Click here for the post and podcast on names.
Overview
The skills and traits being tested and strengthened for the rest of the quarter are organization, assiduousness, and self-efficacy. You must keep multiple assignments in focus and to plan out your schedule in order to be successful. On Friday, we will pause to work on your Pareto Projects; on Thursday, we will return to your ETA essays.
Keep these assignments in mind. It will feel like a lot to juggle at first, but you will only get stronger in these universal skills and traits if you are forced to develop them.
Reading: Freakonomics, Chapters 5-6 and More
The focus of the work for today and tomorrow 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 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”) and the “Bonus Matter.” The epilogue is to the entire book, but it serves perfectly as a capstone to Chapters 5-6.
You began reading on Monday, January 9, and will continue to read over the weekend and into next week. The two photocopied chapters are most important; after that, you should explore the Freakonomics website for other interesting articles, especially those about parenting, raising children, and naming. The image at the top of this post links to a podcast that you should 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. If you need help finding more to read, however, this should be your follow-up:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/freakonomics-goes-to-school-and-teaches-us-the-right-way-to-bribe-kids/258672/
Start with the podcast on names, though. It’s available here or through the image at the top of this post.
Your Reading Assignment
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 group. (If you need a reminder about what these new groups look like — and why you are in them — revisit this post.)
For now, that’s all you must do: Read carefully, take notes of some kind, and look for what’s most interesting to you. A more formal assignment will appear next week, when you will be tested on your internalization of the text, your understanding of its ideas, and your ability to monitor your reading.
This is also 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: