Book Post for October

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not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, star wars, this is a prussian education system hateblog

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: Not particularly interesting as a work of skepticism, unless you happen to have an interest in space aliens particularly for some reason. Fascinating as a look into the pre-New-Atheist skepticism movement.

Sagan pays a truly baffling amount of attention to what seem to me to be relatively unimportant kinds of woo, like psychic powers and alien abductions. Of course, neither psychic powers nor alien abductions are real, and it is better to not believe in them. But from my perspective there are far more important false beliefs that actually destroy lives. Sagan mentions false memories of abuse; equally important are certain incorrect medical beliefs (such as fraudulent cancer cures and anti-vaccine sentiment) and, of course, religion.

As someone who came of age as a skeptic around New Atheists, I am struck by Sagan’s restraint as regards religion. He several times makes arguments the logical implication of which is atheism, and then backtracks that there are many liberal religious believers who of course are very rational and accept evolution and support science. I don’t agree with all of Sam Harris’s excesses, but I think it is much more intellectually honest to say that the logical implication of skepticism is atheism.

Most interesting fact: quasars were originally believed to be aliens!

The Core: Teaching Your Child The Foundations of Classical Education: This is the worst homeschooling book I have ever read.

The author literally looked at the modern education system and said to herself, “what we really need is MORE pointless memorization and meaningless execution of rote techniques.” In the standard classical-education system, memorization is most of your education from first to fourth grade. After fourth grade education concentrates on logical reasoning and clear communication. The Core eliminates that frivolous “logical reasoning” and “clear communication” part of education and replaces it with more memorization.

It’s hard to say what the worst advice in this book is, because there are so many options. The Core advises requiring your child to do literally every math problem in their textbook, even if they have mastered the material and are complaining about being bored. (I literally cannot think of a better strategy to teach children to hate math.) History consists solely of memorization: memorizing the dates of 204 world events, memorizing the US presidents, memorizing “six stories of twelve sentences each” that summarize a major era, and copying and rewriting paragraphs from histories. (You do, also, get to read historical fiction.) Writing education consists of copying out sentences and paragraphs assigned by the teacher, memorizing a bunch of rules of grammar, and learning to write five-paragraph essays.

Star Wars: Thrawn: The greatest villain in Star Wars history has returned to his proper place in the canon. With the benefit of almost thirty years of hindsight, Zahn understands exactly what the reader wants out of a Thrawn book, which is more Thrawn. It was an absolute pleasure to open to a new chapter and realize that I didn’t have to return to reading about Luke or Leia or someone boring like that.

It is difficult to write a genius character; all too often, writers rely on technobabble or unjustified leaps of logic. Not so Thrawn. Zahn plays fair with the reader; Thrawn rarely has more information than the reader does, and in theory you could often figure out what his plan is before it is revealed, even though you rarely do. Nothing is left mysterious. Star Wars: Thrawn is wonderful and I am eager about starting the sequels.

[Here are spoilers for the Dark Lord’s Answer.]

Dark Lord’s Answer: A very cool premise, poorly executed. An economist 24/7 submissive is transported into a medieval fantasy world. Because sound economic advice is often counterintuitive or even evil-sounding, in order to get anyone to take her advice she had to set up shop as a Dark Lord. Because she’s an 24/7 submissive, she sets up a puppet Dark Lord whom she submits to while also being the power behind the throne.

Inexplicably, instead of choosing to explore this incredibly interesting character and teach the reader some economics along the way, Dark Lord’s Answer chooses to leave this as a ‘mystery’ the entire time and make it a big reveal.

Thoughts Concerning Homeschooling

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting, this is a prussian education system hateblog

I.

I have much stronger opinions about the best way to educate the children I am likely to have than I do about the best way to educate children in general. However, I understand that an educational reform proposal is an important part of being a prospective homeschooling parent who also blogs, and luckily there do seem to be some obvious pieces of low-hanging fruit. Picking these can justify the effort of homeschooling in and of itself.

For instance, high schools, and to a lesser extent middle schools, should run on Silicon Valley time. There is absolutely no reason to start classes before 10, much less at 7am (!!!), as the public high school near where I grew up did. Teenagers like to go to sleep at 11am or midnight, this is an extremely predictable fact about teenagers, and you do not get millions of people to change their preferences by yelling at them to be more virtuous and have more willpower. Chronic sleep deprivation causes depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, poor memory, and poor concentration (interestingly, these are all common complaints about teenagers). And I shudder to think of the consequences of causing chronic sleep deprivation in such a crucial time for brain development. Please, for the love of god, homeschooling parents, let your teenagers sleep in.

