Book Reviews: "A Whole New Mind" and "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

Six months ago, I attended the TIES conference in Minneapolis with my dad. There were a number of things we were eager to see, but none more than the keynote address by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind. We heard him argue, as he does in the book, that the kind of abilities that society values are beginning to change. He lists six aptitudes, or "senses," that will become essential as this change occurs: Design, Symphony, Empathy, Play, Meaning, and Story.

Story, of course, is most pertinent to the denizens of Literacy Log. I found Pink's discussion of the importance of story useful when I spoke to a literacy class at Hamline University in St. Paul recently, and I thought I would extend that discussion to this blog.

I used this quote from A Whole New Mind to summarize the societal shift Pink sees, and why it makes Story more important than ever:

What's unsurprising today would have seemed preposterous just fifteen years ago: an English-speaking thirteen-year-old in Zaire who's connected to the Internet can find the current temperature in Brussels or the closing price of IBM stock or the name of Winston Churchill's second finance minister as quickly and easily as the head librarian at Cambridge University. That's glorious. But it has enormous consequences for how we work and live. When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact (p. 102).

I am reminded of my former life as a high school debater. Every August, before the season began, our team piled into two school vans and made the five-hour trip to the University of Minnesota Library to conduct research. We spent three days photocopying thousands of pages of books and magazines. We then took them back to our room at the school and spent days with scissors and glue sticks in hand, compiling briefs on various aspects of the research topic.

Today, this kind of effort seems absurd. What fifteen of us could accomplish with a ten-hour round trip and weeks of cutting is now the easy task of two or three students with laptop computers. This kind of shift has taken place across our entire economy, and especially in those activities that require the retrieval and use of information.

At Hamline, I was speaking to a room full of Math and Science teachers who were learning about teaching literacy in their classrooms. I used Pink's view of things to stress the importance of Story in Math and Science. These are not the only subjects that tend to place undue value on the memorization of facts. As the world changes, workers will not just have to retrieve information; they will have to convey it as well. Teachers in all disciplines must nurture the storytellers in their students.

In search of an example of the power of Story in Math and Science, I remembered a brilliant book by Bill Bryson called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson, of course, is a well-known teller of travel stories. Here, he strays from his home genre into the history of science.

I must note that I have spent my entire academic life avoiding science. I have thought of myself as a student of the humanities, greatful that others found the workings of the physical universe interesting enough to study. And so I was surprised to find myself absolutely enthralled by A Short History. Bryson's brings his considerable storytelling talent to bear on the people and events that shaped our understanding of the world, and the result is the most unexpected page-turner I have ever stumbled upon.

To demonstrate what Bryson accomplishes with this book, and to exemplify the shift from a knowledge-based economy to one that values Story, I turned to the book's discussion of the Richter Scale.

Students in Science classes encounter the Richter scale in this form:


(Technical Difficulties: Please click the picture to see it more clearly. And thanks to Wikipedia.org.)

The average student will attend to this chart only to the extent necessary for regurgitation on a quiz or test. And yet most instruction I recieved about the Richter Scale revolved around a chart such as this. Compare this knowledge-based tool to the story told by Bryson on page 211. It is too long to quote in its entirety, but I will share a bit with you and let you read the rest on your own.

The Richter scale has always been widely misunderstood by non-scientists, though perhaps a little less so now than in its early days when visitors to Richter's office often asked to see his celebrated scale, thinking it was some kind of machine. The scale is of course more an idea than an object, an arbitrary measure of Earth's tremblings based on surface measuremnts. It rises exponentially, so that a 7.3 quake is fifty times more powerful than a 6.3 earthquake and 2,500 times more powerful than a 5.3 earthquake.

Bryson spends the next few paragraphs telling stories about earthquakes of different levels of magnitude. He culminates with this one, on 212:

For pure, focused, devastation, however, probably the most intense earthquake in recorded history was one that struck - and essentially shook to pieces - Lisbon, Portugal, on All Saints Day (November 1), 1755. Just before ten in the morning, the city was hit by a sudden sideways lurch now estimated at magnitude 9.0 and shaken ferociously for seven full minutes. The convulsive force was so great that the water rushed out of the city's harbor and returned in a wave fifty feet high, adding to the destruction. When at last the motion ceased, survivors enjoyed just three minutes of calm before a second shock came, only slightly less severe than the first. A third and final schock followed two hours later. At the end of it all, sixty thousand people were dead and virtually every building for miles reduced to rubble. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for comparison, measured an estimated 7.8 on the Richter scale and lasted less than thirty seconds.

For a student like me, this description would lead to a better conception of the Richter Scale than any amount of hours staring at that chart. That is why I love A Short History of Nearly Everything and would recommended to anyone who wants to take an alternate route to an understanding of science. In addition, I think that Mr. Bryson provides a powerful example of the importance of Story in disciplines such as Math and Science. Some students have a natural affinity for such subjects, but others find them intimidating or dull. The excerpt above could catalyze an interest in Seismology or an understanding of magnitude in a student who might have forgotten the facts once the test was completed.

When I mentioned Bryson's book, a few of the science teachers in the room nodded their heads in approval. Any teacher of science will find it a great resource, and I defy the casual reader to find it anything less than engrossing. Likewise, I believe that A Whole New Mind has a lot to tell us about how the world is changing and how we should change what we teach accordingly.

Clippings:5.26.09

The New York Times says the economic downturn is putting new stress on libraries.

