A lot like Weil’s other works, so I am wondering if exposing myself to anyone of Weil’s work will be worthwhile, since the same material is covered again. Now I even see, “from Andrew Weil’s Guide to Optimum Health”, which I also listened to, so hopefully this wasn’t too similar to that.
He criticized New Age and the way it deals with emotions, so I applaud him for that. I agree with him.
Weil is anti-running. It’s sad because running has been such a positive force for me. The reasons he cites are valid, such as the one saying that many people don’t have “runner’s bodies” and I agree. I just hope to do this for a long time.
It’s good for me to listen to Weil because it compels me to think more about nutrition and living better. I wish he was more dedicated to veganism, but overall he has a great perspective on health.
Woodward, Bob: read by Boyd Gaines
2004:Plant of Attack (abridged). New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, Inc.
I love politics. It’s interesting to learn about Bush and his administration. Woodward was critical but cordial in interviewing all these people. Interesting.
Yankovic, Weird Al
1994:Greatest Hits Volume II. Los Angeles, CA: Scotti Bros Records.
I wouldn’t have considered these some of Al’s greatest hits. I like some of his other songs better. My favorites on this one are “Headline News”, “Smells Like Nirvana”, and “Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies”. “Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies”, although written for humorous purposes, is inspiring to me, because it is awesome when someone who lives in poverty makes it big. I love stories of success even if they are just fiction. Weird Al has some of the best satire around; that is for sure.
Books
Cameron, Miriam, PhD, RN
2001:Karma and Happiness: A Tibetan Odyssey in Ethics, Spirituality, and Healing. Minneapolis, MN: Fairview Press.
Although I do sometimes like travel descriptions, I would have preferred a straight discussion on karma. The author tied Buddhist concepts to her travel experiences in Tibet. She is very explicitly eclectic as she says she uses Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and other ideas and I like that a lot since I am a big fan of eclecticism. The epilogue defined “spiritual values” and since I am interested in discovering definitions of spirituality particularly non-Judeo-Christian ones, this was one of the more interesting parts of the book.
Cermak, Timmen, MD
1989:A Primer on Adult Children of Alcoholics. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc.
Shorter than some similar books, but lots of good material. New insights and that is good.
Editors of Don’t Sweat Press
2001:The Don’t Sweat Guide for Couples: Ways to Be More intimate, Loving, and Stress-Free in Your Relationship. New York, NY: Hyperion.
Books like these usually make sure to have exactly 100 suggestions, but this book only had 97 suggestions. Pretty much all the suggestions are good and it would be great to apply to a relationship.
Farenga, Patrick
1998:The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling. Cambridge, MA: Holt Associates/GWS.
As homeschooling goes, I like the tone and approach of Holt Associates, so it was nice to get that in this book. I was turned on by the thinness of this volume; as interesting as some thick volumes, such as The Underground History of American Education are, I don’t have the time to complete them, so thinner works can appeal to me more. The printing was too small, but this did not bother me as much as with other works, since the words themselves were so interesting. The main text is only 29 pages, and the first appendix is an essay with a few more pages, but the rest is just information about contacts.
On page 9, Farenga deals with the issue of single parents and homeschooling. He describes his own job at this homeschooling publisher and suggests other people could do the same. Many don’t think they can homeschool in a single parent family, and Farenga is not adequately addressing this concern. In his case, a homeschooling publisher is naturally sympathetic to the needs of homeschooling families, but few people work for such places that make it THAT easy. Could these homeschooling people look at the world from someone else’s perspective? Some say it’s too costly for many poor families to homeschool, and instead of addressing this with feasible answers, too many homeschooling writers act as if everyone is in their world of cushy super flexible high earning jobs.
In this short work, there was a section entitled “On Being a Qualified Teacher” addressing the certification deal. I find the whole issue of certification to be interesting, so I liked this. Farenga should write a whole book on the issue of certification, if he hasn’t. I doubt if he has. This section was what I needed. I am even more convinced of the nonsense of certification because I work in the public school as a non-certified employee.
This book says Holt Associates is about unschooling, which sounds really good to me.
Gatto, John Taylor
2002:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.
I wanted a really hard hitting critique of the school system, so I decided to get Gatto’s An Underground History of American Education. Unfortunately, it was way too big to tackle, especially during the school year when I am employed in the school district. Since I work in the school district, I now really analyze the homeschoolers’s criticisms of the schools, and some ways, find them to be accurate and other ways to be inaccurate. I can see the school up close and personal, so I get a good view of the validity or lack thereof of various home school criticisms.
I loved how Gatto slammed television along with the education system. He even claimed that the two most perverse and pervasive influences are television and the education system. Right on!
