07.11.07
Posted in Literature
at 8:30 am
by Dave Badtke
I’ve certainly hoped that J.K. Rowling’s influence on children will be profound: Because they’ve found books they love, they’ll continue to read more and more, constantly searching for similar reading experiences. But today’s NY Times article by Motoko Rich questions this hope.
Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.
There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days.
Then these children age. They develop other passions, especially those driven by hormones. They begin moving out of a home where they read books into the larger society of middle and high school where they make friends and begin to deal with social, media and sexual demands that become more important than the world of books.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.
. . .
But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. During a recent sixth-grade English class at the John W. McCormack Middle School in the Dorchester section of Boston, Aaron Forde, a cherubic 12-year-old, said he loved playing soccer, basketball and football. On top of that, he spends four hours a day chatting with friends on MySpace.com, the social networking site.
Of course it’s a continuous battle, and we shouldn’t lose hope because children go through a period when they read less. My guess is that these same children, when the NY Times checks back with them during college and after, will have matured in their relationships with others and in their own identities, will have begun to figure out what they’re going to do during the next decade or two, and will look back fondly on the Potter series as an introduction to their connection with books and literature.
And while it’s probably true that the emphasis during these middle years should be more on nonfiction than fiction because life’s lessons are more easily understood as fact rather than literature . . .
Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.
. . . ultimately there’s a good chance that one who once loved a novel is much more likely later in life to return to that quest for something just as good and something that speaks to that person now as Potter did when he was a child.
Still, there is something about seeing the passion that a novel can inspire that excites those who want to perpetuate a culture of reading. Even as the Harry Potter series draws to a close, there are signs that other books are coming up to take its place.
On a recent afternoon at at Public School 54 on Staten Island, a group of fifth grade boys shouted with enthusiasm for the “Cirque du Freak” series by Darren Shan, about a boy who becomes entangled with a vampire.
“I like the books so much that even when the teacher is teaching a lesson, I still want to read the books,” said Vincent Eng, a wiry 11-year-old. His classmate Thejas Alex said he had stopped reading a Harry Potter book to jump into “Cirque du Freak.”
“While I was reading them,” Thejas said, referring to the “Cirque” books, “I was like, addicted.”
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07.10.07
Posted in Family, Literature
at 12:27 pm
by Dave Badtke
On Chesil Beach is a short book, a novella in four parts with a fifth part, a hurried epilogue driving the implicit moral home, that opens the evening of a couple’s honeymoon during a time in the 50s when some, perhaps many, might discuss much, but not sex. And some 200 short pages later the novel ends this same evening in a heart-rending moment that could have turned out differently, but doesn’t.
While the power of this novel lies in its exquisite exploration of the complex nature of love between two people, what may be most memorable for most readers, myself included, is the story’s focus on a single life-changing moment. That this singularity, this turning down a path not taken or too often taken, makes all the difference in the couple’s life is not new. The plot device of a prideful step taken with insufficient and incorrect information is as necessary for the tragedy of Oedipus as it is for our tragic involvement in Iraq. Yet McEwan manages such a new look at an essential conundrum — each of us in our lifetimes will make decisions we regret — that he may leave you wondering if this might be one of the best novels you’ve read in a long, long time.
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07.06.07
Posted in Society, Sailing
at 8:01 am
by Dave Badtke
While my wife and I sail our small Corsair 750 Sprint, Dulcinea, on the Carquinez Straits and up the Napa River and out onto the various Bays that spread out to the east and west, I dream of sailing the open oceans. I get all the sailing magazines. I relish heavy weather stories and tales of sailing to distant islands that appear like slivers of dark sky floating on the
horizon. I read about the performance of new sailboats. I chart courses on Google Earth. And I dream of handling sails on some small boat that wouldn’t be overpowering, say a Hallberg-Rassy 342, in the middle of the South Pacific, heading south toward the Marquises or west toward Hawaii and Japan. In my future I visualize the vast open ocean where there’s nothing except our small boat, me, my wife, and the rolling waves and wind.
So I’m not sure I’m ready for the latest cruise innovation on the world’s ugliest boat that I read about today in the New York Times. Four Seasons is offering this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase, for a mere $3.8 million, an 800 square-foot condo on a ship that forever sails, though it’s expected that the ship will be in port some 250 days each year. So really it’s a huge hotel (boatel?) stuck in a marina most of the time.
