Dogtown (Katherine Applegate and Gennifer Choldenko)

I loved this story. It is told from a dog named Chance's perspective. It's funny (lots of poop jokes) and lots of matter of fact things that I believe dogs really do think! In particular there is this one moment that Chance writes in kibble…

“I nid to b petd.”

The heartache of dogs in a shelter!

It would be a good opportunity to teach about responsible pet care, have a reading to pets program or something like that. 

I was taken back by Chance's story of how he lost his leg and how irresponsible his dog-sitters were.

It is also a great story representing inclusion:  autistic child, abandoned and disabled dog, multi-lingual mouse....all without being didactic or preachy about it all. It is just the way the story is. 

I thought the robot dog was kind of weird but maybe it was a good way to address the them versus us problems in our world and also to bring in the idea of AI

I should read this aloud to my class...or perhaps get some kids to read it and see what they think. 

Best of all, it has a happy ending.

Goodreads says:

Dogtown is a shelter for stray dogs, misbehaving dogs, and discarded robot dogs, whose owners have outgrown them.

Chance, a real dog, has been in Dogtown since her owners unwittingly left her with irresponsible dog-sitters who skipped town.

Metal Head is a robot dog who dreams of being back in a real home.

And Mouse is a mouse who has the run of Dogtown, pilfering kibble, and performing clever feats to protect the dogs he loves.

When Chance and Metal Head embark on an adventure to find their forever homes, there is danger, cheese sandwiches, a charging station, and some unexpected kindnesses along the way.

Give and Take (Adam Grant)

There are some great concepts in this book. The idea that it is better to be a giver than a taker is an eternal truth, if you ask me.  His ideas about how to uncover whether someone is a take or a giver (ie big pictures in annual reports) was fascinating. 

High Expectations are Key

p. 98 ....In eighteen different classrooms, students from Kindergarten through fifth grade took a Harvard cognitive ability test. The test objectively measured students verbal and reasoning skills, which are known to be critical to learning and problem solving. Rosenthal and Jacobson shared the test results with the teachers: approximately 20 percent of the students had shown the potential for intellectual blooming, or spurting. Although they might not look different today, their test results suggested that these bloomers would show "unusual intellectual gains" over the source of the school year.

The Harvard test was discerning: when the students took the cognitive ability test a year later, the bloomers improved more than the rest of the students. The bloomers gained an average of twelve IQ points, compared with average gains of only eight points for their classmates. The bloomers outgained their peers by roughly fifteen IQ points in first grade and ten IQ points in second grade. Two years later, the bloomers were still outgaining their classmates. The intelligence test was successful in identifying high-potential students: the bloomers got smarter - and at a faster rate - than their classmates.

Based on these results, intelligence seems like a strong contender as the key differentiating factor for the high-potential students. But it wasn't - at least not in the beginning. Why not?

The students labeled as bloomers didn't actually score higher on the Harvard intelligence test. Rosenthal chose them at random.

The study was designed to find out what happened to students when teachers believed they had high potential. Rosenthal randomly selected 20 percent of the students in each classroom to be labeled as bloomers, and the other 80 percent were a control group. The bloomers weren't any smarter than their peers - the difference "was in the mind of the teacher."

Yet the bloomers became smarter than their peers, in both verbal and reasoning ability. Some students who were randomly labeled as bloomers achieved more than 50 percent intelligence gains in a single year. The ability advantage to the bloomers held up when the students had their intelligence tested at the end of the year by separate examiners who weren't aware that the experiment had occurred, let alone which students were identified as bloomers. And the students labeled as bloomers continued to show gains after two years, even when they were being taught by entirely different teachers who didn't know which students had been labeled as bloomers. Why?

Teachers' beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their students were bloomers, they set high expectations for their success. As a result, the teachers engaged in more supportive behaviors that boosted the students' confidence and enhanced their learning and development. Teachers communicated more warmly to the bloomers, gave them more challenging assignments, called on them more often, and provided them with more feedback. Many experiments have replicated these effects, showing that teacher expectations are especially important for improving the grades and intelligence test scores of low-achieving students and members of stigmatized minority groups. In a comprehensive review of the evidence, psychologists Lee Jussim and Kent Harber concluded, "Self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom are real."

Goodreads says:

Give and Take highlights what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common.

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But today, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. It turns out that at work, most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers. Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return.

Using his own pioneering research as Wharton's youngest tenured professor, Grant shows that these styles have a surprising impact on success. Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries. Combining cutting-edge evidence with captivating stories, this landmark book shows how one of America's best networkers developed his connections, why the creative genius behind one of the most popular shows in television history toiled for years in anonymity, how a basketball executive responsible for multiple draft busts transformed his franchise into a winner, and how we could have anticipated Enron's demise four years before the company collapsed - without ever looking at a single number.

