Book: Double Comfort Safari Club

BLAHHHHHHHHH

I do not know how this cover has to do with the book.
I don't know what made this fit the mystery genre.
I didn't like it.
I was mad enough to finish it to prove how much it wasn't fit for printing.

Need good book!!!!

(did like the phrase "matronly air passages")

grrr......

Book: Half the Sky

IF YOU THINK EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE, TRY IGNORANCE - DEREK BOK



As far as current event / topic books go, this wasn't half bad!



The subtitle of the book (wordy and academic) is: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide.



It was challenging to read about the difficult lives and circumstances of many women around the world from sex trafficking, mutilation, under education, teenage brides and pregnancies, to maternal health standards. The vignettes are a colorful and painful reminder of the gender inequality that exists on the same planet you and I exist on. Throughout the book education came up as a key factor in changing traditions, fighting inequality, and allowing women to progress.



I found the portions discussing the lack of education available to girls around the world very interesting. We see in the United States not this type of gender inequality (that I know of) but an inequality between income brackets. The focus *gasp* wasn't on the girls test scores, progress toward national goals, or proficiencies. Their education on any level of any kind led to a better life.

"Education is the key issue for overcoming poverty, for overcoming war...If
people are educated, then women will not be abused or tortured. They will also
stand up and say, 'My child should not be married so young.' " (164)

In the chapter discussing family planning and the strongly held beliefs that almost anyone has on the subject, education comes up again!

"It appears that the most effective contraceptive is education for girls,
although birth control supplies are obviously needed as well." (135)

In preventing young girls from being married young, becoming early teenage mothers, suffering complications of difficult labor, and having a family that she or her husband may not be able to support their lives take drastic, positive, turns.



In AIDS education for girls, one successful method was:



"A third approach was to provide students with free uniforms to encourage them to stay in school longer; that cost about $12 per student and did reduce pregnancies."



Countries such as Mexico have resourcefully found ways to keep girls in school. Faced with high percentage of girls dropping out of high school, a study began essentially bribing families to keep their child in school as opposed to the traditional food subsidy programs. $10 per month for a third grader, and $66 per month for a girl in high school would be paid to the child's mother for food, supplies, immunizations, check ups etc.

"After only 3 years, poor Mexican children living in the rural areas where
Oportunidades operates have increased their school enrollment, have more
balanced diets, are receiving more medical attention, and are learning that the
future can be very different from the past...The program raised high school
attendance by 10 percent for boys and 20 percent for girls. Children in
the program grow one centimeter taller per year than those in the control
group. In essence, Oportunidades encourages poor families to invest in
their children, the way rich families already do, thus breaking the typical
transmission path of poverty from generation to generation." (174)

One centimeter per year!! If nothing else, this program shows how disadvantaged students below poverty are. Literally limiting their physical growth!



Oh~ US education system. We try to close the gap but seem to only use traditional aka out of date avenues.

Early Literacy

Happy 1 month old baby. Hope you've learned a lot so far!

Ever wonder if it is too early to start reading to a child.

NEVER TOO EARLY!!!

and fyi, the Sherlock stories are quite fun!

Need Book

Thanks to Facebook here is a list accredited to BBC about books people might read in a lifetime.
They figured most people would only have read about 6 of them. It seems to be a rather odd list, perhaps most popular for a period of time?

Regardless, I just requested from the good ol' public library ( after paying a few fines arg!)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton



As I am in need of a new list of books to read (and Anna Karenina isn't catchin' on yet) I might fill a few more in.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – most of them..
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

School Blog

If you haven't checked it out, More Than the ABC's is a blog I started this fall for my students, parents, and classroom. I love being able to share videos, pictures, and info quickly and easily on the blog.

I plan to stick with the same types of posts and format for the year but after reading The Other 8 Hours which I talk about here, and here, and here I wondered what else might become of such a blog someday.

What would I do if I didn't care if I failed, or even better...knew I would succeed?

Start a teacher blog that would promote great books and programs, and be an amazing resource for parents and students. I would want to encourage families to help raise independent thinkers in a supportive environment where they know more about the world around them every day. Students are excited and able to experience something new and encourage to try out new ideas.

I keep searching for a website that has those wonderful creative classroom ideas that sparks an interest in me as a teacher and could be supportive to parents who were reading it as well. I find a few that are nice, but still haven't seen that great ONE! Hmmm...

Book: Water for Elephants

Thanks for passing along the book Kate.

I was a bit surprised to feel as if I was not only reading a story but learning how a circus works. It had a few "The Notebook" moments regarding an elderly person telling the story looking back on their life which is an interesting storytelling method.

