Reading this two days

The Knowledge Deficit by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

I am and have been a fan of his and alan bloom for a long time. He is right about reading comprehension formal strategies being boring, boring and boring to kids. They hate them. My notes are thus: Inference and drawing conclusions IS comprehension. 90% of the words must be known to get the other 10. Vocabulary and background knowledge AND fluency are absolutely required. Every day.

Readers need a knowledge base for reading, domain-specific knowledge and the ability to construct a mental situation model to understand the kind of reality that the decoded words are referring to. (Theory of Mind, cognitive complexity)

Breadth of knowledge kills poverty of mind. The Matthew effect is profoundly true. Why use Multiple Intelligence approaches? Time is precious, opportunity costs are high. Readers need to be taught decoding as linguistics, encoding as formally as possible using the Trivium. Decode, encode, print code is standard english.


The Electric Church by Jeff Somers. Standard issue "sin city" meets sci-fi noir but not as good as Gibson made it with Neuromancer.

Slam by Nick Hornby.  Channel the mind of a teen age skateboarder boy, a good boy, who loves his mother and becomes a father. Nice coming of age where no one really grows up that much or changes that much.

Runemarks by Joanne Harris. I liked this a lot, but American Gods by Neil Gaiman was better at the same.The Order and The Word are well drawn.