50-book challenge: July.
Aug. 6th, 2007 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaDo I still have to give a spoiler warning for Deathly Hallows? There are spoilers below the cut. Also below the cut: an extensive discussion of the Our Whole Lives sex education curriculum, for those who are interested.
Watch Your Back, by Donald Westlake.
Meh. Another lackluster modern Dortmunder book, this one painfully trying to cash in on The Sopranos. But now I have done my duty and caught up.
Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Grades 7-9, by Pamela Wilson, and Sexuality and Our Faith: A Companion to Our Whole Lives Grades 7-9, by Rev. Jory Agate and Rev. Makanah Elizabeth Morriss.
OMG what an unbelievably great curriculum. I love everything about it. It's got a great structure: you start out with more intellectual issues (values, gender roles, societal messages about sex, physiology) and then move towards greater emotional content once the class has built up some intimacy and trust. The "relationships" section begins with general instruction and practice in communication skills, moves on to communicating with parents and addressing "thorny issues" with friends, including a consideration of what qualities makes someone a good friend, and finally moves on to communication in romantic relationships - and whether and how those differ from friendships. Every step builds on the one before.
The content is loving and sex-positive. It presents sexuality as a positive and natural element of the entire lifespan, and sexual intercourse as a narrow subset of sexuality, one which young teenagers are probably not developmentally ready to experience. There's explicit discussion of concepts like "touch hunger," and the difference between a desire for close physical contact (which is treated with full respect) and sexual desire (also treated with full respect, but it's important to differentiate the two!).
It's fully inclusive of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trangendered people - not just in the sessions which are specifically about sexual orientation and gender identity, but in the entire curriculum. In an exercise in which kids practice asking each other out and accepting or turning down a date, for example, the pairs are chosen at random, without regard to participant gender. A set of stories about sexual decision-making includes both same-sex and opposite-sex couples trying to decide how far they should go.
The details are all really well thought-out. For example, a regular feature is giving the kids an opportunity to write questions on slips of paper, which are then put into a "question box" and answered by the teachers. That's a pretty standard technique. But the OWL curriculum directs us to require every kid to write something, even if it's "I don't have a question." That way, the kids who do have questions don't stand out because they're the only ones writing. A tiny detail, but an important one.
The religious supplement includes both UU and United Church of Christ materials. Predictably, the UU elements are much less structured - they mostly seem to boil down to (a) constructing an altar or focal point for the classroom, where you can place items of significance to either the kids or the topic (or both); and (b) discussion of which of the UU Seven Principles might be brought to bear on each lesson. I hope the training goes into more detail about how to encourage the kids to incorporate the Principles in their thinking about sexual matters.
I'm so looking forward to teaching OWL. Sadly, we weren't able to get our collective acts together soon enough to get everyone trained before October, so we probably won't be starting OWL until late in the fall. We go for training the weekend of October 19-21.
April Lady, by Georgette Heyer.
An enjoyable trifle, with secondary characters who are more interesting than the hero and heroine. The more Heyer I read, the more I realize that the principal theme is not so much love but money.
The Reluctant Widow, by Georgette Heyer.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky gets it exactly right when she says, "while Heyer writes wonderful repartee, I think she is at her best with a plot in which nothing much happens, she wasn't good with drama. A dog loose in a park, yes, but not a battle or exciting adventures." The Reluctant Widow has a midnight marriage to a dying total stranger, a secret passage, French spies, murder, and hidden papers vital to the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars, so as a Heyer novel it is at a serious disadvantage. What saves the book for me is the characterization. Unlike in The Black Moth (implausible characters reacting implausibly to implausible situations), the characters in this one are entirely plausible, well-drawn Heyer types who react just as you would expect them to react when thrown into implausible situations. I liked it.