Can you imagine being on this monstrosity day after day, night after night, on this oceanship without a tree except those in pots, with others like you who have spent so much for so little and the privilege of being so close to others just like you?
If you feel that 800 square feet is a bit cramped — to put this in perspective, the Halberg-Rassy 342 is less than 300 square feet — residences as large as 7,000 square feet are also available, but I hesitate to ask the price — simple math would put it at about $33 mill — as I search my pants’ pockets for spare change.
Four Seasons Ocean Residences
WHAT Residential ocean liner.
WHERE Launching initially from London.
AMENITIES A spa and concierge service, among others.
PRICES Residences starting at $3.8 million.
STATUS Sales began recently, and the ship is scheduled to begin service in 2010.
DEVELOPER BV International Ocean Holdings.
CONTACT 
(877) 507-3393
or www.oceanresidences.com.
DETAILS The Four Seasons — a 719-foot, 13-deck ship operated by the hotel company that will be filled entirely with residences — will begin construction next spring in Helsinki, Finland. Its 112 residences are described as nothing like standard cruise ship cabins. The one- to four-bedroom units, sold in whole ownership, will range from 800 to more than 7,000 square feet and will have full-length windows, walk-in closets, terraces and full-size kitchens. Each residence will be credited $12,000 a year for food, drinks and spa services. Amenities, other than the spa, will include a fitness center, a pool, a shopping promenade, four restaurants, a specialty food market, a wine cellar, a business center, putting greens and a driving range. Sailboats and motorized water scooters will be launched from the ship’s marina area, which will also be used for diving trips and shuttles to shore. Round-the-clock concierge service will be available to help arrange on-shore activities, and in-room dining will be offered. Plans call for the ship initially to follow a two-year fixed itinerary that will take it to Antarctica, the Amazon and the 2012 Olympics in London. During that time, it is expected that the ship will spend an average of 250 days a year in port.
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06.26.07
Posted in People, Society
at 3:26 pm
by Dave Badtke
Reading Joan Didion this summer should mean The Year of Magical Thinking. But I’m not up to dealing with her dealing with her husband’s death and the illness that would eventually kill her daughter, so I’m reading instead the Everyman’s Library compilation of her seven books of nonfiction written between 1968 and 2003: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. The title is from the opening of The White Album, published in 1979:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
During the fall semester I’ll assign Didion’s “On Keeping a Journal,” found in most anthologies, because my students will need to keep journals that I’ll read and grade. I’ll encourage them to look carefully and record without worrying about reasons or consequences. Some will, but most won’t because it’s an alien concept, the metonymic truth that lies in detailed, seemingly syncretic observations. . . and inimitable prose.
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06.22.07
Posted in Education, People, Column Ideas
at 8:09 am
by Dave Badtke
Comparing some 60,000 IQ tests taken by male Norwegian military siblings, Norwegian researcher Petter Kristensen claims, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle (also in the NY Times), that the debate over the intelligence of the oldest in a family is over:
On average, the eldest child’s IQ is a measly 2.3 points higher than the second. But researchers say the difference is enough to give the first child a better chance — about 13 percent higher – of getting into the top college.
The researchers, whose work appeared today in the online issue of Science, analyzed IQ scores of 250,000 men starting mandatory military service in Norway. They found a significant difference in IQ scores in 60,000 pairs of siblings, making it the largest study to confirm that birth order affects intelligence, ending nearly a century of debate, said lead author Petter Kristensen, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oslo.
Even though the researchers looked only at men, Kristensen said previous studies say women are similarly affected by their birth rank in the family.
Maybe. Certainly if you’re the oldest in your family, this is confirmation of what you always knew, but if you’re not, it’s faulty research.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa in 1968, I was a Jean Piaget fan. In one of my classes crowded with elementary students sitting closely together, squeezed into the small classroom with arms and legs wrapped around each other, all listening intently to my lessons, I would perform little Piaget experiments to see whether Piaget’s Switzerland results applied in Palala. One that I remember involved an understanding of volume in which water from a squat vessel is poured into a tall thin vessel. When I asked my students which had more water, the squat or tall vessel, they knew that both contained the same.
“Duh,” these little kids seemed to say. “You just poured the same water from one into the other. Of course they’re the same.”
According to Piaget, at their age they shouldn’t have understood this conservation principle that older children, at least Swiss children at the time, had trouble with. My students were different from Piaget’s, it seemed, and while I continued to be interested in Piaget’s theories, I didn’t give them as much weight: Certainly a child’s understanding of the world changes as he develops, but that change is a complex mix of nature and nurture.