On page 27, Gatto says “The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they live in a continuous present: the exact moment they are in is the boundary of consciousness”. This is in direct contrast to Buddhism, which emphasizes the utter importance of “living in the moment”. Buddhism, I have found, is actually philosophically contrary to homeschooling in more than just this way. The Dalai Lama even accepts going into schools and teaching some Buddhist ideas. I have thought that some meditation could serve hyperactive kids well, but the homeschoolers are really against considering hyperactivity a problem.
In a couple of places or so in here, Gatto condemns Platonic thought. It’s really interesting in pondering Gatto’s specific conception of the world. If he is against Buddhism and Platonism, that makes his point of view really interesting.
Gatto is ever so correct in condemning what he calls “the one right way”, and with this critique we have one of the most powerful refutations of the school system’s logic.
On page 64, Gatto says, “Parents, for the most part, are usually lied to or told half truths, as they are usually considered adversaries”. Gatto is right in a sense. I might hope to do a doctoral dissertation on paraprofessionals, which are part of the school system. I believe what is fascinating is how paraprofessionals must like Erving Goffman suggested in his “dramaturgical metaphor” of human interaction, “perform”, “act’, and engage in “impression management”. I wouldn’t say parents are necessarily considered adversaries, but there is definitely what Goffman calls “a backstage”, where teachers will talk differently about parents than they do to their faces. By no means is this type of behavior solely endemic to teachers though. Teachers really have to be diplomatic with parents. I do not like treating parents or students this way as a whole, as I would rather be real with kids.
Gatto says, “interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important” and elsewhere Gatto believes having periods makes kids not be motivated to study something seriously. This is a really thought provoking concept. I have seen teachers take this really far, as I
have seen kids have barely any time to do anything, and then jolted in the middle by teacher instructions. Gatto has a point here. In real life, almost every activity is interrupted at some point, even with for those of us with longer attention spans. He is right that the artificial interruption can undermine the continuity and satisfaction of the opportunity. He is indeed right that the school system constantly jolts kids from activities, making most everything scattered and fragmented.
As a minor point, Gatto gives the same old line about prohibition. Certainly this got on my nerves, but I did not allow it to override my acceptance of his otherwise fabulous general argument.
On page 83, in order to make his points, he claims that women and minorities have it worse today. This is dubious to me as some improvements have surely been made.
Gatto like other homeschooling advocates touch on the problems of rigid teacher certification requirements. I entirely agree with him on this. This is another one of the very strong homeschooling arguments. He even calls certification “a fraud and a sham”. I do wish I could find fuller treatment of the certification issue. Homeschoolers touch on it, but it doesn’t seem to be dealt with in enough depth to satisfy my curiosity.
The crux of homeschooling is expressed on page 85, “good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone”. I love the human spirit and want to see it flourish. Some good may come out of the school system, but I think the homeschooling way could do better.
Hamilton, Elizabeth and Dan Hamilton
1997:Should I Homeschool: How to Decide What’s Right For You and Your Child. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press.
On page 13, the book said it set out to be “balanced” about the homeschooling issue which it did not think other books were, since they were biased one way or the other. I value this particularly because I have seen it from both sides: I once dated a woman who was home schooled and now I work in the special education department of a public school.
On page 62, the authors claim that “teachers in classrooms with twenty pupils have a hard time really getting to know their students.” Yes and no. This is valid and invalid at the same time. Since I work in mainstream classrooms, I do find it difficult to connect with every last kid, which sometimes has more to do with time factors than anything else. However, I am also able to really connect with some kids, and I do wish I had even more time for that with them.
On page 63, the authors claim that a teacher only devotes a 120 seconds per school session on average per kid. I find this hard to believe. Again, I have found it hard to connect with every kid, especially since I am in so many classrooms.
I was impressed with the fact that this book showed fair mindedness and conceded that sometimes homeschooling is not the way to go with certain families. The above book by Patrick Farenga seemed to dogmatically suggest that homeschooling was always best. Some say if you acknowledge the pitfalls of your side, you bolster your credibility. Thus these authors did exactly that here.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama (Compiled and edited by Renuka Singh
Year Unknown: The Path to Tranquility: Daily Wisdom. New York, NY: Penguin Compass.
The format was ideal for buses where attention may not be constant. Short pages are easy to read because you keep moving and you make progress. As the title suggests, there is a lot of wisdom in here. Some parts aren’t so wise, but overall it is very wise. I consider eclecticism to be the epitome of wisdom. The Dalai Lama on the other hand disagrees on page 363, where he condemns it: “If you try to follow all the paths, you will not get anywhere”. That makes little sense to me. In actuality, you will get everywhere. In one place, while criticizing backstabbing, the Dalai Lama states that if you are prone to do such, “Nobody will like you.” Not true! Backstabbers do seem to have friends. The Dalai Lama suggested that karma really works and he critiqued people like me who think karma may not work because we don’t see the righteous consequences as “short sighted”. Good work, and I hope to expose myself to even more Dalai Lama works.
