Tag: reading

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Reading to baby

The people who told you to turn off the TV, now say to read to your baby. Easy advice to give if you’ve never done child care.

This is the first time the American Academy of Pediatrics — which has issued recommendations on how long mothers should nurse their babies and advises parents to keep children away from screens until they are at least 2 — has officially weighed in on early literacy education.

As the New York times, explains, “While highly educated, ambitious parents who are already reading poetry and playing Mozart to their imageschildren in utero may not need this advice, research shows that many parents do not read to their children as often as researchers and educators think is crucial to the development of pre-literacy skills that help children succeed once they get to school.

“Reading, as well as talking and singing, is viewed as important in increasing the number of words that children hear in the earliest years of their lives. Nearly two decades ago, an oft-cited study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than have those of less educated, low-income parents, giving the children who have heard more words a distinct advantage in school. New research shows that these gaps emerge as early as 18 months.

“According to a federal government survey of children’s health, 60 percent of American children from families with incomes at least 400 percent of the federal poverty threshold — $95,400 for a family of four — are read to daily from birth to 5 years of age, compared with around a third of children from families living below the poverty line, $23,850 for a family of four.

“With parents of all income levels increasingly handing smartphones and tablets to babies, who learn how to swipe before they can turn a page, reading aloud may be fading into the background.

“The reality of today’s world is that we’re competing with portable digital media,” said Dr. Alanna Levine, a pediatrician in Orangeburg, N.Y. “So you really want to arm parents with tools and rationale behind it about why it’s important to stick to the basics of things like books.” Continue reading “Reading to baby”

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The end of reading . . . books?

The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. imgres-3As detailed in a follow-up article in today’s The Atlantic,

“They hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in their car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

“If you are the sort of person who believes that TV and the Internet have turned American culture into a post-literate scrubland full of cat GIFs and reality TV spinoffs, then this news will probably reinforce your worst suspicions. But buried beneath it, I think there’s an optimistic story to tell about American book culture. It’s about the kids.

“Without question, the American bookworm is a rarer species than two or three decades ago, when we didn’t enjoy today’s abundance of highly distracting gadgets. In 1978, Gallup found that 42 percent of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year (13 percent said they’d read more than 50!).  Today, Pew finds that just 28 percent hit the 11 mark.

“But here’s why we shouldn’t proclaim the death of the book quite yet (aside from the fact that the vast majority of the country does still read them). First,  the number of books an American reads tends to be closely associated with their level of education. Even those with just a little bit of college read far more, on average, than high school grads or less. That may be because people who grow up reading are far more likely to enroll in higher education. But it seems at least somewhat likely that reading books in class conditions people to read books later in life. And the good news (for publishers, at least) is that today’s twenty-somethings, as a rule, go to college. A recent Department of Education study found that 85 percent of the high-school class of 2004 had at least some postsecondary education. Continue reading “The end of reading . . . books?”

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The suicide of the humanities

You’ve probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.imgres

The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline. As reported in that bastion of humanities expertise, The Wall Street Journal, one culprit is mostly to blame. As WSJ puts it, “But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature.

“No longer will the reading of, say, “King Lear” or D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career—the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few—the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head—there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist’s chair. In their numbing hands, the term “humanities” became code for “and you don’t even have to show up to get an A.” 

“When people wax plaintive about the fate of the humanities, they talk, in particular, about the slow extinction of English majors. Never mind that the preponderance of English majors go into other fields, such as law or advertising, and that students who don’t major in English can still take literature courses. In the current alarming view, large numbers of people devoting four years mostly to studying novels, poems and plays are all that stand between us and sociocultural nightfall.”

 

More at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323823004578595803296798048.html

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Non-western feminist reading

“Too often ‘feminism’ is understood through a western lens, and this includes African-American and Latino feminism, as practiced in the academy,” reads an item re-posted on Because We’re Still Oppressed,”which continues:  “Positions at the margins of feminism, developed from theoretical frameworks that do not rely on western epistemology are necessary to disrupt the theoretical assumptions that we have grown too comfortable with.

“Further, it is my intention that, as this list circulates tumblr through reblogs, more texts will be added to it so that space can be made for voices that are all too often unheard, new voices can be added to the feminist “canon,” and we can recognize the very real need for feminisms that arise in contexts outside the american and the western theoretical.”

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Maria Lugones “On the logic of pluralist feminism” in Pilgrimages

Alison Bailey “Locating Traitorous Identities” (about how privileged should proceed)

Uma Narayan, Chapter One, “Contesting Cultures: ‘Westernization,’ Respect for Cultures, and Third-World Feminists” in Dislocating Cultures (about what is really western about our (eastern) feminism)

bell hooks “Sisterhood: political solidarity among women” in FEMINIST theory

Sumbul Ali-Karamali, “Women in Islam: Marriage, Divorce, Polygamy, and that Veil Thing” inThe Muslim Next Door

Amina Wadud “Rights and Roles of Women” in Qur’an and Woman

Azizah al-Hibri “The Nature of Islamic Marriage” in Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective

Birdwhistell, Joanne D. 2007. Mencius and masculinities: Dynamics of power, morality, and maternal thinking. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Butnor, Ashby. 2001. Self and social engagement in Zen Buddhism and Western feminism. East-West Connections 1(1).

Dalmiya, Vrinda. 1998a. Not just “Staying Alive.” Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 15 (3): 97-116.

 

Complete list at: http://oppressedbrowngirlsdoingthings.tumblr.com/post/41260621801/non-western-feminism-a-list

 

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Assault on Reason, revisited

With the approaching elections in the US, the nation’s polarization is getting more and more attention. Similar divides persist in many countries, causing those on both sides to wonder why their opposition seems so entrenched in its opposition. How can they not understand? Why are people so wrong-headed? What causes people to vote against their own interests?  One infamous figure in American politics has given this matter a lot of thought––and for good reason. Let’s not forget that former Vice President Al Gore actually was elected by the popular vote when he ran for the nation’s highest office, Continue reading “Assault on Reason, revisited”

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Print is dead?

The “death of the book” has been talked about for half a century, along with the demise of the newspaper, he obsolescence of the magazine, and, more generally, the end of reading. It started with worries about radio and television, then shifted to concerns about computers and games, and now attaches to social networks and mobile devices.  Today this topic resurfaced with the announcement that Newsweek would suspend production of the print version of the magazine in 2013, with unsympathetic observers immediately offering an “it’s-about-time” response. After all, electronic media bring us “stories” in ways that are faster, cheaper, more dynamic, more visual, and in greater more abundance. It’s a no brainer right? Continue reading “Print is dead?”