The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

The winners of the Pulitzer Prize were announced this week, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction won in the category of General Nonfiction. I’ve followed Kolbert since she published her three groundbreaking “Climate of Man” articles on climate change in the New Yorker in April and May of 2005, articles that became part of her 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and I’m excited to see her get this level of recognition. The stories of global warming and biodiversity loss covered in these two books are every bit the bummer their titles suggest, but Kolbert brings such intelligence to the topics and has such a gift for anchoring general trends in stories of particular places and people that they become page-turners. The Sixth Extinction begins with the tale of the emergence of Homo sapiens some two hundred thousand years ago and their curious habit of killing off many of the species they came in contact with . . .

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Radiolab on American Football (January 2014)

I’m a lapsed football fan who hasn’t dealt with my conflicting feelings about the game, and so I was profoundly grateful to hear the folks at Radiolab dedicate their considerable skills to a 75-minute double episode titled “American Football” (aired at the end of January – I have a pretty relaxed podcast listening schedule). Part one is devoted to the history of the game, particularly the pivotal, troubling, and inspiring role played by the Carlisle Indian School football team in the late 19th and early 20th century. I’ve had an itch to write about it because it coalesced so much of what I love about Radiolab and exactly what I’ll never stop loving about football.

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When Group Work Gets Old

Group work – getting students to work together in groups to solve some kind of problem – is a go-to lesson plan item for me and most of the teachers I know. And it isn’t just a matter of personal preference: the effectiveness of group work is backed by decades of research. As John Bean points out in Engaging Ideas, in a good group activity students don’t just pool their knowledge; they propose possible answers or solutions to each other as they prepare to deliver a collective solution or answer to the class, which they must defend. It's also true, though, that you can’t do group activities all the time. You can’t do anything all the time because whatever it is gets dull and formulaic. So what to do instead? What to do that still engages students in something active but is sufficiently different to contrast with problem-solving in small groups?

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Vacationland, by Sarah Stonich (2013)

Among this novel’s many strengths is the cast of voices it establishes as its chapters pile up, each told from the point of view of a different character (though there are a few repeats). I’ve long had mixed feelings about this storytelling strategy: what you gain in breadth you can lose in depth. I think of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin as another novel that takes this tack, and though it’s well worth the read, I didn’t feel that it did the main thing I want a novel to do: take me deeply into one story, whatever the parameters of that story might be. In what felt to me like masterful timing, at the precise moment that Vacationland begins to feel as if it’s going to construct itself as a broad, shallow pool, it begins to connect its disparate characters and dives deeper . . .

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