I spent a few more days on this book compared to my usual read it in a day style. I probably got a bit more into it because it was spread out over time. However, the books I read in a day or two are usually because they are SO AMAZING I can't put them down.

So...somewhere inbetween.

New Bag + Books

Saturday

Quality Garage Sale Time with friend

Land's End bag after washing - school, purse, and lunch bag all fit!! $1

32+ Bernstein Bear Books $5

[sidenote] Just about EVERYONE I know or have been close friends with is PREGNANT.

I'm SUPER happy. However, I do not have a baby, want a baby, or need a baby right now.

But I can buy things for those babies...

And when life gets tough, get a new job title.

[sidenote II]

It has nothing to do with a new job.

But I would like to retitle my job..

It should be something like...

a

cattle wrangling

dog training

supply sorting

Saturday working

paper sorting

needs to be sleeping

FOOL

Book: The Other 8 Hours

This weekend include a fast read of the book:

I had seen a few people recommend this book on blogs and put it on hold at the public library. (can I just say I love the public library and all the FREE movies! (and books) They're great!)





At first I wasn't sure about the book. A few "real life stories" had me worried we'd be looking at Jane's life and seeing how it just didn't compare to Sally's life. However, the book progressed and I really felt energized and motivated.





Here were a few thoughts aka, the purple post-it note monster- you can figure out what the book was talking about...or just go read it yourself.

I work for about 10 hours a day excluding school blogging time I sleep (or want to) for 8 hours a night
drive 30 minutes a day
spend 1.5 hours eating or preparing meals a day
spend 1 hour getting ready for work/then bed
try to spend an hour with family
spend 1 hour relaxing/tv/surfing web
try to spend 30 minutes working on spirituality issues
exercise has been a 0
helping others has been a 0
my social time (unfortunately mostly FB during the week) is less than 10
hours a week

I'll be thinking about other "lessons learned" or at least acknowledged in a few future posts.

Where do you read?

School has started. I'm supposed to be sleeping at 9 and up by 5:30. Well, 5:39, or 5:41, or 5:50, ..let's be real 5:59. Ok, it's August, it is almost by 6:17.

But for the few minutes I do read before bed it's been the "Cookbook Collector" recently.
I finished "The Help", LOVED it, and passed it onto my mom. This book is ok but didn't have much of a chance after "The Help". Easy themes to follow, fun characters, and a pretty no stress plot. Nice to read a chapter and go to bed.


Yet tonight I was home and had eaten dinner before dark. I needed some TLC time with my garden. So I found a lawn chair, a spot that had a bit of room, and plopped myself down to read in the middle of my garden.

I can breathe so much better there. Time passes in a peculiar vortex that feels like forever, yet re-energizes me and only takes up a few moments of real time.

I need my sunshine, plants, flowers, vegetables, and yes, even the weeds are a reassuring reminder that there is work, time, air, and existence OUTSIDE of my normal day.

Book: Potato Peel Pie?

The title is really The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society but that seemed a bit long for my post.

I was returning Snow Falling on Cedars and the librarian recommended this book for me to read. It takes place on an island in the English Channel almost immediately after World War II.

The islanders had been under German occupation and in order to cover up an illegal pig roast dinner after hours concocted the literary society, and it stuck. The society members would meet during the war to discuss books and try to forget about their occupation, loss of loved ones, children that had been sent to farming communities in England for the war, and the hardships that everyone endured.

With just enough romance, drama, and historical facts I enjoyed the book as not one of war stories, but of the stories that happened when the war wasn't happening. It is written in the form of letters between characters and was refreshingly different!

Book: The Help

Recommended by Coworkers & family friend
Read last night and today
Loved it!!

This is another piece of evidence that well written material with amazing endings are my favorite kind of book!

Skeeter, a young white college-educated girl comes home to Mississippi not sure what to do with her life. Her family still has a large plantation, and her mama wants her to get married. She is part of all the right social circles and has polite little parties with her friends.
Those nice friends, fun bridge clubs, and her parent's plantation all have 'the help' doing most of their work. Maids in the house cooking, cleaning, and raising children while the men pick the cotton, beat their wives, or get hurt in the south's version of 'civil rights'.

Somehow this one white women and several black maids begin to open up to each other and Skeeter is in the process of write a tell all with the help of the maids about each and every one of their white 'families'. Some of the stories are amazing, disgusting, depressing, and just plain curious.

Everything works so well in spite of itself, it's like watching a perfectly choreographed ballet. Everything doesn't always turn out well, but it sure can get interesting!

Book: The Glass Castle

Recommended by: coworker and boss
Found book at garage sale for a quarter.
Read book while flight was delayed 4 hours.




