Random Quote
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
---- H. G. Wells
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
---- Author Unknown
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
---- Terry Pratchett
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
---- Charlemagne
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
---- Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
it's probably not a good idea to underestimate my ability to make an ass out of myself—just when I seem to have it under control, I'll turn around and surprise you.
---- Tenser said the Tensor
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
---- Isaac Asimov
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?"
---- Kelvin Throop III
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
Reading (mini book reviews)
This post will be about books that I am reading lately as well as books that my students are reading. First I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. A few books that I have borrowed and enjoyed include:
The Omnivores Dilemma is a book that will forever change the way you look at food. I don’t mean that it will make you a vegetarian, because that didn’t happen to me - I just had some bacon for breakfast and have steaks queued up for dinner. However, you will learn how much of what you eat is made from corn. This book is a fascinating read - I highly recommend it.
DNA: The Secret of Life is written by James D. Watson, winner of the Nobel prize and the discoverer of DNA. It’s written for the layman and talks about the history of DNA up to the present and what this means for the future of mankind. Another absolutely fascinating book on science.
Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking is about how the unconscious mind can make the best decisions immediately upon sizing up a situation and why getting too much information can often derail that same decision. It’s all about thin slicing. A must read and one that I will buy in order to read again in the future. I’ve also purchased The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by the same author and this book is queued up.
The list of books is going to be quite long so this will be continued in the extended entry.
Guns, Germs and Steel is a fascinating look at why some societies developed faster than others. This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding why Europe developed faster than New Guinea. Hint - it’s not related to genetics. Go read this book.
I’ve recently read three books on web design; CSS Mastery, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, and Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax: From Novice to Professional (not yet finished). The first two books are absolutely essential for the amateur interested in improving their own sites and following web standards. The third book is incredibly dense and difficult but I’m sure will be beneficial once I’m finished it.
The Princess Bride - I spotted this in the bookstore on sale for $3 and had to take it as I love the movie. The book was great and I recommend reading it if you like the movie.
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable is a book of essays by multiple authors on what they consider to be their dangerous idea. Everything is interesting and some of it I disagree with, but all of it is worth reading.
The White Castle is a strangely compelling story. I don’t know how to express what I felt as i read the book, but I do highly recommend it. This book will make you think.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is a fascinating history of a family from the end of imperial china through communism upto the late 70’s when the author moved to England. Not the type of book that I normally read, but I’m glad I read it.
Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and The Invisible Man are two classic tales that everyone knows about through movies and pop-culture. I really enjoyed reading the original stories and am now keen to watch a movie adaptation to compare.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are two stories that I frequently find quoted in various materials and wanted to read. I didn’t finish the first story. The story in no way drew me in or kept my interest. I fail to see how this is a classic.
This brings me to the section on books my students are reading. In my advanced class students are required to read 450,000 words a semester, which works out to on average about one book a month. Every book that students read, I also read, which means I end up doing a lot of reading. When I initially started this assignment I prepared a list of ten books for students to read and they only had to read two during the semester. However I found that some students did not enjoy the books on the list and also finished reading quite early. Thus the change to a word count and now students can choose a book off the list, but they must notify me and then I will buy the book and read it myself.
Word counts are determined in two ways. First if I can I download the ebook version and do a word count - this is most accurate. If I can’t find an ebook then I count the words on 3 lines of the book, count the lines on a page and then look at the page count. Taking an average of words per page x the page count gets a rough estimate. However I found that this number is much higher than the real word count using the ebook so if I use this method I then multiply the total by 0.9 to get a much more accurate count.
I’ve actually found this to be quite interesting as I’ve read several novels that I wouldn’t normally buy. Many of them turned out to be quite good and a couple of them are terrible (one has been removed from the list it is terrible that the student didn’t want future students to suffer)
Below is the table from my moodle site with novels and word counts as it stands.
| Author | title | count | |
| 1 | Yann Martel | Life of Pi | 103,000 |
| 2 | Dan Brown | The DaVinci Code | 132,000 |
| 3 | John Grisham | The Pelican Brief | 113,000 |
| 4 | John Grisham | The King of Torts | 108,000 |
| 5 | John Grisham | The Chamber | 190,000 |
| 6 | John Grisham | A Time to Kill | 160,000 |
| 7 | Alvin Toffler | The Third Wave | 155,000 |
| 8 | Sophie Kinsella | Confessions of a Shopaholic | 92,000 |
| 9 | Alice Sebold | The Lovely Bones | 99,000 |
| 10 | Wally Lamb | She’s Come Undone | 150,000 |
| 11 | Meg Cabot | The Boy Next Door | 76,000 |
| 12 | Dan Brown | Digital Fortress | 104,000 |
| 13 | Terry Pratchett | Going Postal | 119,000 |
| 14 | George R.R. Martin | A Game of Thrones | 255,000 |
| 15 | Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus | Nanny Diaries | 95,000 |
| 16 | Nick Hornby | About a Boy | 81,000 |
| 17 | Lauren Weisberger | The Devil Wears Prada | 138,000 |
| 18 | L.M. Montgomery | Anne of Green Gables | 103,000 |
| 19 | Mitch Albom | The Five People you meet in Heaven | 40,000 |
| 20 | Helen Fielding | Bridget Jones’s Diary | 68,000 |
|
| Author | title | count |
| 21 | J.K. Rowling | Harry Potter and the Philosophers (Sorcerer’s) Stone | 78,000 |
| 22 | J.K. Rowling | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | 84,000 |
| 23
| Janet Evanovic | 12 Sharp | 71,000 |
| 24 | Patrick Suskind | Perfume | 83,000 |
| 25 | Paulo Cohelo | 11 minutes | |
| 26 | |||
| Non Fiction | |||
&nbps; | Author | title | count |
| 1 | John Gray, Ph.D | Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus | 84,000 |
| 2 | Joel Osteen | Your Best Life Now | 115,000 |
| 3 | Mitch Albom | Tuesdays with Morrie | 35,000 |
| 4 | |||
| 5 | |||
Katie wrote 41 words on Monday May 5, 2008 at 11:12 AM
I just bought a nice used copy of Blink so I’m glad to see you liked it. I’ll put it at the top of my own reading queue.
Nice idea to commit to reading what your students choose to read themselves.
Sean. wrote 34 words on Monday May 5, 2008 at 11:30 AM
Katie,
it’s partly to so that I can ensure that they have read the books as I can now ask them questions about it that can only be answered if they have read it.
aart wrote 33 words on Monday May 5, 2008 at 04:09 PM
Hello!
I’m a big fan of Paulo Coelho! You will love this! He’s the first best-selling
author to be distributing for free his works on his blog:
www.paulocoelhoblog.com
Have a nice day!
Aart