Similarly, many schools have cut recess and physical education to create more time for academics, in spite of the evidence that exercise improves children’s academic outcomes (as well as, obviously, their physical health). Again, this is another easy fix: homeschooling parents can and should ensure that their children have sufficient time for physical activity, including plenty of time for unstructured free play. On a related note, play-based kindergartens appear to outperform academically oriented kindergartens.

The homeschooling parent may also be able to adopt some evidence-based learning techniques which are not necessarily common in the classroom. The two techniques with the most evidence are practice testing and distributed practice (also called spaced repetition). People seem to learn better if they regularly have to recall the information they’re supposed to be learning, such as by using flashcards, doing practice problems, or having to write a short essay without referencing your notes. Distributed practice/spaced repetition is spreading out what you’re learning over time: for instance, instead of teaching about the theory of evolution all in one week, spread out the lessons over several weeks, and regularly return to the concepts to review them. Promising techniques with less evidence include interleaved practice (mixing up problems of different kinds, such as having addition and subtraction problems on the same worksheet), elaborative interrogation (trying to explain to yourself why facts are true), and self-explanation (explaining to yourself why you solved a problem in a particular way or how a fact relates to other facts you already know).

While there’s not much the non-homeschooling parent can do about their teenager’s chronic sleep deprivation, non-homeschooling parents can also pick these low-hanging fruit, although with somewhat more difficulty. Prioritize physical activity and unstructured play in choosing your child’s after-school activities, flee any kindergarten which involves a worksheet, and teach your child to test themselves and spread out their studying over time. Also, if you find yourself interested in activism, please consider campaigning for your child’s high school to start at a reasonable hour.

II.

An interesting question is whether homeschooling tends to outperform non-homeschooling. Unfortunately, most of the data that purports to show that it does is selection bias hell, overrepresenting wealthy and college-educated homeschooling parents and underrepresenting educationally neglectful or just generally shitty homeschooling parents.

However, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education has done some very important– albeit preliminary– research with fewer selection bias issues. (Interested readers may fund less preliminary research here.) Poor homeschoolers tend to outperform poor publicly schooled children in reading and writing and slightly underperform them in math. Non-poor homeschoolers tend to slightly underperform in reading and writing and massively underperform in math.

We don’t have enough information to know for certain why homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers differ. However, my speculation is that poor homeschoolers tend to do better because poor homeschoolers are different from poor non-homeschoolers: for instance, they may be more likely to be culturally and educationally middle-class people who are poor because one parent quit their job to homeschool. The lower performance of children in math seems to me to be a result of the average American’s attitude towards math, namely, hatred, fear, and distrust. Many Americans can barely perform elementary-school-level math, such as simplifying fractions. No doubt this is due to American schools’ appalling math education, but one would not expect high-quality reading education from a parent who struggles reading Goosebumps, and one should not expect high-quality math education from a parent who does not know algebra.

For this reason, I would advise the homeschooling parent to put serious thought into how they’ll teach mathematics. In my case, I’m not particularly worried, because my local homeschooling coop is going to include an absurd number of physics majors, a former math tutor, and an Ivy League mathematics PhD. However, people who are less lucky should consider budgeting some money for math tutoring, perhaps from a local grad student, or a high-quality after-school math program.

III.

I currently favor unschooling as a method of homeschooling, but this is pretty much about traits of my child, rather than traits of children in general. It is pretty much inevitable– given genetics– that any children I have will have their own particular, passionate interests which they are extremely enthusiastic about learning about, and that they will respond to attempts to get them to learn about other topics with something between dutifulness and rebellion. This seems to me to imply that unschooling, which involves following the child’s interests, is an ideal choice: the children will be much happier and I won’t have to spend a bunch of time coercing them into doing well on tests on subjects they are uninterested in.

No doubt this will lead the child to have a remarkably unbalanced education: they may understand everything there is to know about sailing, or Broadway musicals, or ancient Greece, while remaining unclear on things like how molecules work or the Civil War. However, conventionally educated people are also generally unclear on these things: for instance, 19% of college students know what the Manhattan Project is, 16% know that the Raven in the poem of the same name says “Nevermore,” and 14% know that Mendel is the man who first studied genetic inheritance in plants. (In the interests of not presenting an unfairly biased list, I will add that college students are generally extremely accurate about the definitions of the words “zebra,” “hibernation,” “hockey puck,” “fossil,” and “ruby.” So science education at least is not a total failure.) It is a commonplace observation that most people go through twelve years of mathematical and scientific education, and graduate with no ability to do anything beyond arithmetic and only the vaguest understanding of Newton’s laws or the theory of evolution. If my children are ignorant about Edgar Allen Poe, at least they will have a firm understanding of ancient Greece, which is more than can be said for the general public.