Class sets of the comic book, "Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli #1" are available for pre-order.

Writing on the I.N.K. blog, children's writer David Elliott calls into question the line between fiction and nonfiction in this amusing memoir.

At the MacMillan Dictionary Blog, Gwyenth Fox says maybe we should just do away with apostrophes.

The English Business Letter Generator exemplifies the Internet's capacity for automation.

And David Warlick discusses The 21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act.

(Picture: "Ann Arbor Library: Pittsfield Branch" by jhoweaa - CC.)

Strategy: The Imposter

The Imposter strategy engages students in text which contains contradictory statements or factual errors. It was created by Michael J. Curran and Elizabeth C. Smith and featured in The Journal Of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (subscription required.)

This strategy can be adapted to any subject for students of any reading level. It teaches students deep-reading skills as well as an awareness that text is not always factually sound.

Depending on the level of students involved, a teacher might prepare her own statements for scrutiny by students or ask students to craft their own imperfect statements to share with others.

The recently-featured site AllAboutExplorers.com is built on a very similar concept.

Web Resource: All About Explorers

All About Explorers was set up to help elementary-aged students learn about the pitfalls of finding information on the Internet. It features biographies of major explorers which contain factual errors, both subtle and blatant. The site also contains lesson plans and worksheets intended to guide students through the site towards greater information literacy.

This lesson plan, for example, compels students to consider the publishing process; books and most printed materials undergo many stages of editing and fact-checking while information on the internet enjoys less rigorous editing, if any at all.

All About Explorers was mentioned in this New York Times piece about the changing role of school librarians.

Lit News: The Future of the School Librarian

Stephanie Rosalia does not call herself a school librarian. She goes by "information literacy teacher," and she works at P.S. 225 in Brooklyn. She is featured in this great New York Times article about the changing role of school libraries.

Ms. Rosalia sees it as part of her job to help students learn how to navigate the internet safely and efficiently. She has found herself spending plenty of time educating teachers, as well.

The article also features a fascinating, if scary, discussion of the diminishing role libraries are playing in our schools. Funding is being cut and classroom teachers are compelled to work on test prep when they might have taken their kids to the library.

There is a companion video story about Ms. Rosalia on the site as well.

Web Resource: Primary Sources at The Library of Congress

Primary sources were once the province of learned historians with access to dusty archives. Younger students of history -and those who would teach them- had no such access and had to make do with secondary accounts in textbook and on film.

The internet has changed this. An ever-growing treasure-trove of primary documents is available online. Perhaps the best collection can be found at the Library of Congress's Digital Collections and Programs site.

It would be hard to overstate the vastness of this collection. Students can view the contents of Lincoln's pockets on the night of his assassination, watch 341 of the very first motion picture recordings by Thomas Edison, and read Walt Whitman's handwritten notebooks page-by-page.

The Teaching With Primary Sources Program from The Library Of Congress is a great resource for teachers who would like to put primary sources to use in their classrooms. One teacher highlighted on the site says that her students are "mesmerized" by audio recordings of slave narratives, for example.

Strategy: Mad Libs Debate

Mad Libs were first published in 1958 and have been popular with children ever since. Prompted by parts of speech, players fill in a template with words of their choosing and plug them into blanks in a story. The results are often humorous, and kids have a laugh while learning about parts of speech.

This activity can be altered to help students understand many aspects of literacy. This variation is intended to help students learn how to structure an argument and cite sources to support it. If desired, a teacher could provide students with editorials or opinion columns on two sides of one issue and stage a “debate” with the results.

Start by finding opinion pieces on two different sides of an important issue, such as American Idol. In this commentary , the author argues that the popular television talent show is an "integral part of the American landscape." Here, an author contends that Idol is a grotesque freak show.

Students will read one opinion or the other and, in groups, identify items A-F on our Answer Sheet. In order to do this, they will need to know how to identify an author's main argument, understand how that argument is supported, and be able to cogently offer their own opinion on the matter.

Once the answer sheet is completed, students need only plug items A-F into their corresponding spaces on the Argument Template.

A full answer sheet might look something like this. If you put those answers into the template, you have a rudimentary persuasive argument.

As you'll see, the activity did not create a perfectly-written argument. It does not flow all that well, and it is a bit redundant. But for our purposes, that might be a good thing. This activity gives students practice in identifying authors' key arguments and forming their own. Most importantly, it gives them an introduction to how those skills can be used to cite examples in persuasive writing.

Primary Source Scavenger Hunt

This lesson is intended to strengthen students’ skills in finding and analyzing primary sources. It can be conducted over one or two class periods, depending on group size and the age of the students. It assumes that students have a basic knowledge of primary sources, including author bias.

Students choose a topic and use the internet to find the primary sources required. Using a template provided, they will analyze the point of view and possible biases of the author. Finally, student will write a brief account of the event using what they learned form their sources.
Here is an example of a scavenger hunt list:

Hurricane Katrina
o One interview of a victim of Katrina. Can be in print or video.
o Two videos of the Gulf Coast during or after the hurricane.
o A speech by a politician about the situation in New Orleans. Can be a transcript or a video.
o Five still pictures of the events of Katrina.
o Three primary sources expressing one person’s perspective on the events of Hurricane Katrina.

This exercise would be effective in strengthening basic literacy in students; it requires close readings of interviews and first-hand accounts. It is a great exercise for building historical and information literacy as well. Students will learn to examine documents critically and identify problems of bias and point of view.