Dispatches From North Of The Border

The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013 ©

By DEBORAH HOFMANN
December 18, 2013 published by The New York Times ©

In lieu of a lesson on this last Wednesday before the holiday break, we asked Deborah Hofmann, the senior editor of the New York Times Best Sellers List, to create a special list for us of the top 75 best-selling education titles of 2013, and to explain how she defined and ranked books for this new category.

We hope it starts conversations, introduces you to new ideas and authors, and provides inspiration for teaching and learning well into 2014.

The Learning Network
Teaching and Learning with The New York Times

Reading List | The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013

By Deborah Hofmann

Welcome to the debut of the New York Times Best-Seller List of Education titles.

This collection of eclectic and far-ranging titles is intended to get people talking and thinking about the many ways we discuss education, how we present sometimes arcane subjects, and how we think about teaching and learning at all ages and in many contexts.

The list was compiled by looking at every adult nonfiction title that was reported each week to the New York Times Best-Seller Lists though Dec. 7, in both print and electronic formats. This includes titles that were released in earlier years, but continue to enjoy sales; for this first experiment, we wanted to cast a wide net to see what turned up naturally.

I classified a title as “Education” after I examined multiple standard sources, including its industry identifiers, reviews and interviews, to create a sort of card catalog of titles that — to this editor’s sensibilities — spoke to an enduring appetite for books that try to teach the reader, or tell us how we learn or why we learn — or, sometimes, why we do not. There were no vetting experts or outside education consultants. Had that been the case, we might still be debating.

Although some titles are familiar for having made the traditional best-seller list that is published weekly in the Book Review, many of the titles are books that were reported, but perhaps often in quantities too low in any given weeks to qualify for the traditional rankings. Cumulatively over the months and in this subgroup, however, they emerge in clearer relief. They are ranked below by their relative reported sales, the same way we rank all books on the best-seller lists.

Please note that I chose not to consider for inclusion any titles that are actively tracked toward ranking among the Childrens’ Best-Sellers List categories, so you will not find classroom evergreens or coming-of-age narratives here.

One might argue that some of these titles are simply too narrow, too literal, or, in some cases, spoofery or farce. But isn’t argument what makes for lively hand-raising and calling out of turn?


1. America the Beautiful, by Ben C. Carson with Candy Carson
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
3. How to Read Literature Like a Professor, by Thomas C. Foster
4. How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough
5. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

6. The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
7. Pathways to the Common Core, by Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman
8. Far from the Tree, by Andrew Solomon
9. The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe
10. The Smartest Kids in the World, by Amanda Ripley

11. Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch
12. How Music Works, by David Byrne
13. Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, by Charlotte Mason
14. The Autistic Brain, by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
15. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Wheelan

16. One World Schoolhouse, by Salman Khan
17. The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky
18. F in Exams, Richard Benson
19. Letters to a Young Scientist, by Edward O. Wilson
20. On Writing, by Stephen King

21. NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
22. De-Textbook, by Cracked.com
23. F for Effort, by Richard Benson
24. The Whole-Brain Child, by Daniel J Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
25. Walk in Their Shoes: Can One Person Change the World?, by Jim Ziolkowski with James S. Hirsch

26. Teach Like a PIRATE, by Dave Burgess
27. What You’re Really Meant to Do, by Robert Steven Kaplan
28. Make Good Art, by Neil Gaiman
29. The Education of a Lifetime, by Robert Khayat
30. The Naked Roommate, by Harlan Cohen

31. Sticks and Stones, by Emily Bazelon
32. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, by Daniel C. Dennett
33. College (Un)Bound, by Jeffrey Selingo
34. Confessions of a Scholarship Winner, by Kristina Ellis
35. How to Create a Mind, by Ray Kurzweil. (Penguin)

36. Pandora’s Lunchbox, by Melanie Warner
37. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s, by John Elder Robison
38. This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace
39. Heretics and Heroes, by Thomas Cahill
40. Instant Vocabulary, by Ida L. Ehrlich

41. Onion Book of Known Knowledge, by The Onion
42. Disney U, by Doug Lipp
43. Smithsonian Book of Presidential Trivia, by Smithsonian Institution and Amy Pastan
44. Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, by Mignon Fogarty
45. Things Come Apart, by Todd McLellan

46. Real Talk for Real Teachers, by Rafe Esquith
47. The School Revolution, by Ron Paul
48. What Great Teachers Do Differently, by Todd Whitaker
49. Why Teach? by Mark Edmundson
50. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

51.Shouting Won’t Help, by Katherine Bouton
52. Teach Your Children Well, by Madeline Levine
53. Big Book of How, by Editors of Time Magazine for Kids
54. Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt
55. Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett with David Wilezol