In addition, one does not have unlimited time to educate children: you can either give them a broad overview of many topics or a deep understanding of a few topics. You can have a world history class which gives two days to Sumeria and one day to the Vietnam War, or you can have a Sumerian history class that doesn’t talk about anything else. It’s not obvious to me that the former is obviously better than the latter, and the difficulty of coercing children whose brains work the way mine does leads one inevitably to the latter.

Perhaps the most important part of unschooling is not what it does but what it doesn’t do: that is, unschooling does not crush the love of learning out of children. Peter Gray writes in Free to Learn that adults who attended Sudbury schools as children are often behind in academic knowledge, but they catch up quite quickly once they go to college. And they are routinely baffled by other college students: these college students are paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn from experts in the field, and yet their primary interest is doing the minimum they can to get an A. It was simply incomprehensible to them.

It seems to me that mandatory schooling is likely to reduce the love of learning, because you will regularly have to learn about things you don’t care about and aren’t interested in, and if you are interested in a subject you cannot explore it in as much depth as you would prefer. Extrinsic rewards tend to decrease intrinsic motivation: the more you’re working to get an A in the class, the less you’re working because you actually care about the subject. I’ve personally experienced this– there’s nothing that kills my motivation to write five-thousand word essays about feminism than getting a grade on it.

However, I do think there is a certain amount of wisdom in the three R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic, one that overcomes my objections to coercion. Reading, writing, and arithmetic (plus statistics) are unique among subjects in that they make it easier to learn everything else. While there are other subjects that make everything else easier to learn, they generally only require a few days’ worth of explicit education (the scientific method) or are related to so many different interests that there’s not much reason to explicitly teach it as its own thing (the ability to smell bullshit).

You could also add “a foreign language” to the list of things that make it easier to learn other things, and I certainly would if my children were not native English speakers. However, teaching a foreign language such that the child actually learns it is an enormous pain unless you happen to already have lots of friends who are fluent speakers, and there doesn’t seem to me to be much point in replicating the standard American four-years-of-high-school-Spanish-and-can’t-ask-where-the-bathroom-is. However, if you happen to know lots of people who fluently speak Spanish, Chinese, or a similarly useful language, it seems well-advised to ask them to babysit regularly and refuse to speak any language other than the one you want your child to learn.

Of reading, writing, arithmetic, and a useful foreign language, reading is the most important: while writing is primarily useful if you want to communicate something, and math is useful for the natural and social sciences but generally unnecessary for the humanities, literally everything you want to know– from cooking to woodworking to economics to the history of the Indus valley civilization– is easier to learn if you are capable of reading a reference text.

The good news is that all pretty much all unschooled children learn to read eventually, on average at the age of 8, which is only one year behind most children. (Note, however, the caveats above about self-reported data: this evidence is likely to massively overstate how early unschoolers are reading.) The bad news is that nearly a fifth of unschooling children learn to read after the age of 10, which means that they have at best three to four years of fundamentally impaired ability to learn, and perhaps almost a decade. Imagine what they could have accomplished in those three to four years with appropriate reading education!

Some unschooling advocates point to hunter-gatherer societies, in which children often learn solely through play. However, the games hunter-gatherer children play have undergone literal millennia of cultural evolution to make sure they teach the skills hunter-gatherer children need to learn. This is not true for modern children; our games are not generally optimized for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. For that reason, I suggest using Montessori methods in the early grades, which are play-based.

IV.

Both my family and my husband’s family have a disproportionate number of weird, awkward nerds. Having no social skills is deeply unpleasant: it feels like you are surrounded by incomprehensible monsters who hate you for no reason, perhaps because they are evil, perhaps because you are an inherently terrible person. For this reason, it makes sense to prioritize teaching social skills.

However, explicitly teaching social skills often goes poorly. For one thing, social skills classes are often based more on what parents and teachers want to be true than on what is actually true: for instance, students will be told to tell bullies firmly that they don’t like that, but will not be told to punch the bully or, failing that, befriend someone tough who can punch the bully for you, even though the latter are far more effective techniques. Sometimes students are even told that sitting quietly in class and doing your homework will make you friends. For this reason, I suggest avoiding social skills classes.

I am currently moderately socially competent. When I think about how I became moderately socially competent, two things stand out. One is that I began communicating online, which stripped away the incomprehensible tone and body language and allowed me to quietly observe interactions for months before I participated myself. For this reason, I plan to encourage my children to engage in online interaction.