Siblings Without Rivalry, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
No, we don't have any special news we're hiding. I saw this on the parenting books shelf in the children's library and had to check it out because I'm such a Faber & Mazlish fan. Unsurprisingly, it's really good. The sections on the dangers of assigning roles to children (the smart one, the dependable one, the rebel, the bully, the victim) and the harm done by comparisons, even ostensibly "favorable" ones, provoked a lot of thought about my own family - which was rife with both of those things. I wonder to what extent some of the sibling problems which have festered into adulthood have come from preventable issues with family roles, rather than natural personality clashes or animosities.
Most useful new parenting idea: that always trying to make things "equal" among your kids doesn't work and isn't necessary, and that children don't find "I love you both exactly the same" satisfying or reassuring at all.
Half a Crown, by Jo Walton.
I was beta-reading this one, so it wouldn't be proper for me to say anything about it. Instead, I'll just grin smugly.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.
I'm not sure what I have to say about this one that hasn't already been said repeatedly. I liked it. I'm not unaware of its literary flaws - if ever a book suffers from plot coupon troubles, Deathly Hallows does - but there's something about Harry Potter that makes for compelling reading despite the flaws. I liked that Snape is only partially redeemed, and that Dumbledore is revealed to be significantly more complicated and ambiguous than we believed him to be - especially because his death in Book 6 could've easily justified setting him safely on the shelf as the epitome of Good. One of the things Rowling does really well in this series is to gradually introduce more and more complexity to what begins as a black-and-white moral universe, in a way that beautifully encapsulates the way that moral judgment matures as we grow up.
Oh: and I loved Neville Longbottom. I love the character arc she gave him, across the full series. I would love to read a novel about Neville leading the Hogwarts Resistance - the brief glimpse we get of him is so compelling.
Did I Say That Out Loud?, by Meg Barnhouse.
A slim and wonderful book of essays/meditations by a musician, therapist, and UU minister I met at SUUSI. She comes across as very down-to-earth and real, with great depths of compassion and charity of spirit.
Regency Buck, by Georgette Heyer.
It's kind of hard to hold on to your dignity when you're reading a book called "Regency Buck." But it was pretty good, even if I completely failed to be even the tiniest surprised, even for an instant, by the shocking twist. Notable among Heyers for an uncommon level of descriptive detail of things like the Royal Pavillion in Brighton, and a cockfight, and preparations for a duel. Interesting to get outside of Almacks for once.
Total for July: 9
Total for the year: 50
That works out neatly - without intending to, I reached the 50-book mark precisely at the end of a month. I do intend to keep posting about books which are new to me; perhaps I ought to change the tag to "the increasingly misnamed 50 book challenge."
Watch Your Back, by Donald Westlake.
Meh. Another lackluster modern Dortmunder book, this one painfully trying to cash in on The Sopranos. But now I have done my duty and caught up.
Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Grades 7-9, by Pamela Wilson, and Sexuality and Our Faith: A Companion to Our Whole Lives Grades 7-9, by Rev. Jory Agate and Rev. Makanah Elizabeth Morriss.
OMG what an unbelievably great curriculum. I love everything about it. It's got a great structure: you start out with more intellectual issues (values, gender roles, societal messages about sex, physiology) and then move towards greater emotional content once the class has built up some intimacy and trust. The "relationships" section begins with general instruction and practice in communication skills, moves on to communicating with parents and addressing "thorny issues" with friends, including a consideration of what qualities makes someone a good friend, and finally moves on to communication in romantic relationships - and whether and how those differ from friendships. Every step builds on the one before.
The content is loving and sex-positive. It presents sexuality as a positive and natural element of the entire lifespan, and sexual intercourse as a narrow subset of sexuality, one which young teenagers are probably not developmentally ready to experience. There's explicit discussion of concepts like "touch hunger," and the difference between a desire for close physical contact (which is treated with full respect) and sexual desire (also treated with full respect, but it's important to differentiate the two!).
It's fully inclusive of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trangendered people - not just in the sessions which are specifically about sexual orientation and gender identity, but in the entire curriculum. In an exercise in which kids practice asking each other out and accepting or turning down a date, for example, the pairs are chosen at random, without regard to participant gender. A set of stories about sexual decision-making includes both same-sex and opposite-sex couples trying to decide how far they should go.
