Book Review: The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

While it's not like I don't have enough things to keep me busy this time of year, I just finished reading The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan.  But I had requested it from the library, and after how ever many weeks? months? of waiting, it arrived and I only had a week to read it.  So if I never get around to doing Christmas cards, I'm blaming it on Rick Riordan.

However, I have to say that I'm glad I got to read it.  The truth is, we're not big Percy Jackson fans here.  My son read The Lightning Thief, and he liked it OK, but never read any of the other books in the series, nor did my husband.  I read all five books, and while I really liked the premise and love the way the books hook children into Greek mythology, I never was in love with the series like I have been with some other young adult series.

So, while I don't know that this would be true for middle school readers, I think I actually like The Lost Hero better than the previous series.  My main reason is that, to me, this book is more like a real mystery book, where you can figure out from the clues what may be coming up.  One of my biggest problems with the Percy Jackson series is that while you quickly learned that every chapter or so, the protagonists would be facing some horrible monster or vengeful god from Greek mythology, it always seemed arbitrary to me as to who was showing up when.  It felt to me like when Riordan was writing, he would say to himself "Whoops, it's been three chapters now since Percy Jackson was on the brink of being killed.  Let's see, who haven't I used yet to try to destroy him?" and then just throw in some new Greek horror.  But from my perspective, this one seems more cohesive, and Greek figures who either help or oppose the demigod heroes make more sense to me, based on their traditional stories and what is going on in the book.  This time around, I could take the clues and figure out somethings about the heroes and about the forces of evil that they must overcome (I don't want to be more specific and give things away, but come on--that's what Riordan's mythology series are always about).  I felt like I used my brain a bit more in this book, and that's something I appreciate in a book.

Another thing that I really like about this series is that it is blending the Greek and the Roman mythologies.  It is only touched on in this book, but the groundwork is laid for the fact that while the Romans borrowed their gods from the Greeks, their versions were slightly different in some significant ways.  I don't know where Riordan is going with this, but this is a fascinating new element to weave into his updated mythological tales.

This series maintains the same madcap pace...can't any of these "end of life as we know" scenarios give the protagonists at least a week of warning?...but has less of the comic/bravado/sarcastic patter that Percy Jackson tends to keep up during his battles.  Again, that is probably undesirable from the point of view of young adolescents, but a parent (or, at least, I) doesn't miss it.  Also, the story is told in third person among the three demigods who are the main characters in the book, which I like because I like spreading the wealth and getting to know more characters, rather that being so focused on just Percy Jackson.  The gods are also a bit nicer to their kids (so far, at least), and as a parent, I approve of that as well.

So I enjoyed the book, and recommend it to others.  It's not really something that I think of as being a Newbery contender.  But it is fun, fast-paced, and builds on a successful series that did build an interesting world that brings ancient mythology into the 21st century.  I think Riordan's idea of looking at both the Greek and Roman faces of these stories has a lot of potential, and I hope he takes advantage of that in the books to come.

Educational Resource: Napoleonic Wars

First, I'll admit it--I hate to be writing about wars.  But if you are teaching your middle schoolers about history, it's a topic that has to be addressed.  And if you are teaching about 19th century wars, a book that I just have to recommend is Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars by Donald Sommerville.

At least here in America, there are not lots of great resources about the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.  But personally, I think it is really important to study, especially for Americans.  One thing that I try to convey in teaching about the American Revolution is what a radical idea it was that people were equal and that the common (white) man (unfortunately, sexism was still rampant then and women were not seen as equals...nor were ethnic groups such as Negroes) was capable of ruling himself--or, at least, of choosing the men (again, sexist and racist, but that's how it was) who would set the rules.

So, although it wasn't perfect, the ideas of democracy and equality that drove the American Revolution were a remarkable divergence from how governments had been run since Western Civilization.  And the -- again, pretty much exclusive white men -- who argued about those ideals and tried to formulate them into a working government were also, in my opinion, fairly remarkable.

One way to demonstrate this is to study the French Revolution.  Just as the French philosophers had influenced the American revolutionaries, so the American example inspired similar rebellions on the part of the people of France.  But after their war, the government that was established was either unstable or totalitarian.  The French were able to overthrow the aristocracy, but the government for many years after that was brutal to its perceived enemies, both within and around the country.

