Mind in the Making by Ellen Galinsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A first-rate how-to manual for stimulating cognitive development in young children which ought to be required reading for parents and educators. Very highly recommended.

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Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the '80s by Richard Rushfield
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Rarely do I fail to finish a book. However, I must say that this book is one for which I was happy to make an exception. The narrative, which is in fact essentially fiction, conforms to Dorothy Parker's dictum (and I paraphrase): "This is not a book to be set aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force." When I was a student at Hampshire, I avoided people like Richard Rushfield, just as I avoid them now.

And by the way, Hampshire is what you make of it. If you are immature, there is a good possibility you will make nothing of it--or worse, become a malignant force like Mr. Rushfield and his pals.

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Heartbreak Soup by Gilbert Hernández
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As the summary on the back cover of this collection attests, "...in the third issue of Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez abruptly jettisoned his Marvel and Heavy Metal-influenced sci-fi yarns to focus on the day to day tribulations of a tiny Central American hamlet more or less untouched by time--Palomar." Mr. Hernandez gives his readers a clue to this transition in the story "Love Bites." As the story opens, Heraclio begs his lover Carmen not to destroy his copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has displaced her in his attention and, presumably, affection (continued...).

The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters by Plato
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Along with current--and ongoing--findings in cognitive science, pretty much everything you need to know about teaching.

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There's a new blog in the ether, and it is, I assure you, worthy of your attention: A colleague of mine writes it, and he calls it The Assailed Teacher.

One of the pleasures of the first three years of my tenure in my current school was making the acquaintance of, and serving as a collaborative team teacher with my esteemed colleague David Siroonian. David takes his responsibilities as an educator very seriously, and it shows every day in his pedagogy. While in a perfect world I shouldn't have been, I was nonetheless--very pleasantly--surprised when I saw the serious texts (e.g. passages from the novels of John Dos Passos and Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club) he was using for the Do Now (a short didactic exercise at the beginning of a class period to help students focus and get settled) portion of his teaching period. David is a first-rate Americanist who would be a happy addition, I would think, to any college or university history department or American Studies program.

As you will quickly notice while reading his prose, David is an astute analyst and a voluble, stylish writer. As of this writing (October 15, 2011), his top entry is an analysis of history textbooks and their lies of omission. I found this particularly refreshing, as so much analysis of history textbooks tends to focus on their lies of commission. Important stuff, but not particularly novel, and therefore not particularly scintillating. David's critique implicitly addresses the fact that the paucity of information about the last 40 or so years in United States history fails to help students make connections...of any kind.

Take a long look at David's blog; if you're concerned about the state of American public education, you will find a kindred spirit in The Assailed Teacher.

Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents by Peg Dawson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Elsewhere on this blog, I wrote a summary of the cognitive skills and abilities that constitute executive function. This year for my professional development obligation, I have joined a group of people who want to explore more deeply the challenges students with underdeveloped Executive Skills face. We started with this fine book.

If you are a learning support teacher, parent, guidance counselor or otherwise associated with educational enterprises, and you are looking for a good book on executive skills--what they are and how they affect learning and behavior in the classroom, how to assess them in children and adolescents, and how to coach students who struggle with these essential cognitive skills--than this is a book well worth reading. Moreover, its generous menu of solutions and interventions for remedying weaknesses in executive skills are indispensable and therefore well worth trying out with your students or children.

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Maggie the Mechanic by Jaime Hernández
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While reading these stories, I was struck by the fact that the Hernandez brothers, the creators of this amazing melange of punk rock, science fiction, Chicano/Catholic culture, and many other influences---including the lower-case-c catholic reading habits of literary omnivores--drew and wrote most of these stories in the early eighties, when I was younger reader and when they would have had much greater appeal for me; I can't say they don't appeal to me now--and in any case, I like to fancy myself capable of recognizing great work even if it isn't exactly my dish now that I am much older. Nonetheless, this is in almost every respect American culture at its best and most generously syncretic and self-mocking,

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You know all those blurbs on the cover of this book? With all the superlatives? For once, they are true: this is a masterpiece of the genre, and a memoir that is virtually certain to resonate with all who read it. Very highly recommended.

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The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll by Preston Lauterbach
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Preston Lauterbach has written here a perfect companion to Robert Palmer's magisterial blues history, Deep Blues. While the chitlin' circuit lives on in truncated form--and Mr. Lauterbach explains aptly just how and where--this is a book written in the past tense, and therefore serves as an elegy to a colorful but bygone era. That rock and roll would not exist without pioneering performers like Louis Jordan, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Big Maybelle, Walter Barnes and Big Mama Thornton is a given, it is the African-American entrepreneurs, booking agents, promoters, nightclub owners, record label impresarios and the like that were for me the most fascinating dimension of this story. These were men and women operating against almost impossible odds--racist municipal administrations, corrupt cops, the KKK, a largely indifferent culture, etc--who nonetheless abetted the creation of what is arguably one of the few original aspects of American culture: the Blues in all its permutations and, here, specifically, as it informed rock and roll. (Continued...).

Elsewhere on this site, I have extolled the virtue of the the TED conferences, which I believe present a lot of important, albeit in some cases ancillary, information teachers can use. Of course, perceiving knowledge as ancillary is subjective. My own sense is that this talk on "The Myth of Violence" given by Harvard Professor of Psychology (and widely published author) Steven Pinker may fall under the ancillary rubric--unless you work with students that fight. Then, I think there is the basis in this talk of an interesting lesson for your students.