The details are all really well thought-out. For example, a regular feature is giving the kids an opportunity to write questions on slips of paper, which are then put into a "question box" and answered by the teachers. That's a pretty standard technique. But the OWL curriculum directs us to require every kid to write something, even if it's "I don't have a question." That way, the kids who do have questions don't stand out because they're the only ones writing. A tiny detail, but an important one.
The religious supplement includes both UU and United Church of Christ materials. Predictably, the UU elements are much less structured - they mostly seem to boil down to (a) constructing an altar or focal point for the classroom, where you can place items of significance to either the kids or the topic (or both); and (b) discussion of which of the UU Seven Principles might be brought to bear on each lesson. I hope the training goes into more detail about how to encourage the kids to incorporate the Principles in their thinking about sexual matters.
I'm so looking forward to teaching OWL. Sadly, we weren't able to get our collective acts together soon enough to get everyone trained before October, so we probably won't be starting OWL until late in the fall. We go for training the weekend of October 19-21.
April Lady, by Georgette Heyer.
An enjoyable trifle, with secondary characters who are more interesting than the hero and heroine. The more Heyer I read, the more I realize that the principal theme is not so much love but money.
The Reluctant Widow, by Georgette Heyer.
papersky gets it exactly right when she says, "while Heyer writes wonderful repartee, I think she is at her best with a plot in which nothing much happens, she wasn't good with drama. A dog loose in a park, yes, but not a battle or exciting adventures." The Reluctant Widow has a midnight marriage to a dying total stranger, a secret passage, French spies, murder, and hidden papers vital to the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars, so as a Heyer novel it is at a serious disadvantage. What saves the book for me is the characterization. Unlike in The Black Moth (implausible characters reacting implausibly to implausible situations), the characters in this one are entirely plausible, well-drawn Heyer types who react just as you would expect them to react when thrown into implausible situations. I liked it.Siblings Without Rivalry, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
No, we don't have any special news we're hiding. I saw this on the parenting books shelf in the children's library and had to check it out because I'm such a Faber & Mazlish fan. Unsurprisingly, it's really good. The sections on the dangers of assigning roles to children (the smart one, the dependable one, the rebel, the bully, the victim) and the harm done by comparisons, even ostensibly "favorable" ones, provoked a lot of thought about my own family - which was rife with both of those things. I wonder to what extent some of the sibling problems which have festered into adulthood have come from preventable issues with family roles, rather than natural personality clashes or animosities.
Most useful new parenting idea: that always trying to make things "equal" among your kids doesn't work and isn't necessary, and that children don't find "I love you both exactly the same" satisfying or reassuring at all.
Half a Crown, by Jo Walton.
I was beta-reading this one, so it wouldn't be proper for me to say anything about it. Instead, I'll just grin smugly.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.
I'm not sure what I have to say about this one that hasn't already been said repeatedly. I liked it. I'm not unaware of its literary flaws - if ever a book suffers from plot coupon troubles, Deathly Hallows does - but there's something about Harry Potter that makes for compelling reading despite the flaws. I liked that Snape is only partially redeemed, and that Dumbledore is revealed to be significantly more complicated and ambiguous than we believed him to be - especially because his death in Book 6 could've easily justified setting him safely on the shelf as the epitome of Good. One of the things Rowling does really well in this series is to gradually introduce more and more complexity to what begins as a black-and-white moral universe, in a way that beautifully encapsulates the way that moral judgment matures as we grow up.
Oh: and I loved Neville Longbottom. I love the character arc she gave him, across the full series. I would love to read a novel about Neville leading the Hogwarts Resistance - the brief glimpse we get of him is so compelling.
Did I Say That Out Loud?, by Meg Barnhouse.
A slim and wonderful book of essays/meditations by a musician, therapist, and UU minister I met at SUUSI. She comes across as very down-to-earth and real, with great depths of compassion and charity of spirit.
Regency Buck, by Georgette Heyer.