The second is that online I could talk to people whose neurotypes (for lack of a better word) were similar to mine. (This is not about diagnoses: there are many autistic people I can’t relate to with anything other than polite incomprehension; weird awkward nerds can have a wide variety of different diagnoses and often do not qualify for any diagnosis at all, except perhaps recurring depression.) I don’t think people often think about how important the typical mind fallacy is in developing cognitive empathy, particularly when you are first learning. The first step to cognitive empathy is going “I would be sad if I lost my doll, she lost her doll, so she is probably sad.” Only once you have a firm grasp of that can you move onto “I would be sad if I lost something important to me, I don’t care about tea sets, she cares about her tea set, she lost her tea set, so she is probably sad.”

Interacting with people who are very different from you is interaction on hard mode. We normally place children with social-skills impairments in environments where reasoning based on their own minds is utterly useless. If you like listening to other people’s infodumps, you might infodump about your own interests and then be puzzled about why no one likes you. If you misunderstand subtext, you might politely decide to be blunt about whether you like another child’s haircut. If you don’t care about hygiene, you might be confused about why the other children make fun of you for wearing the same pants three days in a row. Weird awkward nerds are probably different from other children in other ways: for instance, they tend to have different interests, which makes it hard to bond over shared passions or hobbies. The situation is even worse for autistic children, who not only have all these difficulties but also have a characteristic affect (stimming, lack of eye contact) which is unpleasant for most neurotypicals. So you put children who are already bad at social interaction in a situation where they have to do very complicated social reasoning and they don’t share many interests with the children they’re talking to and the other children are already biased towards disliking them. This is a recipe for disaster.

It seems to me a better way would be to put weird awkward nerdy children in an environment of solely weird awkward nerdy children. As young children, they can learn empathy, confidence, and how to make friends around people like them. Once they’re a bit older, they can interact with ordinary children and children who are differently socially impaired, and learn how to expand their empathy to people who are more different from them: since they already have friends, their failures won’t make them feel like they are inherently unlikeable and alien, and perhaps they can compare notes with their friends and together learn to understand more normal people. Autistic children can learn to fake eye contact and to stim subtly in adolescence, after several years of being allowed to stim freely, and when they aren’t trying to learn all the other rules at the same time. (I do believe that being able to pass is, sadly, a useful skill.)

I guess this is partially an argument against inclusion, even though inclusion has been a big disability rights push for decades. I want to defend myself against this a little bit. A disabled-children-only classroom seems very silly: most disabled children don’t have any sort of social impairment, so this argument doesn’t apply to them. Not all socially impaired children should be put in the same classroom: there are lots of different ways children can be socially impaired, and a socially impaired child may have even more difficulties understanding a differently socially impaired child than they do understanding a child with ordinary social skills. And certainly there is no reason to separate disabled and nondisabled weird awkward nerds.

Like I said, I am not really capable of suggesting strategies for educational reform: I shudder at the idea of turning “weird awkward nerd” into a set of criteria that decides which classroom you get to go into. And I have zero evidence (other than my own personal experience) that suggests this is actually a better way to raise socially impaired children. That said, personally I plan on setting up my homeschooling so that my children mostly interact with similarly weird and awkward children in the elementary-school years, and to me this is the major advantage of being able to homeschool.

 

Book Post for February, Part Two: Books About Parenting

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting, this is a prussian education system hateblog

Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform On Your Kid: Exactly what it says on the tin! If you would like to replicate a bunch of developmental psychology experiments on infants with your very own infant, this book will explain to you how! All the experiments were selected for being easily doable in the home and posing no risk to the child. Important note: buy a copy while you’re pregnant, as many of the experiments are best performed on newborns.

The Baby Book: Since there is very little evidence about most decisions parents make about babies, I feel perfectly free to make my decision based on my own preferences and values. Attachment parenting, I think, is in line with my values: it hews closely to the way people raised children in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness; it emphasizes closeness and support; it doesn’t involve letting your child cry it out, which personally I feel like would make my heart shatter in two. Whether or not Dr. Sears’s advice is right for most people, I definitely think it’s right for me.

I don’t understand why the attachment parenting blogosphere is such a cesspit. Dr. Sears emphasizes that the most important thing any baby needs is happy parents and that parents know their own baby best, so if advice goes against your own parental intuition throw out the advice. Even the much-despised advice about being a stay-at-home mother is primarily motivated by concern for the mother: raising a baby is very stressful and combining it with a full-time job can make moms miserable and unable to enjoy their babies. I think Dr. Sears both doesn’t think enough about his class privilege and doesn’t recognize that some mothers legitimately prioritize career success or would go insane only talking to people whose age is measured in months, but I think it comes from a good place.

