It’s the beginning of Week 25 of 2013, and I’m on track for a book a week this year (#1 on the list took me weeks to finish!)

24. All Over the Map, by Laura Frasier. Excellently titled, this travel writer’s memoir is the story of a middle-aged single woman who loves her exotic, adventurous life while she longs for love and children. She envies her married, child-ful friends almost as much as they envy her.  But her journeys go deeper than simply Samoa and blind dates—she is a living, breathing, interesting person who hits hers 47^th birthday as she completes this book. Worth the read.

23. Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg. I ran out of sticky arrows to mark important passages in this important manifesto. Very readable, but more importantly, more “thinkable”. I wish she had written this ten years ago; my history would probably be different. But I’m willing to bet Mrs. Sandberg will be influencing my future. More importantly, I hope I will be influencing my future. For those who want the short version, click here. It’s a verbatim list of passages I marked.

22. Parenting a struggling reader by Susan Hall & Louisa Moats. Good information for those who might be the parent described in the title. A decent handbook to get you started.

20. Teaching on Poverty Rock / Joby McGowan. It’s not his first year teaching, but it’s his first year teaching on Mercer Island. A very short memoir.

19. To Sell is Human: the surprising truth about moving others / Daniel Pink. I read Drive, a book on what motivates us, last year. He’s a writer like Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell, great at taking diverse studies and bringing interesting information into a cohesive framework. He’s just a fun read! And we all so spend a lot of time “selling”—what to put in a subject line so you will read—and respond—to my email, advertising old stuff on craigslist, convincing someone else to do a job so you don’t have to…

18. How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character, by Paul Tough (author of Whatever It Takes).   LOVED this.  I posted more in depth on some of the ideas that stood out in this book.

17. Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance: Poverty, literacy, and the development of information capital / Susan B. Neuman, Donna C. Celano. This is the perfect book for me—the tale of two libraries, it deals with literacy, learning, poverty, the achievement gap, technology and education all within the parameters of an empirical research paper published as a book. (Those who listen to NPR will recognize the Susan B. Neuman name.) In case you find this as interesting as I do, you are in luck! KCLS didn’t have this book until I requested it and it looks like I will have to buy the book as it has some water damage. Hmm.

16. The Introvert Advantage: How to thrive in an extrovert world / Marti Olsen Laney. I am interesting in this topic, as I consider myself quite introverted (social, but introverted) and at least one of my kids has my same introvert characteristics. Recently, I went to a very engaging Susan Cain lecture about introverted children. Her book, Quiet, is on my hold list at the library and I think I will find it more interesting than this one.

15. Gilead / Marilynne Robinson. We read it for book club. It was excellently written, and it was hard to believe the nearly 80 year old pastor narrator was written by a middle age woman. It was pretty good.

14. Dawn Huebner has written 6 books, the first two I have read and recommend:

1. What to Do When Your Temper Flares: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Problems With Anger

2. What to Do When You Dread Your Bed: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Problems with Sleep

3. What to Do When Bad Habits Take Hold: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Nail Biting and More

4. Sometimes I Worry Too Much, But Now I Know How to Stop

5. What to Do When You Grumble Too Much: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Negativity

6. What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Anxiety

13. Going Bovine / Libba Bray. Great title. Great cover. Lousy story.

12. The out of sync child: recognizing and coping with sensory processing disorder / Carol Stock Kranowitz. I read this to see if it fit anything we had been seeing in one our little darlings. It didn’t. Here was the companion book: Answers to questions teachers ask about sensory integration : forms, checklists, and practical tools for teachers and parents

11. Fluency instruction: research-based best practices / edited by Timothy Rasinski, Camille Blachowicz, Kristin Lems. (2006). Great articles about, well, fluency. Quickest summary: kids learning to read fluently should read the same thing 4 times.

10. Tears of the Giraffe / Alexander McCall Smith. The second in the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series. I really like listening to this series. Luckily, there are lots more.

9. Becoming a Thinking Christian: If We Want Church Renewal, We Will Have to Renew Thinking in the Church / John B. Cobb, Jr. From the publisher, “This book challenges Christians to think. Committed lay Christians, says Cobb, are already theologians; he wants them to realize this and then to become good theologians. Laypersons are just as capable as professional theologians of intellectual hard work, but they no longer expect the church to ask this of them. Cobb discusses why it is important for Christians to think about their own beliefs and assumptions.”

[Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. This is supposed to be an excellent book. I picked it up and started reading it at the library while Wesley slept in my arms. I had a few concerns about the subject matter, so I read the ending, decided I would hate the novel, no matter how well-written, and put it in the return box on the way out.]

8. Speaking Among the Bones (A Flavia de Luce novel) / Alan Bradley. This is the 5th in a series that I am on the library hold lists long before the book is published.  A day’s read if one ignores one’s duties enough.  I adore Flavia, who is now almost twelve.  The last sentence in the book is the best/worst I’ve read in a mystery.   Unfortunately for my sanity, the sixth book isn’t scheduled to publish until “early 2014”.  You’re killing me, Alan Bradley.

7. Radical: Fighting to put students first / Michelle Rhee.  I read a book about Ms. Rhee last autumn and got a lot out of it, including a radical crush on Michelle and her philosophies.  I bought Radical when I went to see her last week at a Town Hall lecture (thank you, Seattle Public Library!). There were pickets and protests and hisses and everything.   Since leaving the Washington, D.C. district, she has started StudentsFirst, a union of sorts for students.  She’s considered controversial, but I support her positions.  I definitely want to teach again when the kids are all in school, but she inspires me to move to the inner city and work harder than I ever have in my life to be the best teacher any kid has ever had.  I’ve already said it: she’s inspiring.