I think the greatest lesson for Americans in French history, especially regarding the Napoleonic era, is that EVEN with revolution, democracy was not a foregone conclusion.  First France, then the many nations of South America, declared their independence from European royalty.   But none of these countries were able to establish a lasting democratic government.  However, with the establishment of the US Constitution, the US government has prevailed through conflicts over its territory (the War of 1812, the Mexican war, the wars with the Native Americans), with World Wars and other military action outside its borders, and even the Civil War that set state against state.

So this is a big deal for me.   But if you are interested in your middle schooler learning about these events--American Revolution, French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, American expansionism, and the War against Mexico--I haven't found a better resource than this book.

'Tis the Season to be Grateful that We Don't Live in Juarez

In 2007, when Bill Gates (Harvard's most famous drop-out) was receiving an honorary degree from his could-have-been alma mater and giving the graduation speech, the beginning of his talk addressed his failure to graduate with the stereotypical break-up line:  It's not you, it's me.   But then he segued into an issue with his Harvard education, although he still presented it as a personal failing.  His great admission was:

But taking a serious look back...I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world - the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I think that problem is true for most of us who were born in the United States.  Even the most progressive among us can't imagine how good we've really got it unless we've spent some time in some of the other countries that are less privileged.

This was brought home to me again today with an article in today's local newspaper about the school systems in Juarez, Mexico.  It seems that gangsters are now targeting school teachers for extortion, because the teachers get a Christmas bonus of up to a month's salary (which, down there, apparently average about $650--and this is for the month).  The mobsters are not only threatening the safety of the teachers; they are also threatening violence towards the children they teach.  And their threats have not been all talk.  Last week, they torched a preschool, which, while it seems injuries were avoided, left the administration offices in ruin.

I know I can be rough on my local school system (although I try not to be rough on the teachers, most of whom I think are doing a hero's job under difficult and demanding circumstances).  But I know that, every now and then, I need a wake-up call about how good we've got things.  I may not like the emphasis on testing, I may not like school board policies, I may not agree with curriculum approaches.  But thank goodness that we can send our children to school without thinking they might be targets for criminals who want to shake down teachers, of all people, for their Christmas bonuses.

Is Studying a Foreign Language Still Important?

Every year, we are advised about all the additional stuff we need to be teaching our middle schoolers and high schoolers.  We are told they need more science and math, more computers and technology, more business and finance work, more arts and music, more writing, more more more.  But how can we fit it all in?  If we are adding in additional years in traditional subjects, or including new subjects like information technology, what do we let fall by the wayside in a school day that only has so many hours?

One area I haven't heard as much about lately is foreign languages.  On one hand, with all the emphasis on the globalization of our modern world, it seems it would be important to communicate to at least some section of the planet that doesn't speak English.  On the other hand, are we just assuming that everyone else will continue to learn English, so there is no need for us to learn one of their languages?

However, at least on the college level, it seems that foreign language instruction has been growing steadily for at least the last decade.  The Modern Language Association has just released the results of its 2009 comprehensive survey of enrollments in languages other than English among 2,514 US undergraduate and graduate institutions.  It shows that foreign language enrollments in 2009 were at an all-time high of 1,682,627 students, having grown by 6.6% between 2006-2009 and by nearly 13% from 2002-2006.

The most popular language by far (it enrolls more students than all other foreign languages combined) is Spanish, which has long held the #1 position in foreign language studies with 864,986 students.  The second most popular language is French, with 216,419 students, and followed by German with 96,349 enrolled.  These languages, along with what has traditionally been the fourth-ranked language, Italian, continue to grow, but by relatively small percentages (from 2-5%).

The great leaps in enrollments, however, have come from what the MLA calls "less commonly taught languages" or LCTLs, which grew by 31.2% from 2002-2006, then by an additional 20.8% from 2005-2009.  The biggest percentage gains were registered among the Arabic languages, where enrollments raised by 126.5% from 2002-2006, then by another 46.3% in 2006-2009.  Any guesses about what the most popular LCTL is?  Actually, it is American Sign Language (ASL), which was up by 16.4% to a total of 91,763 students and supplanting Italian as the fourth most popular language.  Japanese, with 73,434 enrollments, was the most popular Asian language and was the 6th most popular language overall, followed by Chinese in 7th place with 60,976 students.  The top ten list was rounded out with Arabic in 8th place (35,083 students), Latin in 9th (32,606), and Russian in 10th (26,883).  The only languages among the top 15 that reported losing students were Ancient Greek (although some of that was explained by some schools that have reclassified their Greek classes) and Hebrew, both Modern and Biblical.

