Book Review: The Language Police

Title: The Language Police--How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Author: Diane Ravitch
Pages: 170, 255 including appendices and index
Review: The author makes her points quite clear, and for the most part I could not agree more--censorship in textbooks threaten the freedom of thought, as well as distort facts children are taught in order to appease pressure groups.

Occasionally, more often in the beginning, by proving her point, Ravitch comes across a bit ignorant. She is so adamantly opposed to changing un-PC words, I have to disagree when it comes to textbooks. For example, she does not understand the difference between "African slave" and "enslaved African." I am all for more accurate terms, though I do not believe in rewriting history so that everything is pleasant, and I do not believe in editing classic literature to your liking, both important points that Ravitch makes.

Because many people may believe that textbooks operate on a competitive market, that teachers have a say in what their kids read, and that textbook writers and publishers put in adequate amounts of research to compile material, this book is a must read to open some eyes. Its appendices are also interesting (list of banned words) and helpful (suggested classics reading list for grades 3-10). Although you have to look for it, the book also essentially mini-reviews individual textbooks, particularly history textbooks, and their slant.

Final Review: The Essential Difference

I finally finished "The Essential Difference," previously helf-reviewed in my August 11 entry.

The section that described how levels of testosterone can affect the systemizing/empathizing abilities in your life was a little scary (and definitely interesting). However, he noted that other hormones may affect your abilities as well, but deflected that topic as a topic "for another book." Well, no! He can't do that! If he titled his book, "The Effect of Testosterone on...," then maybe, but we're trying to get to the bottom of this and he bails out.

What makes the second part more interesting than the first is that he provides more case studies of specific people and talks more about their behavior and how it exemplifies different degrees of autism. He also ponders, if autism is extreme-main-brainedness, then what would be the extreme female-brainedness? He postulates the evolutionary advantages of being variously balanced in systemizing or empathizing. All this is just interesting enough for me to keep the book. Just barely.

Mid-Book Review: The Essential Difference

Title: The Essential Difference--The Truth About the Male and Female Brain (hardcover version title)
Author: Simon Baron-Cohen
Status: Page 88 of 186, 271 including appendices (tests completed), bibliography, and index
Mid-Book Review: So far the author has stated his thesis pretty much over and over, as well as his caveats. Basically, I feel as long as you've heard the following points, you've read 88 pages of this book:

1. Males tend to be systematic thinkers, female empathetic thinkers, and experiments have "proven" this even minutes after a baby is born.
   
2. The above thesis refers to the average male and the average female, and there can be exceptions to the rule.
   
3. Autism can be though of as of having an overly "male" brain.
   

From what I've heard, point no. 3 is the most "controversial."

Besides using the same graphs over and over (but with different labels and titles) and referring to many experiments that seem to have unmentioned variables, Baron-Cohen feels like a fluff writer. His language is not too interesting--worse, this book suffers from the turn-my-paper-into-a-full-length-book syndrome. I'm only going to finish the book so I don't feel bad about selling it back.

Passerby Profiles of Everyday People

Person #1: I went to pick up mail at my P.O. Box, and a postal worker had to step aside so I could access my box. As soon as she saw which box I stuck my key in, she addressed me by name. Of course I was amazed and had to find out her name (Diane). She claimed that she could associate every box number with its owner's name. Wow.

Person #2: A junior-high-aged girl (I admit I am pretty bad at guessing ages) caught my attention when she got off the bus in front of me. She looked like a preppy goth (no makeup), but had these cute things on her backpack: 2 NASA pins, 1 NASA badge, 1 alien pin, 1 Powerpuff Girl (Bubbles) pin, and one pin that read, "Real People Wear Fake Fur." It was the NASA stuff that struck me; to imagine that kids still had NASA dreams was just so adorable and wholesome to me.

Erik

I made a shirt with an iron-on transfer of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer's sketch of the coelacanth she found at the local marketplace. Erik recognized it immediately, as he saw the same documentary a long time ago. No one else commented on my shirt, not at work, not at my French group, nor anywhere else.

I also received my Sakki-Sakki tarot deck, and boy was it beautiful. Erik was around so I showed it to him, and he loved it too.

:0) These things are so trivial and small, but it made me feel understood.

Words of the Day (from AWAD and Dr. Dictionary)

Whilom and Quondam: Who knew we needed so many words for "former"? But both sound cooler than other thesaurus-listed synonyms, such as anterior, bygone, earlier, erstwhile, foregoing, preceding, etc.

Bloviate: Closely associated with US President Warren Harding. H.L. Mencken said of him, "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

"It's hard to be an animal"

So said my boy. We were watching a documentary about tiger sharks--one pregnant tiger shark in particular. It took her forever to find some food. But that's pretty much what her life was about: the search for food. I'm glad we're free to have other concerns.

I get annoyed with eating sometimes. I'm in the middle of something--and blam! I'm hungry again and have to decide what to eat. But it beats wandering around like a wild animal, looking for food, starving 80% of the time [this is not a scientifically-derived number, just a personal, ignorant estimate].

I also watched a coelacanth documentary. While I understand some scientists' urges to capture and study the fish, the documentary barely mentioned conserving these still possibly rare fish. Thankfully, there is a movement to prevent the overfishing of coelacanths: dinofish.com.