56. Here Is Where: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History, by Andrew Carroll
57. Art As Therapy, by Alain De Botton and John Armstrong
58. A History of Western Music, by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca
59. My Bookstore, by Ronald Rice
60. Hello! My Name Is Public School, and I Have an Image Problem, by Leslie Milder and Jane Braddock

61. Thinking in Numbers, by David Tammet
62. Who Owns the Learning? by Alan November
63. Good Luck, Graduate, by Gregory Lang
64. First Class, by Alison Stewart
65. A Year Up, by Gerald Chertavian

66. Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
67. History’s Greatest Hits, by Joseph Cummins
68. Strings Attached, by Joanne Lipman and Melanie Kupchynsky
69. Hope Against Hope, by Sarah Carr
70. Learning by Doing, by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Thomas Many

71. Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice, by David Stinson and Anita Wager
72. Information Dashboard Design, by Stephen Few
73. Fire in the Ashes, by Jonathan Kozol
74. What Your Third Grader Needs to Know, by Hirsch, E. D., Jr.
75. All Roads Lead to Austen, by Amy Elizabeth Smith

Sales of both print books and e-books are reported confidentially to The New York Times; retailers were not asked specifically about Education titles. The sales venues for print books include independent book retailers; national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and discount department stores; and newsstands. E-book rankings reflect sales from leading online vendors of e-books in a variety of popular e-reader formats.

Original URL:
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/reading-list-the-top-75-new-york-times-best-selling-education-books-of-2013/?_r=1

Cohn: How Canada let Caterpillar strip a plant clean


U.S. heavy equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. announced Friday it was closing its Electro-Motive Canada plant in London, Ont., a month after it locked out about 450 workers.

By Martin Regg Cohn Queen's Park Columnist
This article was first published in TheStar on February 5, 2012

Ask yourself this: Why did Caterpillar buy a plant only to destroy it?

The labour dispute at a London locomotive factory was nasty, brutish and short — a depressingly Hobbesian scenario in which brute strength prevailed over civilized rules of conduct.

There were no strikebreakers wielding clubs at Electro-Motive Canada, because there was no strike to break — the union was locked out on New Year’s Day. There were no replacement workers to bust the union, because the union was merely invited to slit its own wrists — by halving most wages from $34 to $16.50 an hour.

The U.S.-based owner, multinational giant Caterpillar Inc., didn’t so much humiliate 460 skilled workers as ignore them. It started and ended this negotiation with a carefully choreographed plan to pack up, shut down and leave town.

Clever multinationals — and this is one cunning Caterpillar — don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a factory only to shutter it. So what was the plan?

Never mind Caterpillar’s cold-hearted tactics. Its clear-eyed strategy exposes our own blindness.

The big bad Americans saw past our myopia — beyond the cash value of the plant’s physical property to size up and seize the company’s intellectual property: the innovation, trade secrets, manufacturing processes and R&D residing in London.

It won’t just relocate the heavy equipment on the factory floor, but harvest the technological know-how subsidized with government incentives and writeoffs. This wasn’t bullying, it was highway robbery — with our politicians watching from the sidelines.

Caterpillar kicked those workers in the teeth, but we should be kicking ourselves for letting it acquire the legal right to do it as it pleased when purchasing the old locomotive plant. There has been much hand-wringing that foreign investment safeguards weren’t triggered, failing to ensure a net benefit to Canada with explicit job guarantees after the takeover.

But lost jobs aren’t our only loss. Be it Nortel or RIM, we need to value the technology and patents in play when foreigners start kicking the tires. The buyers are just as likely to be scavengers as investors. And if their primary goal is to spirit away our intellectual property, they will treat the ancillary human resources as an expendable asset to be stripped away, bargained down or locked out.

The $4.5 billion auction of Nortel patents last year made a mockery of the more modest valuations that the bankrupt company had put on its own treasure trove of intellectual property, nurtured by our tax dollars. Canadians always sell themselves short.

So the first lesson of the London massacre: Ottawa must be vigilant about vetting foreign investment and retaining jobs, but also mindful of valuing — and anchoring — our homegrown intellectual property. Why underwrite our companies if we willingly sell off our embedded brainpower to foreign bidders who leave Canada cash-rich, patent poor and jobless?

If RIM is one day placed in the shop window, are we ready for a fire sale of its technology? What if Bombardier — which also builds locomotives — ever goes on the auction block, patents aplenty?

Another lesson: When it comes to the economy, empathy isn’t enough. Premier Dalton McGuinty adopted a reflexively tepid tone from the start, expressing the vain hope that both sides would come to their senses. Belatedly last week, he ratcheted up the rhetoric by exhorting the plant’s owners to play fair.

But he never picked up the phone to the employer. Nor did he reach out to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to forge a non-partisan common front. When a company treats its workers like dirt, a premier should leave no stone unturned.

McGuinty and Harper must conduct a post-mortem. More Caterpillars are coming, and they will metamorphose into a plague on our intellectual property if we don’t start using our heads. I’ve argued before that globalization can bring benefits, but only if we’re smart enough to play defence as well as offence.