The good news, according to experts, is that language studies seem to be more stable now then they were in the 1980s and 1990s.  So if your children are interested in pursuing a LCTL, there's a good chance they can find a college that will enable them to continue their studies at the postsecondary level.  Overall, US colleges and universities reported offering a total of 217 LCTLs, which is 35 more languages than were available in 2006.

Gates Teacher Effectiveness Study Links Good Teaching with Gains in Test Scores

Some preliminary results were published today from the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching study being conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The goal of this research, which is examining 3,000 teachers from seven urban school districts, including the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system here in North Carolina, is to develop a fair and comprehensive way to assess a teacher's overall role on student achievement beyond simply how their students do in high-stakes testing (which is called "value-added"measurement).

The headline among most of the educational journals about these results is that individual teachers' "value-added" histories (how much their students have raised their test scores in the past) strongly predict how they will do in the future, even if they have changed schools or classes.  So, those teachers whose students have increased their scores significantly in previous years usually continue to teach classes with strong test score increases at the end of the year.  These factors were linked regardless of subject matter or grade level.

Less highlighted in the study reviews, however, is the fact that the teachers who did a good job in raising student scores also were consistently rated high by their students on good teaching practices, such as giving clear explanations, explaining the same thing in several different ways, and showing care and concern for their students.  The teachers with the biggest gains were also highly and consistently rated by students from all their different classes for their classroom management skills as well as for their tendency to present challenging academic content.  So, basically, what this study says to me is that good teaching lead to good test scores.

This is, perhaps, not a revolutionary concept.  But what I think it does indicate is that the teachers who are most effective in raising student scores due so NOT by focusing on the ends--the tests--but by the means--the process of instruction.  The researchers emphasize that these are preliminary results of a multi-year project, so we aren't supposed to be drawing hard and fast conclusions yet.  However, I think it supports the notion that "teaching to the test" doesn't work to raise test scores; good teaching does.  And I think any research that helps lead us away from focusing on the test so much and concentrating on identifying, sharing, and rewarding good teaching IN AND OF ITSELF is a good thing.

The Kids Are All Right

I hope people enjoyed my eight nights of book reviews for Hanukkah.  It was kind of fun to focus on one things for a while, as well as finally writing reviews of all these great books we've been reading.  I really recommend the Mock Newbery Book Club program--it encourages your middle schooler (and probably you as well, at least if you are like our family) to catch up with some wonderful new books, and has us all reaching for different types of book than we typically read.

But now, back to other educational issues.  However, I'm still in a holiday mood, so I don't want to go on a rant against educational policies I disagree with right now.  So I thought tonight maybe I would give parents a gift--the gift of reducing our guilt about all the ways we are messing up our children.

This gift comes via one of my favorite educational writers, Alfie Kohn (oft mentioned in this blog).  He posted a new article on his website recently pointing out that all the woes of today's educational critics--high school graduates who can't read, employers who find high school graduates incapable of performing even entry-level jobs, grade inflation, falling standards, yada yada yada--have been railed about for years.  That is, critics were saying the same things about the problems with the education system during Eisenhower's time (and in some cases, even earlier) as they are saying now.  So while it is obviously unacceptable to have high school graduates who can't read, at least it is not just a recent phenomenon that our generation has created.

While this article is good, an even better one was something in the same vein he wrote this summer.  In that article he addresses the often-heard criticism that today's parents are too permissive and indulgent, and that today's students are entitled, smug, out of touch with reality, and out-and-out spoiled rotten.  Well, Kohn traces the exact same complaints about overindulgent parents and what he calls "undisciplined narcissists" even farther back, to over a century ago.  It seems that educational experts have been blaming parents for ruining their children's work ethic for nearly as long as we've had mandatory universal public education.

Kohn points out a couple of holes in this line of criticism.  First, there is no data--in fact, there has never been any attempt to collective information on parenting styles in a systematic way that could be used to rate a parent as "permissive" versus a "disciplinarian" in all these many long years that critics have been decrying the failures of successive generations of parents.  What little research has been done in this area hardly suggests that parents are awash in overindulgence; Kohn cites a 1995 study of parents of preschoolers in which 94% admitted that they spank or hit their children.