And yet all the attachment parenting blogosphere is like “h o n e s t l y if you’re not breastfeeding your child until three and you’re not using handmade cloth diapers and you don’t cosleep until the child decides to leave your bed on their own you’re basically abusing them l b q h.” There are people feeling guilty that cosleeping isn’t the right choice for them! This is absurd. How do people take such a kind and compassionate book and transform it into an opportunity to beat up on other mothers for doing it wrong?

The Other Baby Book: A Natural Approach To Baby’s First Year: Okay, now I understand where the guilt comes from.

This was pitched to me as “amazing hatereading material” and it was, in fact, amazing. I learned all about how you can prevent the adverse consequences of vaccines by giving your child megadoses of vitamin C and homeopathic preparations. And how formula is basically POISON. And pretty much every object I’ve ever bought is also POISON, full of dangerous and unpronounceable chemicals. And that “a person—a loving, calm, skilled, experienced person who was with the laboring woman, breathing with her, talking to her, being quiet with her, supporting her” is an acceptable substitute for fetal monitoring. And the important baby bonding of elimination communication (look, it’s fine if you personally feel that elimination communication helps you bond with your baby, but my opinion is that we live in the 21st century in which there is such a thing as a disposable diaper). And that epidurals hurt your baby (no, they don’t). And in general that we should trust Nature. To be honest, Nature invented the concept of parasitoids, I think she’s a terrible fucking mother.

Apparently “woman is the birth power source.” I have no idea what this means but to be honest I sort of want to make “the birth power source” my pregnancy tag.

Brain Rules for Baby: How To Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five: This book I like!

Prenatal stimulation is really cool and I feel sad about how much pseudoscience has given it a bad reputation. Your baby can learn things before they’re born! They can recognize Dr. Seuss books, or lullabies, or soap opera jingles, or their dad’s voice. And familiar sounds are likely to be comforting! It does not make your child a genius, but it doesn’t have to make your child a genius to be nifty.

Apparently one third to one half of new parents experience as much marital distress as couples who are currently in therapy trying to save their relationship. The biggest causes are sleep deprivation, social isolation, an uneven division of labor (usually in heterosexual couples favoring the man), and postpartum depression. To prevent this, practice empathy and ensure that you are doing your fair share of the chores (which will probably feel like you are doing an unfairly large share of the chores).

To increase children’s intelligence: breastfeed; talk to your baby a lot; encourage imaginative play, possibly using the Tools of the Mind classroom techniques which increase executive function; praise effort, not IQ. I think the last piece of advice was poorly phrased in the book: they imply that you should just switch out “you did well on that math test, you’re really smart” with “you did well on that math test, you worked really hard.” Of course, if your kid didn’t work hard at all, they’re going to be totally aware that you’re bullshitting them. So you should probably just say “good job” about the math test and instead praise their soccer performance, where they keep tripping over their own feet but also keep showing up to practice.

To increase children’s happiness: practice a demanding but responsive parenting style (support, warmth, and acceptance, combined with high standards and strictly enforced rules); be comfortable with your own emotions, including negative ones; be attuned to your children’s emotions; teach children to label their own emotions; validate and don’t judge emotions, but teach children about unacceptable behavioral responses to emotions and view crises as an opportunity to teach self-regulation skills; if your child is throwing a tantrum about not having a cookie, say something like “I bet you wish you could have another cookie. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and make all the carrots taste like cookies.” The advice here is pretty similar to How To Talk So Kids Will Listen (And Listen So Kids Will Talk).

To encourage self-control and altruism: create reasonable, clear rules; praise when the rules are followed and the absence of bad behavior; be warm and accepting when enforcing rules; when punishing, be swift and consistent, use real punishments, and remind your child that you love and accept them; whenever possible, use natural consequences or withdrawal of parental attention; provide an explanation for all rules during warnings, praise, and punishment; don’t spank.

I have two complaints about this book. First, autism is described as a single condition caused by a deficit in theory of mind, even though the evidence suggests that theory of mind deficits are not universal in autism. Second, the author explicitly claims that their advice might not apply to single parents, gay parents, or blended families because research has mostly been done on parents who are heterosexual married couples. I’m not sure why your parents being gay would mean that one should instead be harsh and unaccepting when enforcing rules, but okay.

