Jane Haddam

I think it’s interesting who does like Obama and who doesn’t–I like him quite a bit, and I remember the Carter administration too well to think he’s the “most informal” president we’ve ever had–but the part of the VDH article that really strikes me is that part about “coarseness.” I want to be a little…

Yesterday, I wrote a post so lame I ddn’t bother to publish it.  I know I tend to blither, but by the time I got finished with Luther, Calvin, the doctrine of predestination and all the rest of it, even  I didn’t know what I was trying to say. I’ve had a bit to sleep on…

Having regained some of my equilibrium over the last couple of weeks, I’m back to reading the kind of thing that makes some of you claim that I read the way people eat spinach–because it’s good for me, not because I enjoy it. But I do enjoy the stuff I read.  It makes me very…

First, let me start off this post by saying I’m really beginning to feel that I have to go out and read Silas Marner.  I never have, and it was never assigned in any school I went to, or in any school my sons went to, but it seems to be such an excruciatingly awful…

John says that teaching somebody to recognize whether an op-ed is in favor of abortion or against it, for instance, isn’t teaching how to read but teaching how to think. And I’ve thought about it, and I don’t agree.  Teaching someone to disset the op-ed’s argument and decide whether it’s valid or not is teaching how to…

So–John thinks it’s impossible to teach anybody to think, and Lymaree thinks it can be done, but I  was really asking for a lot lesst–I want to teach people to read. You can, in fact, teach some levels of analysis–literary and logical–even to students with very little in the way of intellectual talent, but what…

Well,  I could start this off by arguing with  John about what we need to know–if “reading” is one of those things every student needs, then the great classics of the tradition and understanding how to recognize and decode literary forms are also “need to know” items, for the simple reason that people who cannot…

It really does seem as if we’re all so entrenched in thinking about education in terms of “courses,” that we can’t seem to get out of it. To answer some of the questions and comments–no, I don’t think a series of national tests will lead to a national, centralized curriculum, because we already have such…

One of the fascinating things about writing this blog is the way in which, thinking I’m being perfectly clear, I suddenly realize that I haven’t managed to get my point across at all. Those of you who posted after the last entry tended to concentrate on things like students who want to be carpenters or…

THERE’S a title calculated to turn off any lurker who might fight his way over here.  Or hers. But I’m going to try to backtrack a little here. I agree with Cheryl that there has to be some way to insure that most people at least get the chance at a basic education, and that…