For this complaint, however, Kohn does have an explanation.  He discusses a 2010 article in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science by Brent Roberts, Grant Edmonds, and Emily Grijalva of the University of Illinois.  These researchers argue that such critics are confusing developmental differences with generational differences.  That is, young people, on the whole, are more self-centered and self-concerned, laxidasical, and unfocused than older professionals (such as these professional critics) because of age-related developmental differences; most only become less self-involved and more focused as they get older.  So, yes, there is a difference between the younger generation and the older one--but it is function of age, rather than a result of differences in parenting styles (or anything to do with their parents, really).  But as the young generation matures and eventually is replaced by a new young generation, they, too, will start shaking their heads and making pronouncements like "these young kids these days DON'T.... or SHOULD....  well, you get the picture.

So, parents, you are off the hook for that one.  If your tweens or teens or even college students or recent graduates are driving you crazy with their lack of responsibility and their inability to get over themselves, don't beat yourself up for being a bad parent.  Most likely, they are just being kids--which is what they are, no matter how early our society starts the whole "get good grades to get into a good college to get a good job" pressure on them.  Apparently we did the same things to our parents (that's not how we remember it, of course, but we probably did), just like they did to our grandparents, who did the same thing to our great-grandparents...and on and on.

So, Alfie Kohn, thank you once again for helping us keep things in perspective.

Hanukkah Book Review: Two Books About the 1960's

Tonight is the last night of Hanukkah, so I thought I would end this series with a big shebang and review TWO books that deal with the same time period--the 1960's--but from very different perspectives.

The first book is Countdown by Deborah Wiles.  On one hand, this is a VERY middle school book, with the characters worrying about how they are viewed by their peers, how they get along with their siblings, who is their friend and who is not, whether or not they are interested in the opposite sex--and whether or not the opposite sex is interested back, all those sorts of things.  However, Wiles takes it to another level by setting all the action during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.  The protagonist, Franny Chapman, thinks she has enough to worry about, what with her father being an Air Force Pilot stationed outside Washington, DC, her perfectionist mother, her uncle who is still reliving his World War II combat days, and her goody two-shoes brother who never tells a lie and wants to be an astronaut (not to mention a best friend who isn't acting too friendly and an intriguing boy who may or may not be a romantic interest).  But then nuclear warheads are discovered in Cuba, and Franny and her peers live in fear of atomic attack--on TOP of the usual early adolescent angst.

I think Wiles does an excellent job of conveying what it was like living through those scary and confusing times, especially as a child (where they were drilled in hiding under desks in case of nuclear attack....like that would make a difference!).  She also inserts all sorts of graphics from the days in questions--pictures, posters, song lyrics, protest signs, newspaper articles, and other similar items--to try to capture the essence of that unique time in American history.  The story line also touches on the civil rights movement and other political issues going on at that time.  Maybe one of the reasons she portrays the feelings of those times so well is that she herself lived through them as a daughter of a pilot stationed at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland during the early '60s.  In fact, she calls  Countdown a "documentary novel," and says it is the first of a trilogy she calls the Sixties Project, in which she tries to depict that decade in way that adolescents can really experience what it felt like to live through those times.

I was really impressed with this book.  I thought she was really successful in capturing the feel of the era in a way that today's young people could understand.  I can't wait to read the other books in this series, which are supposed to be set in 1966 and 1968.

Another potential Newbery book set during this decade is One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia. This book takes place during the summer of 1968, and focuses much more on the civil rights issues of the times.  The story is told by Delphine, one of three self-proclaimed "colored" sisters who have been sent from Brooklyn, NY to Oakland, CA to meet their mother, who abandoned the family when the youngest girl was an infant.   But when their mother refuses to deal with them, even when they come to her place in California, the girls spend the day in a Black Panther summer camp for raising revolutionaries--a far cry from their live in Brooklyn, where their father and grandmother coach them in how to be "good Negroes" and adapt as a minority in the majority white culture.   The sisters learn a lot about themselves, the politics of the times, the secret dynamics of their family, and even a bit about their mother during this summer that changes their lives.

Once again, I can't praise the author enough for how well she puts the reader in the shoes of a character that is facing issues that today's youth probably can't imagine.  She is also the only one of all the books I've review that deals with things from the perspective of an ethnic minority--a valuable input, especially for families like mine that are about as WASPy as you can get.  The protagonist is so honest, down-to-earth, responsible, non-victimy, and ultimately kind (if sometimes mis-informed) that I can't imagine people NOT falling in love with her.  And I really appreciate any book that reminds me what it is like to be a minority without making me feel guilty about it.

Both of these books are GREAT books for a middle school reader, and EXCELLENT resources when you are learning about the 1960's.  I recommend them not only for our children, but for ourselves as well.