Caring For Your Baby And Young Child: Birth To Age 5: Extremely complete, fairly mainstream, not a lot to say about it.

I must say I have a grudge against the American Academy of Pediatrics on the cosleeping thing. If you control properly for confounders, sleeping in a nursery is only a little less dangerous than safe cosleeping. And yet the AAP is all like “you should NEVER EVER EVER cosleep even if it is the ONLY WAY to get a good night’s sleep and even if you are afraid that YOU WILL KILL YOUR CHILD IN A CAR ACCIDENT DUE TO SLEEP DEPRIVATION OTHERWISE”, and their book is not only doesn’t address concerns about nurseries but also is like “here’s some advice about how to decorate your kid’s nursery.” Bleh. I can’t help but think that this is a class thing.

The guide to improving your child’s brain health includes the statement that you should avoid subjecting your child to psychological or physical traumas. Thanks, AAP. I never would have guessed.

Montessori From The Start: The Child At Home, From Birth To Age Three: What is it with parenting books and taking umbrage about totally random things? This book objects to disposable diapers and playpens. Like, honestly, lots of children use disposable diapers, and yet they all wind up toilet trained eventually anyway, so I don’t see any reason to stress about it. More seriously, Montessori from the Start also objects to pretend play, which is cognitively important for the development of small children.

I like the Montessori attitude of respecting children’s autonomy and giving them responsibility. I think that this book is exactly correct that toddlers are capable of handling a lot more than people think they are, if parents are patient and willing to teach. The book gives many practical suggestions of activities that allow one’s toddler a sense of independence and self-reliance, such as teaching the toddler to make their own snack.

The Expectant Father: The Ultimate Guide for Dads-To-Be: I was hoping for a book something along the lines of The Birth Partner, but for the entire pregnancy– a calm, patient book aimed not at the pregnant person but at the pregnant person’s support network. Unfortunately, that is not this book. This book is very definitely aimed at men. The sections about How You Might Be Feeling This Month include lots of information about what your masculinity is doing. Maybe you are feeling more masculine because you impregnated a woman! Maybe you are feeling less masculine because you’re experiencing couvade syndrome! Since my husband does not really have a masculinity in the first place, this book was less than helpful.

One thing that was actually good about this book was its extensive advice for deployed fathers feeling connected to the pregnancy. I myself am neither in the military or married to someone who is, but if you are this book might be helpful.

The Baby Owner’s Manual: An extremely cute premise– basically it’s a baby care book written as if it were an operating manual for a car or an electronics device. The advice is mostly boring standard advice you will also find in the American Academy of Pediatrics book. I had hoped it would be laugh-out-loud funny, but unfortunately the authors were insufficiently good at puns to make that happen. Not recommended.

Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd: A series of games which teach mathematical concepts to children from birth through school-age.  It covers symmetry, numbers, functions, and grids, and provides a variety of games that you can play with children and they can play with each other. While I know literally nothing about mathematical education, it does seem like the suggested activities are fun and would help build mathematical reasoning. Weirdly, it does not include any moebius strips.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting: A guide for nutrition for preconception, pregnant, and breastfeeding parents. This book appears to follow the USDA’s nutritional guidelines. Like all books in the What to Expect series, it is overly conservative about food safety (for instance, it forbids sushi because of the risk of parasite infection) without providing sufficient information to allow the reader to assess what they should eat based on their own risk tolerance. I suggest consulting Expecting Better or Debunking the Bump for food safety information.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting does not contain any information that you cannot find in What To Expect When You’re Expecting, except for a bit more information about various nutrients, some trouble-shooting about how you can get your nutrient needs met if you’re busy or broke or nauseous or at work, and a large number of pregnancy-safe recipes. I would suggest skipping it unless you’re having serious problems getting your vegetable/proteins/grains/whatever servings, in which case it might come in handy.

This is probably my fault for pirating the epub in the first place, but not having a search function is a huge pain in the ass if you’re trying to figure out which food groups peas count as. So if you are planning, like me, to maintain a spreadsheet where you keep track of your servings of Vitamin C foods, it might be worth obtaining an ebook with a search function.

Debunking the Bump: A Mathematician Mom Explodes Myths About Pregnancy: If you liked Expecting Better, you’d like this book, as they are in fact identical.

Debunking the Bump goes through a long list of things that pregnant people are supposed to worry about and tells you which ones are the biggest concerns, and which ones you probably shouldn’t worry about. She considers miscarriage and stillbirth to be an order of magnitude worse than congenital disability, which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause minor impairments (very low birth weight), which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause statistically detectable impairments (low birth weight). Given this value set (things will probably change if you have different values!), here is a listing of how risky things are in order of how risky they are.