The author, Jeanette Walls, describes the life of her and her siblings growing up with anything but normal parents. Her mom was a self-absorbed artist who claimed to want to foster her children to be self sufficient while truly she was not interested in taking care of them. Their father was a alcoholic who, though intellectually brilliant, couldn't hold a job or fulfill any of his wild fortune making schemes.

This left their 3 children caring for themselves from a very young age. The book opens by recounting how Jeanette was terribly burned while trying to boil hot dogs for herself and needed to be taken to and admitted to the hospital for six weeks. She was three.

She would have stayed longer in the hospital but her father believed doctors/hospitals/police/teachers/politicians/bosses/and any other variety of people were either run by the mob or so corrupt that they were the mob. So with this the three children and his wife moved around, from trailer park to abandoned train depot to car to shack living a pale shadow of life.

The parents frustrate you. The children inspire you. At a very young age (upper elementary) the children were self sufficient and by the first years in high school they were on paths to take them away from their current life and into a whole different world.

As a teacher this was a humbling and irritating book because of everything the children had to deal with. Lack of food, clothing, warmth, or responsible & traditional adults robbed them of a childhood. The risks beyond just starving were even more horrifying. While the parents claimed they knew their children would figure out how to survive any situation, being sexually assaulted, abused by extended family, and poor living conditions which in turn froze or burned them.

As a teacher, I am glad I read the book to get a glimpse of what chaos some students live with.
As a human, I'm glad to have seen the author overcome so many challenges to become successful. Yet I'm so frustrated that adults calling themselves parents can subject children to these conditions. Yet it seems to be proof that against all odds some people can rise up like a phoenix from their current lives and thrive!

Book: Prodigal Summer

Recommended by a friend. Kingsolver, author of the popular Poisonwood Bible, writes about life in a small Appalachian farming community. A farmers widow left with a family she doesn't feel welcome in, an elderly man who preferred the "good ol' days", and a Forest Ranger who lives by herself up in the mountains taking care of the mountain. These stories all interact with the environment and how farming, agriculture, natural resources, and modern "progress" can give some surprising results.

Kingsolver points out some of the debates in agriculture about using "modern" techniques like pesticides, genetic crops, and how these can create more problems whereas some of the old techniques really are more successful and productive.

Defiantly a great book to read during the summer, (or spring if you need motivation for summer gardening).

The characters are impeccably described and are deep, flawed, and very human. Their grief is real, joy authentic, and frustration visible. Great characters help to make great books.

The land is just as alive in this book as some of the characters, and I enjoyed it more than the Poisonwood Bible.

June Reading

First I was very intrigued by The Elegance of a Hedgehog, which I already posted about.

I decided to read Snow falling on Cedars second. It seemed tragic, and took place in winter so somehow that helped me decide to read it second. The imagery was great, and I really enjoyed some of the techniques Guterson used to mirror the stories between generations. The story is about a man of Japanese ancestry on trial for murder in the 1950s on a fishing island off of Seattle. He and his family had been taken to Manazar (Japanese internment camp) during the war and he had then enlisted as a US soldier. Other Caucasian men on the island had a very difficult time coming back from the war where they had fought the Japanese to an island where there were many Japanese families.

I just started Balazac and the Little Chinese Princess. Interesting topic, so I'm sure I'll finish it soon too!

Looking for Distraction

So frequently I look for tasks that I can become obsessed with to distract me from the boring mundane tasks all the way to the severely serious. This year that cycle started with reading the Harry Potter series in the span of approximately a month. Since that early spring endeavor I have finished 10-15 books (the time span on a few of those is a bit fuzzy).

Then the garden...which currently is in a serious state of weed anarchy takes up time when at all possible.

Much to my chagrin, this week a "teacher" class "Orton-Gillingham" has threatened and successfully taken over the daytime hours all DAY!

I sometimes struggle to find balance between my distraction and what I am trying to ignore, but am so thankful for those moments of distraction where it is just me and the...book...garden...recipe....even (dare I say) the leg numbing week long class.
The idea of balance is a tricky scale to balance. Life is not always in our control, yet how we react is in our control. As those scales of life and balance shift, so must we. Shift too far and we'll fall off one end, change nothing and the scale will bottom out. Lord, help!

Book: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

By Muriel Barbery

A 300+ pages of witty and thoughtful observations about life. Two protagonists, Renee the building concierge and Paloma a 12 year old tenant of one of the wealthy families give their thoughts on life, death, the meaning of both, and a record of their unlikely interconnected lives. I tend to base a lot of my preference for books based on the ending, and I enjoyed (in a literary way) the ending here so for that I am grateful.

