inflexible and painful. He prefers offering challenging learning experiences that engage students. He does not sacrifice content for entertainment but encourages educators to go for it and make their classes memorable and unforgettable.
This took me back to an experience in practical math during a high school vocational agricultural class. Our teacher Mr. Larson asked us to measure the height of a light pole in the parking lot. The seniors measured it by climbing up the pole. He asked us if there was a different way. I asked him if the sun was shining. He said it was. We measured the length of a the poles shadow and the length of the shadow of a shorter object of known length and used it to calculate the height of the pole. It helps negate the effect of situational dependent learning and allowed us to take mathematics into the real world.
I recently worked with our local 6th graders at JA BizTown. Each of the students in the class had to do various tasks in the town from running a corporation, a rental agency, a bank, a newspaper or radio station. Each company needed to make a profit, pay taxes, do billing, collect payments and budget for expenses. I was impressed with several of the students ability to pick up the skills, following up on unpaid bills and cleaning up the balance sheet.
Mark Twain's Roughing It read by Grover Gardner offers up Mark Twain's observations of the American West during the 1860's. I highly recommend the audio version of this book as a few of the passages are full of archaic slang. Reading the text silently does not provide as rich an experience as listening to entertaining work of Grover Gardner.
Mark Twain deftly illustrates the development of slang in the mining community made up of people from around the world. A miner makes a simple slang filled request for a local parson to conduct a funeral for a friend. The two of them enter into a mighty struggle in an attempt to comprehend what the other person is saying. The parson in particular grasping, dodging and weaving through the slang filled thicket of words attempting to understand the miner. The miner in turn can not comprehend the parson's studied choice of words. The parson searches for a way to offer words the miner can comprehend.
At the beginning of the book a young Mark Twain sets out to the Carson City Nevada on a stage coach from Missouri. He provides a great description of ride, the passengers and the employees of the stage company. The mail bags on the coach provided make shift beds for passengers on the coach. Twain does not shy away from describing the brutal violence of the west and young readers may wish to bypass these sections.
While they stay over for several nights in Salt Lake City, Mark describes the Mormon Culture and offers a less than flattering critique of the Book of Mormon. He equates reading the text to taking a dose of chloroform. He also offers a second hand account of a discussion with Brigham Young on the downside of polygamy. In particular, he lays out the hazards of a guest giving only one child a penny whistle. The multiple wives request equal treatment of their offspring and the misery ends only when the newness of the musical instrument has worn off for the more than 60 children.
Twain's less than successful attempts at being a silver/gold prospector are laid out in detail. He also works briefly in a gold and silver ore processing plant. Mark lasted a week but accurately described the use of mercury to extract the gold and silver metals out of the raw ore. The mercury was saved by heating, vaporizing and then condensing the metal for reuse.
He also ventures over to San Francisco and offers an eyewitness account of the great earthquake of 1865.
His trip to the Sandwich Islands (modern day Oahu, Hawaii) as a news reporter provides a look at the Islands in the 1860's. He describes the island being overrun by cats of all kinds. This matches my observations over a hundred years later on my two trips to the islands. He also describes walking on trails and noting a vast graveyard of human bones with no certain description of how they got there. He describes the Saturday festivals where native men and women would ride horses down the street dressed in festive attire. At the time of his arrival the government was clamping down on this practice along with restrictions on hula dancing.
This is a great piece of writing providing a glimpse into the origin of Twain's growth as an author with his excellent historical description of the American West. I found it entertaining and informative.
Google Earth Tour of the book - 52 minutes
Part one of the full audio book 8 hours and 14 minutes
Part two of the full audio book 8 hours and 50 minutes
Condoleezza Rice's Extraordinary Ordinary People provides a view inside the life of the former Secretary of State's parents and the journey they took together. Condoleezza was the daughter of a Presbyterian Minister and a school teacher. She spent her early childhood in segregated Montgomery, Alabama. She was taught by her school teachers that they had to be twice as good as the next person to get ahead. Her parents solid middle class values viewed education as the pathway to success and invested considerable resources in to assure their daughter's success.
There were problems with the Klan in Alabama and her father would take his turn with the shotgun on the porch as part of the neighborhood watch program as the police department were either part of the Klan or would not respond to acts of violence in their neighborhood. This influenced her perception of gun rights as the government was not there to protect her family from armed members of the Klan.
She describes the subtle class distinctions made between dark skinned and fair skinned black people in the south. Her fair skinned mother was only asked to name the first President of the United States when registering to vote. Her darker skinned father was asked to give the exact number of marbles in a jar. The father later was told of the lone Republican registrar who would take anyone as they were trying to increase the number of registered voters. That event cemented his party affiliation along with his daughters.
The family left Alabama a year after the church bombings that killed one of Condoleezza's friends at a church not far from her father's. She also describes the difficulty for a black family to travel in the south as they could not stay in hotels or find a place to eat when travelling so they had to get a very early start in the morning and pack their own food.
Her parents pushed her along in school and by the time she entered college at Colorado State she had moved up two grades. Her parents supported her love of piano and figure skating. She dated Rick Upchurch, the U of Minnesota receiver for the Denver Broncos and became a member of the football wives/girlfriends club of the Denver Broncos. She shared a passion for professional football with her father. I am sure she would jump at the chance to become NFL commissioner.
She also describes her time at the NSC during the first Bush administration, her time as provost at Stanford and the time she spent campaigning for George W. Bush in 2000. Her background in Russian studies was put to good use as the administration worked to handle the collapse of the Soviet Union. She was a strong administrator at Stanford helping cleaning up a fiscal mess because of Stanford's higher overhead cost for government grants.
The health problems of her parents and her own health scares are described in detail. The book's final chapter deals with events leading to her father's death on Christmas Eve of 2000.
Brief section of her book read by the author - 7 minutes