1. Smoking more than ten cigarettes a day.
2. Delaying from age 35 to 36.
3. Smoking less than ten cigarettes a day.
4. Delaying from age 30 to age 31.
5. Delaying from age 25 to age 26.
6. Having a BMI of over 30.
7. Alcohol abuse.
8. Contracting viruses from small children.
9. Lead.
10. [Tied] Not eating oily fish; driving.

Of course, many of these are not actionable: you can’t become younger, and if you are smoking cigarettes while pregnant it is probably because you are a nicotine addict and not because you are unaware that it is very risky. Here is her list of actionable advice:

1. Wash your hands frequently when interacting with small children; avoid baby drool.
2. Cut down on discretionary car trips, wear your seatbelt, and drive cautiously.
3. Eat a daily serving of fish, particularly salmon and mackerel.
4. Eat organic vegetables to avoid organophosphate pesticide residue, particularly green beans and bell peppers.
5. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever eat any kind of meat without microwaving it or thoroughly cooking it first. This includes cold cuts!
6. At your next prenatal checkup, ask for your blood to be tested for lead. If your lead levels are high, take a calcium supplement.

The Shit No One Tells You: A Guide To Surviving Your Baby’s First Year: I really wanted to like this book! It’s a funny memoir by a disabled lesbian about the experience of parenting. I think a lot of parenting books are really, uh, optimistic, and The Shit No One Tells You provides a realistic point of view on how much labor sucks (a lot), whether you will have time to do anything except take care of a baby (no), and how much poop your life will involve (lots, and sometimes preceded by the word ‘projectile’).

But then I got to the chapter on vaccines.

Look, I feel like I’m a tolerant human being. “The research on this subject is overwhelming and confusing and I don’t know what the right thing to do is” is a common feeling. I am even sympathetic to parents who don’t want an autistic child, particularly an autistic child with high support needs. But when you say something like “there are so many anecdotes about children who got vaccines and then the light in their eyes just went out!”… guys, I’m autistic, and I’m a person. The light is still on in my eyes! I understand I am verbal, I don’t require a paid caregiver, and my violent meltdowns are extraordinarily rare, but people with more support needs than I have are still people! It is like finding a worm in the middle of an apple. The rest of the apple might taste really good, but it kind of ruined my whole experience.

Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers: This book contains medically inaccurate information about formula. In the developing world, breastfeeding is a very important public health intervention: breastfeeding reduces the risk of severe gastrointestinal infections, which can kill; parents who use formula in the developing world can wind up making their baby’s formula with unsafe water or diluting formula to save money. In the developed world, where most people can afford formula and the water is generally pretty safe, breastfeeding is less important: it leads to fewer gastrointestinal infections (which are far less dangerous in the developed world), lower rate of constipation, and probably a higher IQ. Many of the benefits this book claims simply have not been backed up by evidence.

In addition, Breastfeeding Made Simple has an anti-science attitude that upsets me. It’s true that formula was widely adopted, not because it was better, but because it seemed more scientific. And it’s true that some parents, inspired by behaviorism, ignored their babies’ cries and hunger signals. But that does not mean that we have learned that sometimes the wisdom of motherhood matters more than science; it means that science is self-correcting and sometimes makes mistakes, but that we can revise these mistakes. And it doesn’t mean that alternative medicine is an adequate substitute for real medicine.

I don’t mean to criticize this book overall. If you take the alleged benefits of breastfeeding with a grain of salt, it seems like an extraordinarily useful resource for breastfeeding parents, covering many common pitfalls. Babies do not understand the concept of clocks, and so you should generally expect to feed your children on their own schedule, not on yours; formula-fed babies take to a schedule much better, while for breastfed babies scheduling feedings can lead to underfeeding and loss of milk. You should never experience pain worse than a slight tenderness while breastfeeding: if you do, your baby probably has an improper latch-on. To ensure proper latch-on:

1. Hold your baby’s body under your breast and firmly against you; align your baby’s nose to your nipple; allow the baby’s head to tilt slightly back.
2. Lightly bring your baby to the breast (NOT breast to baby), rubbing your nipple along your baby’s face until the baby’s mouth opens.
3. Before the baby has developed head and neck control at four to six weeks, gently push the baby to get the baby to take more of your breast into their mouth.

For the first forty days after your baby is born, you should not expect to do anything except sleep and breastfeed. Clarify this state of affairs with your coparent(s); even though you may be home for parental leave and they are at work, they should still expect to handle all the cooking and cleaning. However, over time, breastfeeding becomes easier than formula feeding; you don’t have to prepare formula in the middle of the night, you can just sleepily stick the baby on your boob.