Many of the refined thoughts revolve around intelligence and what it means.

"And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language." - 160

I tend to want to use quotes to explain why I like or dislike something so I tried to mark pages with something interesting that I might want to be able to refer back to.

" I've had my own suspicious on the matter for a while now too. From a distance, she's a real concierge. Close up...well, close up...there's something weird going on. [ ...] As for Madame Michel...how can we tell? She radiates intelligence. And yet she really makes an effort, like, you can tell she is doing everything she possibly can to act like a concierge and come across as stupid. [...] Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary, and terribly elegant." -143

Another tenant, Kakuro, takes an interest in Renee because of their uncanny similar interests. In one scene that is just begging to be in a movie, Renee has dressed up for the first time in her life for dinner and encounters other tenants of the building.

"They didn't recognize me," I say.
I come to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, completely flabbergasted.
"They didn't recognize me," I repeat.
He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm.
"It is because they have never seen you," he says. " I would recognize you anywhere." - 303

Wouldn't we all love to be known in such a way by one person in life!

And those true friendships are what have the most meaning.

"All those hours drinking tea in the refined company of a great lady who has neither wealth nor palaces, only the bare skin in which she was born, - without those hours I would have remained a mere concierge, but instead it was contagious, because the aristocracy of the heart is a contagious emotion, so you made me a woman who could be a friend." - 319

Book - Body of Knowledge

I was reading some book lists and came across this title and thought it might be worth a read. A journalist follows first year med students through their first semester of Gross Anatomy and follows the cadaver as well as the students through this process.

Being a bit of a "downer" kind of topic there wasn't much that was a surprise or exciting point in the book. It was an easy read just because of the completely bizarre practice (but completely necessary) of cutting up the cadaver and searching every part of it to gain a greater understanding.

The most interesting part to me was the variety of reactions from the students to the whole idea or to specific procedures that they were scheduled to perform on the cadaver. Some students wielded the scalpel with poise and maturity while others could barely look at their subject on those steel metal tables.

As someone who has never had to take an anatomy class it was interesting and gave me a tinge of remorse at not having been able to (or choosing to) take one in college. I think the benefits to understanding the human body can far out weight the uncomfortableness. That being said, I feel like I would want some ambitious lab partners who did more of the scalpel wielding than I would.

I had a discussion with someone the other day about how I really don't like worms. They asked if there was anything worse. I said probably snakes. I think that still stands in light of this book. So that should say something.

Also, I know people who intend to donate their bodies to science. I know once they die their gone and their bodies are no longer a part of them. However, it sure makes you think about those med students, and hoping they'll be as honored and respectful of the ultimate donation.

Tales of a Female Nomad

The title of this book at first made me think of the weirdest women put together into one traveling around aimlessly.

I still dove in and found that while it is far from my "life" it still had some very interesting ideas about life. I realized after the first few chapters when I checked that this is nonfiction so the 'real life' aspect brought me a bit more into the story.

It is about a woman who decides that the conventional United States life isn't for her anymore and leaves to travel in non-English parts of the world. In many ways I had a more difficult time identifying with her because she was in another stage of life completely. She felt free and made this decision after her kids were grown and she ended up divorced.

Yet she does comment (where in I stopped typing and spent way too long trying to find the quote unsuccessfully...arg!) that when she talked to people in the United States men just sort of looked at her like, "wow, interesting life" as opposed to women who had a sense of awe talking with her. She doesn't seem to be making a gender judgement, but in talking with people found that many women have dreams of doing something (travel or otherwise) but often don't do it for a variety of reasons, responsibilities, fears, etc. She often in her book described how she found herself wanting to so something and then realizing that with a few simple steps she could do it.

I wonder myself what "dreams" I have, and if I am trying to accomplish them, or just keep looking at them and sighing. I hope I can go get them as best as possible.

Why I Love You-Tube - Shakespeare Edition

I was reading somewhere else on the Internet yesterday and found this and proceeded to laugh for quite some time. If only Shakespeare was so obviously funny to everyone!


Reduced Shakespeare Company : Othello Rap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC-f0drvdmM

The Bonesetter's Daughter (and cake!)

I finished the Bonesetter's Daughter this week and really enjoyed the plot development. The main character's mother (happy Mother's day) has dementia and slowly begins to reveal the life she had in China before immigrating to the United States. She had built her life on keeping certain information secret from her family, husband, and anyone that knew her - including her daughter! She had written a partial life history in Chinese characters and as her daughter begins to have these translated she sees more clearly who her mother really was!

Oh, and chocolate cake and chocolate frosting made it DELICIOUS!