Praised by bestselling authors such as Dan Pink, Tony Hsieh, Dan Ariely, Susan Cain, Dan Gilbert, Gretchen Rubin, Bob Sutton, David Allen, Robert Cialdini, and Seth Godin-as well as senior leaders from Google, McKinsey, Merck, Estee Lauder, Nike, and NASA - Give and Take highlights what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common. This landmark book opens up an approach to success that has the power to transform not just individuals and groups, but entire organizations and communities.

Etty Darwin and the Four Pebble Problem (Lauren Soloy)

 

The question after this book was: How do you become a scientist?

Answer: Lots of walking and thinking. 

We talked about how it is good sometimes to be a little bored. When we are bored, if we don't turn on a screen, we have time to think. We can think of questions and sometimes we might even think of answers.

It's called the Four Pebble Problem because they use pebbles to keep track of how many times they've wandered around their path, thinking. Good read after just reading Slow Productivity! 

Goodreads says:

Etty Darwin and her famous father go for a walk to ponder life, science . . . and fairies! Inspired by the real-life daughter of Charles Darwin.

Etty loves make-believe.
Her dad loves science.
Etty believes in fairies.
Her dad would need to see some proof that they exist.
But they both love nature, conversation and each other.

A gorgeous rumination on belief and imagination featuring Henrietta (Etty) Darwin and her famous father, Charles. Etty went on to become a valued and keen editor of Charles's work and a thoughtful and intellectual being in her own right. This imagined conversation between Etty and Charles as they stroll around Charles's real-life thinking track explores their close relationship and shows that even science is nothing without an open mind and imagination.

Slow Productivity (Carl Newport)

 

I was not enamored with this book initially.

p. 8 ...this philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.

My inner voice said, "Sounds easy coming from a man. What about women who are managing many different jobs, people and projects? Have you seen what life is like for a teacher?! Sure. I'd like this idea...but the very structure of education does not provide for this idea."

But then there was this:

He talked about a city in Italy that did not want a McDonald's restaurant. A new movement started against fast food called Slow Food. 

p. 32 In 1986, McDonald's announced a plan to open a massive new restaurant, with seating for over 450 people, at the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, near the base of the Spanish Steps. Many Italians weren't pleased. Cty council members tried to block the opening, while the fashion designer Valentino, who maintained a studio in the area, argued that the smell of hamburgers would sully his coture outfirs. "What disturbs us most is the americanization of our life." decried the film director Luciano De Crescenzo. ...It was amid this unrest that a seasoned activitist and journalist named Carlo Petrini launched a new movement that he called Slow Food. 

p. 34 As the journalist Carl Honore documents in his 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, these second-wave movements include Slow cities, which also started in Italy (where it's called Cittaslow), and focuses on making cities more pedestrian-centric, supportive of localbusiness, and in a general sense, more neighborly. They also includ Slow Medicine, which promotes the holistic care of people as opposed to focusing on ly on disease, and Slow Schooling, which attempts to freelementary school students from the pressures of high-stakes testing and ocmpetitive tracking. More recently, the Slow Media movement has emerged to promose more sustained and higher-quality alternatives to digital clickbait, and the term Slow Cinema is increasily used ot describe realistic, largely non narrative movies that reward extended atttention with deeper insight into human condition. "The slow movement was f irst seen as an idea for a few people who liked to eat and drink well," explained the mayor of Petrini's homtown of Bra. "But now ithas become a much broader cltural discussion about the benefits of doing things in a more human, less frenetic manner.

His tiny footnote on p. 82 though helped: ...for a sobering critical take on the specific circumstances and privileges required or support Benjamin Franklin's rise, I recommend Jill Lepore's 2013 National Book Awards Finalist, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. Lepore details how Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane shared a similar intelligence and ambition to her famous brother, but, due to the demands on women of that class in that time (Jan raised twelve children!) had no viable outlet for her talents.

I started to read about having rituals, narrowing our focus and some of the topics really leaned well into his ideas of deep work.

p. 163 First, form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important. Second, in doing so, ensure your rituals are sufficiently striking to effectively shirt your mental state into something more supportive of your goals. 

In the end, I was sold on the concept. 

Goodreads says:

Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, a groundbreaking philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload.

Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?

Long before the arrival of pinging inboxes and clogged schedules, history’s most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. In this timely and provocative book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of these traditional knowledge workers to radically transform our modern jobs. Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkers—from Galileo and Isaac Newton, to Jane Austen and Georgia O’Keefe—Newport lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,” a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment. Combining cultural criticism with systematic pragmatism, Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for workers to replace them with a slower, more humane alternative.

From the aggressive rethinking of workload management, to introducing seasonal variation, to shifting your performance toward long-term quality, Slow Productivity provides a roadmap for escaping overload and arriving instead at a more timeless approach to pursuing meaningful accomplishment. The world of work is due for a new revolution. Slow productivity is exactly what we need.