What’s In a Name?

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Reading: Freakonomics, Chapters 5-6 and More

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The focus of our current lessons is an excerpt from Freakonomics, one of the more interesting and controversial non-fiction books available to us. You can learn more about its authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, at that Wikipedia link. You can learn even more by exploring their website, which is also embedded below.

We are reading two chapters: Chapter 5, “What Makes a Perfect Parent?” and Chapter 6, “Perfect Parenting, Part II: Or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?” The photocopied packet also includes the epilogue (“Two Paths to Harvard”). The epilogue comes, as epilogues do, at the end of the entire book, but it serves perfectly as a capstone to Chapters 5-6.

You likely began this reading offline and without an instructional post. That’s not just to balance the online and offline work we do, but to stress how important those two photocopied chapters are to our work. There will also be copies posted to Google Classroom.

After you’ve read and annotated them, you can explore the Freakonomics website for other interesting articles, especially those about parenting, raising children, and naming children. The image at the top of this post links to a podcast that you could listen to, for instance, before you load the website proper:

Because Levitt and Dubner have published so many follow-up articles, studies, and books, you are almost guaranteed to find more to read on the subject of parenting and raising children. As a teacher trying to innovate the way we do assessment, I’m particularly interested in this one:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/freakonomics-goes-to-school-and-teaches-us-the-right-way-to-bribe-kids/258672/

You really ought to start with the podcast on names, though. It’s available here or through the image at the top of this post.

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Your Reading Assignment

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Take notes that track what you find interesting, what you want to discuss, what sparks your curiosity, etc. You can write on the photocopies, in a notebook, or online through Google Drive. As you write, you should discuss what you read with your peers. You can always rearrange the classroom to suit your needs:

Objects in Space

So you have a simple goal: Read carefully, take notes of some kind, and look for what’s most interesting to you. More formal assignments will be given separately.

This is also (as always) a unit designed to test your attentiveness to this kind of flipped instruction — the posts, links, etc, that teach you what to do before you work directly with your teachers. If you’ve gotten this far, you should click below to load a strange and often hilarious website that relates to our reading:

That, too, is part of the fabric of this discussion. The focus on parenting is central, of course, but the power of names is right there.