So perhaps younger siblings can have hope if they’re not Norwegian, which reminds me of the marvelous Norwegian movie Elling, in which IQ plays a complex, comical role.
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06.20.07
Posted in Education
at 5:09 pm
by Dave Badtke
Okay, this is a shocking story — NOT! — today in the San Francisco Chronicle:
About 500,000 teachers across the country give up on the profession every year — a persistent churn and burn that costs the public schools an estimated $7.3 billion annually, according to a national report released today.
“Schools are able to hire enough teachers, but they just can’t keep them in the classroom,” said Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, which conducted the study.
In San Francisco, the district spends an estimated $12 million to recruit, hire and train new teachers each year to replace those who’ve left, the researchers found.
The annual exodus is “draining resources, diminishing teaching quality, and undermining our ability to close the student achievement gap,” according to the report.
To stem the flow, districts must first determine the annual turnover rate and then focus on hiring well-prepared teachers who have a clear understanding of content, curriculum and how to manage a classroom, Carroll said.
What if they — who’s this “they,” anyway? — just gave this $7.3 billion to teachers as extra pay?
Nowhere in this article is there a mention of pay, which is awful, especially since we all know the profound impact teachers had on each one of us, and physical and social working conditions, which are deplorable in too many schools.
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Posted in Language
at 4:51 pm
by Dave Badtke
This from Gene Expression, a game that helps with hiragana, katakana and kanji:
It is called Slime Forest. The slimes attack and yell characters at you to which you must respond appropriately. Save the princess!
While I realize that I’ll never learn to read and speak Japanese if I don’t study, which I’m not tending to do even though both boys and their partners live in Tokyo, I’m thinking that a game like this might help me. On the other hand, a language drug injected directly into my brain would save a lot of time — like years.
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06.14.07
Posted in Society
at 10:56 am
by Dave Badtke
The following article appeared today, June 14, in the Benicia Herald. I’ve reprinted it here because I agree with the sentiments expressed by Les and also because I regret that since the Benicia Herald has no online presence, this article will be recycled by tomorrow — maybe most already have recycled it — only to be found with difficulty by going to the Benicia Library.
My Two Cents
By Les Mahler
The ongoing immigration debate has hit a nerve with me. And although I could say it’s because I am an immigrant, it’s more about the other side of this issue: how we treat people, be they immigrants, guest workers or whatever else.
While I did emigrate from the Netherlands (I was born in Indonesia but we were forced out during the Sukarno dictatorship simply because my father fought for he Dutch army during WWII), I became a United States citizen in 1962 through my parents. That should quiet down any questions about my status or worries that I believe in a socialist form of government simply because I lived under one in earlier years.
What really bothers me about the immigration issue is how the other side in this whole debate is missing — the treatment of these so-called guest workers. They pick the strawberries, the beans, the spinach and almost every other produce that grows in the Central Valley. And let’s be honest, without them, we wouldn’t have that produce on our dinner tables, would we? After all, how many of us would really work under the harsh conditions that these men, women and children work under? Be honest. After all, we’re accustomed to soft chairs, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, eight hour days, water cooler breaks and other things we simply take for granted nowadays. And after work, we usually go home, sit on a sofa, have dinner at the table and watch TV afterwards. It’s not a bad situation when you stop to think about it.
Now, what do you think are the conditions for most field workers? Don’t know? Well, as a reporter covering San Joaquin County, I got a firsthand glimpse of just what type of conditions field workers have to endure. I was the first reporter on the scene at the Lower Jones Tract flooding of 2004. And while the focus during those months was the loss of crop and agricultural land, we barely saw what those floods had done to the· workers, until one day after the waters subsided.
I was given a private tour of a farm outside Tracy, and I remember walking into a barrack-style building with 45 to 50 bunk beds, all in a row. What amazed and saddened me was how the flood waters had swept up each worker’s belongings, how they had the simplest of items as their possessions and now they were gone.
What angered me most was how conditions in that barrack-style building were so stark: no air conditioning — just a large fan at the front of the building — and a small kitchen at the end of the room, with no restroom facilities, no shower and no living room. They were stacked in there like cattle, brought out to pick our fruits and vegetables and then simply herded back in at the end of the day. They were treated no better than cows; actually, that’s not true.
