A Rip In Heaven

I just finished reading A Rip In Heaven. Part of what struck me was how many of my students are like the main players in this true story: both the victims and the perpetrators. I read the reasons for the behaviors - and have no more answers.

No Place On Earth

No Place On Earth and the movie about the discovery of the caves where 38 people survived the Holocaust - sound interesting. I think I will order the book (since I have no idea how to see the movie until the sell it) but I think I will read about Everest first.

Books that I have just finished reading

The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
Gifted Hands by Dr. Ben Carson
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Common Core - and books

Are any of you going to common core standards? We start rolling them out next year. At this point I know very little beyond that.

They say it will have little impact on the way we teach. Right.

We have been recreating the wheel in high school for 4 years now with the GPS math - so now we start over with CC.

So, let's talk books.

When I was first teaching a veteran teacher lectured me - a lot - about how you don't need a book. I haven't had one for the kids for 4 years. He was right - I don't need a book.

I can still teach, still provide links, still give problems.

The lack of a book hobbles me a little, but not horribly so.

It is crippling the kids.

They need a book to take home. Something with answers in it to check. Something with explanations. They aren't going to write the notes - they need the notes.

I see more of the same in the future.

We have survived (with lowered scores, people, but we survived) without spending millions on books. I am betting we won't see books again anytime soon.

More on books and lack thereof

And textbooks.

Algebra 1.

Algebra 2.

Geometry.

Advanced Mathematical Concepts.

Stalking

My daughter and I just spent an hour reading Amazon Wish Lists for everyone we could find!! What fun. Sometimes there are 2 or three with the same name - but you can find the one you want by the books they chose.

BBC Top 100 Books

BBC Top 100 Books

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

--
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total read at the bottom.
--
Book List:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X+
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X+ - some, mostly the comedies)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X+
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
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 X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
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 X
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 X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
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 X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
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 X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X+
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Not bad - 51