6.  All There Is: Love stories from StoryCorp / Dave Isay (editor).  I put this on my Hold list when I got on my This I Believe essay kick last year, one of NPR’s great features.  Forty minute interviews between lovers, friends, and family are written up in short essays.  It’s an excellent peek into the love lives of representative slice of America. 

5.  American Dervish / Ayad Akhtar. We picked this novel for book club and I loved it.  I learned more about Islam, Jewish-Muslim-Christian tensions, and the Koran through this piece of fiction than I’ve ever gotten out of a deliberate study.  Ah, the power of story.  It brings up some great discussion topics, not only for book club, but even for Dwayne and me.   Unfortunately, this is the author’s first book so as much as I would like to grab from the shelves all his other brilliance, I will have to wait. 

4. Blueprints for building better girls / Elissa Schappell.  Meh. A collection of short stories that I didn’t realize were about the same women until nearly the end.  If you decide to read this book about anorexic girls with more issues than food, know that Elizabeth, Bender, and B are the same person.  Maybe now you will get more out of this than I did.

3. The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron.  Another audio read, I found this is the section of previous Newberry winners.  Lucky, a ten year old orphan, is trying to find her Higher Power, a concept she has heard about while eavesdropping on the different “Anonymous” meetings her in small, small town.  Hey, it won a prestigious award—always worth reading.

2. Predictably Irrational: the hidden forces that shape our decisions, by Dan Ariely.  This was an audio read for me and both the reader and subject were fascinating.  It’s in the same genre as Freakomics or anything by Malcolm Gladwell.

1.  World without End, by Ken Follett.  Our book group read Follett’s Pillars of the Earth a few years ago and decided to tackle the sequel, giving ourselves December and January.  It’s 1,050 pages about life in a English town and priory in the 14th century.  I love his historical fiction—I can read a history book about Martin Luther’s protests of certain Church practices, but fiction makes the fact more real.  The author uses a few prototype characters no matter what century he’s writing in, but overall, I’d say my enjoyment of the novel was just about worth the 4-5 other books I gave up reading to get through this one. 

[Red denotes a work of nonfiction.] 

How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character, by Paul Tough—follow this author if you enjoy fantastic writing that puts together non-related studies into a c0hesive, practical narrative, not unlike Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, and Daniel Pink.

(My note:  In 2009, Paul Tough wrote Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America, a fantastic read about education, poverty, acheivement gap, charter schools, etc. Listen to Geoffrey Canada on KUOW’s Speakers Forum.)

Again, here’s my shortcut version of the book, but really, this is one of those books that I read for my kids (like I read Lean In for me).

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Big Idea: A study took kids who scored low on an IQ test retested those kids and gave them an M&M for every correct answer. They went from an average IQ of 79 to an average of 97.

So…what is their “real” IQ, 79 or 97? (It turns out that life prospects were more in line with a 79 score.) “They may have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentives” (pg. 69).

In other words:

IQ = Natural/developed intelligence/ability + amount of innate motivation

Self-control as a child is correlated with, as an adult, being less likely to smoke, have health problems, have bad credit, brushes with the law, have multiple addictions, and raising children in a single-parent household (p. 73-74).

However, self-control isn’t quite the “driver of success that [Duckworth] was looking for” (p. 74). She called “a passionate commitment to a single mission and an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission” (p. 74), or grit, the important quality that could make the difference in succeeding (my note: compare word choice with success).

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/grit/angela-duckworth-grit.html

Denise: Your grit score is: 4.5. You are in the 90th-99th percentile of other users who have taken this test.

How to improve your grit:

Three strategies people use when setting goals:

1) Optimism: envisioning all the good things that will happen when you achieve; indulging; “doesn’t usually correlate with actual achievement” (p 92)

2) Pessimism: “dwelling, thinking about the entire thing that will get in the way of their accomplishing their goals” (p 92). Doesn’t work well, either.

3) Mental contrasting: “contrasting on a positive outcome and simultaneously concentrating on the obstacles in the way. Doing both at the same time… ‘creates a strong association between future and reality that signals the need to overcome the obstacles in order to attain the desired future’” (p 93). Set rules for yourself.

If you don’t have that kind of safety net (middle class, affluent)—and children in low-income families almost by definition do not—you need to compensate in another way. To succeed, you need more grit, more social intelligence, more self-control than wealthier kids. P 103

Pp120-1  Researchers have demonstrated that for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers. ….[W]hen children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn’t licking and grooming-style care but a very different kind of attention. Perhaps what pushes middle-school students to concentrate and practice … is the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves.

When [Tom Brunzell’s] students were flailing, lost in moments of stress and emotional turmoil, he would encourage them to do the kind of big-picture that take place in the prefrontal cortex: slowing down, examining their impulses, and considering more productive solutions to their problems [than yelling, hitting].

Pg 152-3  The SAT (and the ACT) were designed to equalize the differences in schools (eg a 3.5 GPA in different high school across the nation). But ACT and SAT scores were poor predictors of college completion. The better predictor, actually, is high school GPA. “It was true that a student with a 3.5 GPA from a high quality HS was somewhat more likely to graduate from college than a student with a 3.5 GPA from a low-quality HS, but the difference was surprisingly modest.”

Conclusion: “whether or not en is able to graduate from a decent American college doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with how smart he or she is. It has to do, instead, with the same list of character strengths that produce high GPAs in the middle and high schools…motivation, perseverance, good study habits and time management skills”

OneGoal Leadership principles: Resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism, and integrity.