Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
The 39 stories in this collection span a hundred years, during which Polish society underwent seismic political change several times over. Rather than arrange the stories chronologically, Lloyd-Jones has instead opted to group them under a series of themes - 'Animals', 'Children', 'Couples', 'Men behaving badly', 'Women behaving badly', 'Misfits', 'Soldiers', 'Surrealists' and 'Survivors'
A few of the selections could certainly prove useful for history students, having been written by individuals who lived through WWII.
For the most part, the stories are very readable and highly entertaining. Up until now, only nine of them had previously been available in English translation, making this volume a good introduction to the Polish literary tradition, and some imaginitve approaches to writing and narrative that your English students might not have encountered before.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.
Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters
(Katharina Reinecke, Princeton, £30)
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
There's been much discussion of the biases inherent to Al, facial recognition and other technologies, but as Reinecke explores in Digital Culture Shock, what's often lacking in such conversations is an appreciation of the challenges posed to modern technology by deeply entrenched cultural norms around the globe.
In Rwanda, where internet connections are subject to frequent unplanned outages, people take the opportunity of the Wi-Fi going down to socialise with friends and neighbours.
Or take driverless cars, and consider how helpless those vehicles trained on urban roads in the USA would be in Egypt, owing to the vastly different styles of driving.
Then there's Naver - the most popular internet search engine in South Korea, which operates in a very different way to Google.
Reinecke takes us on a tour of these and other knotty cultural quandaries we don't think about as often as we should, while proposing a few solutions along the way.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.
The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future
Joel J. Miller, Globe Pequot, £30)
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It's hard to imagine a time when books were once precious objects, and libraries an indicator of formidable power and influence; an era when just the very idea of a book - as opposed to a scroll - was considered remarkable. Miller traces the development of books right back to the origins of writing itself, and then onwards, through to the development of the world wide web and beyond, past Al.
What emerges from Miller's telling is essentially a history of problems in search of solutions. How do we know what information is available? How do we find it quickly? How do we then use it?
Underlying the book's insights is a simple, yet profound notion - that the act of writing something down enables others to respond to that information and think about it, hence the title. The written word has endured for millennia, and herein you'll discover why.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.
Craftland: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades
(James Fox, The Bodley Head, £25)
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
A book that offers a glimpse into the way traditional crafts were practised before the Industrial Revolution, in a manner rarely found in economic history books. Each chapter draws the reader in by focusing on the people still engaged in these trades today, and their often unassuming workplaces. In many cases it's a tiny group, or even just one person keeping the tradition alive.
Why does this matter? Because these are stories of determination, resilience and of working with nature, rather than against it.
Students searching for alternative career pathways instead of the traditional academic routes will surely find within these pages a fascinating and well-drawn explanation of a craft or tradition that will serve to inspire them
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.
A now defunct embed has been removed, and a link updated.
Idea! by Terry Freedman
How I’ve used comics/cartoons in the classroom
Much of my misspent youth was taken up with reading comics, such as Superman, Batman, Classics Illustrated. I've also always loved cartoons. So it was only natural I often used cartoons and comics in my teaching. I always found them to be very effective in helping kids to learn. The question is: why?
They can be used as a form of assessment
The cartoons in newspapers are useful because they assume that you already know a lot of background information -- otherwise they simply wouldn't be funny. I found that sharing a cartoon with students could be a good way of finding out what they already knew, or thought they knew, about the topic in hand.
They can be used to start a discussion
I would use newspaper cartoons to start a different sort of class discussion going. They always encapsulate implicit assumptions as well as current information, so you can sometimes use a cartoon to start exploring what those assumptions might be.
Even a silly comic strip you create yourself can be useful in this regard. Consider this for example:
Depending on what your subject is, you could use this to start a discussion along the lines of:
How do you go about creating an app?
What exactly is a hologram?
How could holograms, 3D and virtual reality be used in everyday life?
What is cloning, and when should it be used, if at all?
A picture paints a thousand words
Comics and cartoons are useful because they can convey a great deal of information very quickly. Many devices these days come with a quick start guide comprising pictures and little else. There's a reason for that.
They can lead to better retention
Comics etc are efficient from the point of view that presenting text and images together has been found to increase retention. For more information, see https://teach.com/blog/why-comics/.
They provide humour
Cartoons bring a touch of lightheartedness to lessons, which is often no bad thing. In my experience, kids are more receptive to learning new concepts, and less prone to disrupt the lesson, when there is something we can all laugh with together.
There is some research that suggests that students with autism find comics, especially Manga, easier to read than plain text. See Manga and the autistic Mind for more information.
Some kids more expressive in drawing than in writing
When it comes to getting kids to write an explanation or a report, some may find it easier to do an illustration with a small amount of text rather than lots of writing.
They provide opportunities for collaboration
Pupils don't have to work alone in order to produce a comic strip, say. In fact, if one pupil is good at drawing and another good at writing, that pair can make a great team. Not that you even have to be good at drawing: there are comic-creating programs which enable you to select and combine ready-made elements. See the bottom of this article for a link to lots of applications.
It’s part of the milieu
In Japan, Manga comics are ubiquitous, and cover every conceivable topic. In the west there are graphic ‘novels’ covering such diverse topics as the financial crash of a few years ago, computing, quantum physics and the Iranian revolution (see the Digital Education newsletter for my top ten illustrated books). Even the New York Times has got in on the act — see New York Stories.