Hood, Mary, Ph.D.
1994:The Relaxed Home School: A Family Production. Westminster, MD: Ambleside Educational Press.
The drawings, simple but distinct, looked a lot like the drawings used by this Mennonite group. Since the Mennonite group was pretty out there, I was wary of this book, but despite the Evangelical Christian emphasis, the book was pretty good.
On page 12, Hood briefly makes reference to four types of homeschooling theories. Unfortunately, she just makes reference to them, without giving even a brief definition of each. She does say they are dealt with at length in another of her work, but I would have loved to at the least get a brief definition of each of these ideas. This makes me curious and makes me want to read the other work, which unfortunately I don’t recall seeing at any library, though this work is more available.
On page 24, Hood urges women to “make sure your own needs are attended to first [emphasis in the original].” James C. Hunter, a leading proponent of servant leadership says the opposite, and in fact such is a major thesis of his view of servant leadership: that parents and others should give themselves second priority to children. I think both of these authors are a little bit right here.
Hood makes a dubious statement on page 52. She says, “No mother will intentionally keep doing something if it is clear it is hurting her children!” Really? She shouldn’t assume all mothers are good because they are not.
I was surprised and impressed to see this evangelical Christian describe the use of Howard Zinn in her homeschooling curriculum. She said she used a history book with a fundamentalist tone and Zinn’s book in order to show her kids different angles. That is very open minded and that is the way to be.
On 85, she makes a claim that other homeschoolers make. I rarely hear this anywhere else, but it is intriguing to me. She says what we usually think of when we think of “adolescence”, is “not an automatic feature of puberty.” This even sounds postmodern. She is suggesting like other homeschoolers, that “adolescence” is an “arbitrary construct”. Impressive outside the box thinking!
The Christian bias did not detract from this work, and I think her concept of “a relaxed home school” is a good one.
Kaplan, Robbie Miller
2004:How to Say It When You Don’t Know What to Say: The Right Words for Difficult Times. New York, Prentice Hall, Inc.
The general ideas I more or less have deduced on my own, but it was still good for me to read about the specific approaches to all the different types of tragedy. The book urged readers not to tell people “It’s a Blessing in Disguise”. Blessings in Disguise are positive spins, but I suppose it is up to each individual to determine that his or her negative situation is really a blessing in disguise.
Koetzsch, Ronald, Ph.D.
1997:The Parent’s Guide to Alternatives in Education: The First In Depth Guide to the Full Range of Choices in Alternative Schooling, With All the Information You Need to Decide What Kind of Education Is Right For Your Child. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Before this, I had only been familiar with a few of these alternatives. I knew a lot about homeschooling. I briefly read about free schools and the idea intrigued me. I knew about Montessori schools as my sister went to one years ago, but I couldn’t tell you much about them.
On page 6, the author insightfully observes: “While the public school system is still for the most part bureaucratic, hierarchic, authoritarian, and conservative, a great deal of experimentation, reform, and restructuring has gone on and continues to go on within it”. That is very accurate. I work in the public school system and find the statement to be a fair description of what just I see.
I found his discussion of the “Responsive Classroom”, part of what he calls “the Social Curriculum” to be interesting because the school I work for has used the Responsive Classroom model starting this year. I have not been all that impressed with it. It has some good i
deas, but nothing ground breaking. Many people act as if new models like this are so cutting edge, when they aren’t that much to me at all. The author categorized “The Social Curriculum” as one reform trends. It did not occur to me that the Responsive Classroom would even be worthy of the title “reform”. It doesn’t seem to all that much better.
He discusses the proposal of at least arranging classes by how talented and advanced the kids are rather than just their age. This sounds good to me.
The author discusses something called “developmental education” which contends that kids should not be taught anything or in any way contrary to their designated “developmental” ability. Critics of the school system say it limits children. Something like this developmental education would seem to limit most of all, so it really should be questioned.
The author is a backer of Waldorf education personally, but he did not appear to allow his bias to be reflected in the writing. He seemed to treat the subjects very fairly including his own Waldorf model.
In the end is call to start one’s own school. I applaud the pioneer spirit. I love to use it myself. It is so awesome to found something. It is a wonderful idea. Hopefully one day I can do it as well. That would really be part of my political plan.
Of all the types of schooling presented here, “free schools” (almost no structure) sound most appealing to me. In fact, one Autonomy Party position paper calls for public schools to be made into free schools with just the minimal authority to maintain the peace. Progressive education sounds good as well. Essential schools sound nice too. I would like to learn even more about these models. Homeschooling sounds good too but I already am pretty familiar with that.