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June 30, 2005
I Am Also Reading
I am also currently reading No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, which is decent, but does not have much new information. Mostly it says that in minority schools where discipline is strictly enforced and where teachers, kids, and parents want to be there and are willing to work hard, the racial gap in learning disappears. That may not sound like a radical idea at first, but according to most of the public teachers I know this is not how many of the teachers, students, and parents they work with act. I also recently finished Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I had heard most of the ideas in this book before as well, but never in this much detail. Emotional Intelligence was an interesting contrast with Closing the Gap, although I do not know how much the authors would disagree with each other overall. Closing the Gap argues that test scores like the SAT are one of the best measures of future success, which is why the authors think the key to ending poverty among minorities is improving primary and secondary schooling and ultimately improving test scores. In Emotional Intelligence Goleman argues instead that emotional intelligence (skills such as self discipline and empathy) is the best measure of future success. I suspect that both are good measures that complement each other and that increasing one sort of intelligence will usually help to increase the other.
I am now on tape 9 of 21 of David McCulloughs biography of John Adams and am halfway through I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. I watched the movie version of I, Robot the other night and although it had some decent parts, it was not nearly as thoughtful as the book has been so far. A few of the action scenes were very unbelievable as well. I am also about halfway through Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the Whitehouse which contains essays on each president by people like Lynn Cheney, John McCain, and Glenn Reynolds. The appendix contains an interesting survey of academics that rated each president based on different areas like law and foreign policy. The interesting part of the survey was that unlike most other surveys that rank presidents, this surveys participants were made up of an equal number of liberals, moderates, and conservatives in an attempt to limit partisan bias in the results. I have read up to the chapter on Ulysses S. Grant so far and the essay on Grant was the only one that has changed my opinion of that particular president for the better.
Posted by Pete at June 30, 2005 07:28 PM
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