As an agricultural reporter, I remember going to a dairy fann in San Joaquin County and being told how when it gets hot, cows can gather under a mister or collect under shade. Every six months, a veterinarian would come in to check how the cows were doing, sort of a health checkup.
Perhaps what’s worse is that it isn’t just men who slave away this way, it’s families. During one interview with a mother of two boys who worked the fields with the rest of the family, I asked how old they were. When she told me 15 and 17, I reminded her that county department of education would require that her boys be in school.
With that, she terminated the interview and story. For, as she told me, the boys needed to work in the fields so the family could have a place to live. If they went to school, the family would be homeless.
Now, as the Senate and the president debate immigration reform, let’s bring in the elements of human dignity, treating guest workers, field workers and migrant workers, with dignity and not as second-class slaves.
If we’re going to have migrant farm workers do our backbreaking work for us while we reap the sweat of their hard work, then farmers need to make sure that conditions such as the above are part of the immigration debate. I just can’t see how it would be or could be any other way.
Disclaimer: The thoughts, opinions and whatever else contained in this column are mine and mine alone.
Les Mahler is the Editor for the Benicia Herald.
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06.12.07
Posted in Education
at 11:55 am
by Dave Badtke
While I’m not surprised that Angelica Chang’s kindergarten students have learned to speak, read and write some Mandarin, it’s encouraging that some schools understand the importance of language immersion.
Across the hall from Chang’s classroom on Monday, Principal Chris Rosenberg declared the inaugural year of San Francisco Unified’s first Mandarin immersion program — which includes Chang’s and one other kindergarten classroom taught by Cindy Lai — a success.
All 26 kindergartners from both classes are expected to continue with the immersion program in first grade, along with seven new students who will likely have some catching up to do.
“It was a fantastic year,” Rosenberg said. “Did the kids learn Mandarin while mastering the grade-level standards? Yes. It was a big success, a great success.”
Thirty-four students are signed up for the program’s next kindergarten classes in the fall.
The program is expected to grow by one grade each year through the fifth grade.
I wonder at times if replacing our K-3 reading, writing and arithmetic curriculum with languages — English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc. — music, storytelling, and hands-on geometric construction projects that include surveying might not better prepare our children to succeed in school. Such an approach would build skills that become increasingly difficult to master, especially languages and music, as students age.
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Posted in Business, Technology
at 8:56 am
by Dave Badtke
Because PCs have always been less expensive than Macs, because businesses favor PCs over Macs, because over the years I’ve bought software for PCs that would cost a lot to buy again for Macs, because I long ago worked for GE when it decided to put a rather worthless Windows PC on everyone’s desk — we would turn it on, look at the crude Windows, sniff it as though it might be something dead that we should bury in the grass beyond the parking lot, and go back to working on our Unix-based Sun workstations — because of all of these reasons and more that I’ve forgotten, I long ago began purchasing PCs so that my home and work computers would be compatible.
Years later here I sit writing my blog on a PC, but with a change today since Steve Jobs yesterday announced that Apple’s Safari browser was available for PCs. Analysts were underwhelmed. They were looking for a big announcement, but all they got was a browser. Down the stock price went.
But wait — could there be something more here, I wonder, as I type away in a window in this new browser? For years I’ve been saddled with a marginal operating system that always manages to crash at the wrong time or that makes networking harder than it should be or that just pisses me off because the software we were using on Sun workstations was so much better, and that was many years ago. Why do I need all this Microsoft-compatible hardware and software if I can now wirelessly connect to the Internet?
I blog away. I upload pictures. I get on my browser, in this case Safari with its very classy interface with tabs, which took me a couple moments to find, and I write this on my website server, not really caring that I’m running Windows. Clearly this is the future as network bandwidths increase and more and more applications adopt a browser approach that is independent of the computer’s operating system. Sure Adobe doesn’t do it yet with their Creative Suites, but they will. And then I’ll be able to create pages using Adobe applications running on my website server.
Won’t it be grand when we can carry around a paper-thin device with a battery that lasts forever that we can use to get all our computing and networking and communications done without complaining about Microsoft? Sure I may be an old guy. Sure I may be dead when it happens. But I can look forward to the future anyway. Hope springs eternal, don’t you know.
But maybe we’re not there yet. In trying to change my WordPress options using Safari, the browser crashed. Apple made it easy for me to send an error report and Safari is still in Beta, so I’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, checking back from time to time to see how Safari’s doing, I’ll continue to use Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a rebel living on the edge. Bah, humbug Microsoft.
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