It’s too late to save the jobs in London. Caterpillar has closed a plant and cashiered its workers, but it has opened our eyes: it’s not just the jobs on the factory floor that are lost, but the technology that buttresses them.

A locomotive factory is gone. Now the tech train is leaving the station — with a free pass from our politicians.

Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday in TheStar
(http://www.thestar.com)


mcohn@thestar.ca

twitter.com/reggcohn

This article was first published in TheStar on February 5, 2012 (Toronto, Ontario Canada)

(http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1126357--cohn-how-canada-let-caterpillar-strip-a-plant-clean?bn=1)

ONE of the memes being thrown around over the past few years by advocates of reducing the power of public-sector unions has been the claim that public-sector workers are overpaid in comparison to their private-sector counterparts. I've always considered this an odd claim to hear, as I've been in the labour market for quite a long time and can't recall ever hearing anyone say they were going to work for a government bureaucracy because they wanted to make a lot of money. At crucial career-making junctures in life, people who want to get rich tend to enter corporate law rather than join the District Attorney's office, to work for internet companies rather than teach math in public high schools, and so forth.

All of this is coming up now because Wisconsin has become the showdown state for the public-sector union controversy, and Scott Walker, the governor, is claiming he needs to destroy the state's public-sector unions' ability to negotiate in order to deal with its budget shortfall. State workers, he says, are paid too much. But the Economic Policy Institute tells us that, in Wisconsin, public-sector workers are not in fact paid more than their private-sector counterparts. They're paid less. You can only make it appear that public-sector workers earn more by ignoring the fact that "both nationally and within Wisconsin, public sector workers are significantly more educated than their private sector counterparts."

Nationally, 54% of full-time state and local public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 35% of full-time private sector workers. In Wisconsin, the difference is even greater: 59% of full-time Wisconsin public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 30% of full-time private sector workers

....Public employees receive substantially lower wages, but much better benefits than their private sector counterparts. Wisconsin state and local governments pay public employees 14.2% lower annual wages than comparable private sector employees. On an hourly basis, they earn 10.7% less in wages. College-educated employees earn on average 28% less in wages and 25% less in total compensation in the public sector than in the private sector.

The EPI study does find there's a class of public-sector workers who earn a bit more than their private-sector counterparts: those without high-school degrees. In other words, district attorneys earn less than corporate lawyers, but janitors at the district attorney's office may earn more than janitors at a corporate law office—provided the government hasn't outsourced its facilities staff to the same private company the law office uses, which it may have, since governments have been targeting low-skilled workers for outsourcing precisely because that's how they can save money.

For most people who work for the government, however, the expectation is that your year-to-year salary will be lower, but your benefits will be better, in particular your pension. It turns out, however, that state governments won't have the money to pay a lot of those pensions. They're likely to renege on their promises, and Republicans in Congress want to allow them to declare bankruptcy in order to do so. (Funnily enough, this may be the one area in which labour unions and Wall Street are in alliance: neither one wants states to be allowed to declare bankruptcy.) In other words, as Ezra Klein points out, the public-sector employees got rooked: they accepted lower pay in exchange for retirement benefits, and now the retirement benefits look unlikely to come through.

Now, how can we explain the fact that public-sector employees are paid less than private-sector employees? After all, public-sector employees are heavily unionised, while private-sector employees aren't. Shouldn't those unions be winning public-sector employees better wages? Well, I don't really know; perhaps the fact that the government is a monopoly employer with staggering market power has something to do with it. But try considering how employees' wage negotiations with the government might look if there were no public-sector unions. In most lines of work, individuals' power to negotiate higher wages with large organisations is very limited. In government employment, individuals' power to negotiate higher wages is utterly non-existent. An individual teacher who bargains with a private school for a higher wage than her peers is going to have a tough negotiation on her hands; an individual teacher who tries to bargain with the City of Milwaukee for a higher wage than her peers is going to be laughed out of the superintendent's office. In his initial post on this subject, my colleague ventured that civil servants would constitute a powerful bloc able to protect their wages even without unions. I'm not really sure what this means. Through what mechanism are civil servants supposed to bargain for wage increases if they don't have unions? Who's supposed to do the bargaining?

Originally posted in The Economist Feb 21st 2011, 14:55 by M.S.

As we are gripped in cold and snow Black Walnut Lane Farm was tweeting about the farm being in the middle of the spring lambing season. It made me feel that spring really is not that far away. We are still in for more winter but soon all of us will be in the middle of April showers and then May flowers.

If you are looking for locally grown foods then I would suggest that you get yourself out to Black Walnut Lane Farm in Millgrove, Ontario and start enjoying and supporting locally grown produce.

Black Walnut Lane Farm

Local Farm Food Worth The Premium