It's kind of hard to hold on to your dignity when you're reading a book called "Regency Buck." But it was pretty good, even if I completely failed to be even the tiniest surprised, even for an instant, by the shocking twist. Notable among Heyers for an uncommon level of descriptive detail of things like the Royal Pavillion in Brighton, and a cockfight, and preparations for a duel. Interesting to get outside of Almacks for once.
Total for July: 9
Total for the year: 50
That works out neatly - without intending to, I reached the 50-book mark precisely at the end of a month. I do intend to keep posting about books which are new to me; perhaps I ought to change the tag to "the increasingly misnamed 50 book challenge."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 03:50 pm (UTC)Um, also how cool is it that you'll be teaching students their OWLs???
no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 08:14 pm (UTC)It's really meant to be a group class, though, with discussions and activities and role play practice, and I think it would be hard to get an equivalent experience through home education.
I wonder if any of the UK Unitarian societies (http://www.unitarian.org.uk/movementb.htm) use UUA-produced curricula. If you could find a local society that was either using OWL or could be talked into it, that might be a way for the girls to be exposed.
In the meantime, there's a great series of sex ed books for kids, beginning with It's Not the Stork! (http://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-Stork-Families-Friends/dp/0763600474) for ages 4 and up, It's So Amazing! (http://www.amazon.com/Its-So-Amazing-Babies-Families/dp/0763613215/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/002-2201215-9076834) for ages 7 and up, and It's Perfectly Normal (http://www.amazon.com/Its-Perfectly-Normal-Changing-Growing/dp/0763624330/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/002-2201215-9076834) for the verge-of-puberty crowd. They come highly recommended by liberal sex educators.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 08:39 pm (UTC)The physical mechanics we're happy with; there's a thousand ways and aids for teaching that, even here, because the UK school system's sex ed is so feeble that many parents are doing that part themselves. I'd love to achieve some of what Dutch schools seem to do so naturally, as far as self-respect, mutual respect, boundaries, bodily autonomy etc goes, and a nice slice of emotional - I lack the vocabulary for this - coherence? - would be good too. The ability to identify and communicate and deal with emotions.
The stuff I had to learn as an adult, basically, which would have made my life much easier if I'd known some of it ahead of time...
no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 09:22 pm (UTC)OWL grades 7-9 is the big course, with the most comprehensive information. It's something like 27 90-minute sessions long, compared to OWL for grades K-1 which is eight one-hour sessions. Right now our church only offers the grade 7-9 class, but I love the fact that there's age-appropriate education available across the lifespan.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-08 08:22 pm (UTC)I do think that any system that acknowledges the need for self-and-sexuality education throughout life is an admirable one.
And the cervical smear test vaccine. I like that, too.
("You have a baby Emer there! The lady take him out of you tummy with a KNIFE!" - we have some work to do on those mechanics).
no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 08:28 pm (UTC)For example, a regular feature is giving the kids an opportunity to write questions on slips of paper, which are then put into a "question box" and answered by the teachers. That's a pretty standard technique. But the OWL curriculum directs us to require every kid to write something, even if it's "I don't have a question." That way, the kids who do have questions don't stand out because they're the only ones writing. A tiny detail, but an important one.
My experience has been that in any given session most of the youth put in a "no question" card, but anywhere from ten to thirty percent of the cards have real questions on them. Some are obviously serious ("can you get an STD from oral sex?"), some are obviously silly ("what's sexier, a ninja or a pirate?") and some end up being real learning experiences for the facilitator ("how often does a child get raped and never tell anyone?" - that one had me delving into both the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting system and the Justice Department's National Criminal Victimization Survey).
Regarding the Sexuality and Our Faith supplement: The OWL training probably won't cover religion-specific items, since the odds are pretty good that the trainees will be a mix of UU, UCC and secular folk (such as Planned Parenthood). OTOH, the supplement includes additional, UU-specific questions that can be mixed into each individual activity; that's a very effective means of connecting the curriculum to the Seven Principles.
(Note to self: I really need an Our Whole Lives userpic ...)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-07 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-07 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-14 01:08 am (UTC)