Amber Sparks
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Well, here you go. I think this pretty much says it all, much better than my bitching and whining could.
Kudos to the New Yorker for this excellent piece of real, investigative journalism, and for making it available to everyone online–so that everyone can see for themselves what scary scammy fraudsters Scientologists really are. People laugh–and indeed their “beliefs” are laughable–but these people can be truly frightening as well. Glad to hear the FBI is investigating them and I hope they can finally shut this horrible cult (because yes, that’s what they are) down.
I think community colleges are underrated and fantastic. I think more people should take advantage of them. I think Kay Ryan kind of rules for realizing this:
“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly — and with very little financial encouragement — saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, expect perhaps the bicycle.”
–Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate, quoted in Boneshaker, Issue 42-400.
(Lifted pretty much directly from Balloon Juice–thank you, mistermix.)
Dana Goldstein over at the Daily Beast finds American teens aren’t reading challenging enough stuff, nor nearly enough non-fiction:
What do American kids read? From middle school through 12th grade, the answer is consistent: the Twilight and Harry Potter series, with a little bit of Romeo and Juliet and Holocaust literature sprinkled in. The average reading level of the top 20 books read by U.S. high school students is 5.3—two and a half grade levels easier than a front-page article in The New York Times or Washington Post. In no grade do students typically read nonfiction, beyond memoirs like the The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night—even though success on standardized tests, in college, and in many jobs requires the ability to comprehend dense nonfiction texts.
Read the whole thing here. It’s definitely thought-provoking. Especially as I hear from people who teach about more and more teachers just giving up on kids’ reading habits and allowing book reports by 16 year olds on Harry Potter and Twilight. Yeesh.