If your baby has enough stools, they are probably getting enough food. After the first week, the baby should have three to four stools the size of a quarter or more daily. It may help to track your breastfeedings and the baby’s stools on a piece of paper. Your doctor will weigh the baby; if the baby is losing weight, they are not getting enough food. If you are a neurotic wreck, or if you have some reason to believe you might not produce adequate milk, investing in a baby scale allows you to check your child’s weight at home. (This is unnecessary for most parents.)

The easiest way to wean a child is to simply continue to breastfeed until the child decides they no longer want to breastfeed. There are only positive consequences of this; in many hunter-gatherer cultures, children are breastfed until four or five. If that is not possible or desired, a gradual weaning is far superior to an all-at-once weaning; it is far less likely to be painful and to lead to health consequences like mastitis.

Several chapters at the end kindly and compassionately discuss breastfeeding difficulties. I appreciated the reminder that some breastfeeding is always better than no breastfeeding, and the most important aspect of feeding babies is that they get enough food. If you must supplement with formula for health reasons, this is not a failure.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students With Special Needs Succeed in School and Life: The opening paragraph of this book is about a teacher introducing the author to her students and saying “and these are my slow students”. The author wonders, “doesn’t she know that they can hear her?” As soon as I read that, I knew I would like this book.

It’s no secret that a lot of special education is really bad. “We’re cutting shop, which you like and are good at, so you can spend more time reading, which you hate and are bad at” bad. “This kid with ADHD forgot their homework, so we’re keeping them in from recess to make it up” bad. Neurodiversity in the Classroom argues that, instead, teachers of neurodivergent children should deliberately construct positive niches that build on the children’s skills and strengths. He provides a seven-step process for doing so:

1. Strength Awareness. Teachers and the student know what the student is good at and don’t just think of them as a pile of flaws and disabilities.
2. Positive Role Models. The student is aware of adult role models who have the same neurodivergences they do, including both celebrities and people in the community.
3. Assistive Technologies and Universal Design for Learning. Assistive tech is technology that improves access for disabled people, such as augmented and alternative communication devices, wheelchairs, and large-print and Braille reading materials. Universal design for learning is designing a learning environment that accommodates a wide array of learning differences for both neurotypical and neurodivergent children: for instance, using interactive digital books which provide speech, text, and graphics.
4. Enhanced Human Resources. The use of individuals besides the teacher to help the student, including psychologists, physical therapists, parents, tutors, and other students.
5. Strength-Based Learning Strategies. The teacher should build on the student’s abilities and interests when teaching them; for instance, an intellectually disabled student who loves music can be taught to read through song lyrics.
6. Affirmative Career Aspirations. The student should be aware of careers that they are well-suited to, given their neurodivergence and other abilities. For instance, a student with ADHD might be encouraged to look into jobs that involve novelty and movement, like being a personal trainer.
7. Environmental Modification. An environment should be created that fits the student’s needs. For instance, a teacher might muffle school bells if they have an autistic student with a sensitivity to sound.

The book is full of practical ideas about accommodating neurodivergent people in the classroom. For example, to accommodate a student with ADHD, the teacher might help the student use time-management software, frequently change activities (group work, then individual work, then lecture), provide hands-on learning activities, hold science or physical education classes outdoors, introduce movement breaks into the day, or have the student use a balance ball chair instead of a regular chair.

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education At Home: A lot of the advice here seems like silly and/or counterproductive ways to educate children. Why would I waste energy teaching my children to be able to name off the English kings in order? Why would you attempt to teach spelling through workbooks instead of teaching it the way every good speller learned to spell– lots of exposure to text and having their misspellings corrected? Why would you primarily teach subjects through having children do readings and then outline their readings? (Why not spaced repetition? Oh, right, they didn’t have that in the Renaissance.) Why are you teaching children to think using formal logic, but not even addressing the skill of reading a study? Where, pray tell, is the evidence base?

Not all of the Well-Trained Mind is bad. Teaching the humanities as a single subject in its historical context seems to me to be a better approach than artificially separating art, music, literature, and history. A great books education still seems to me like a useful way to teach about the development of intellectual thought. But I expect the correct way to do it is just to work through the St. John’s College Great Books list once the kids get into high school, and not bother with all this nonsense about outlining.

Every Book Is A Social Studies Book: How To Meet Standards with Picture Books, K-6: This is pretty much exactly what it says in the title: a bunch of ways to use classic children’s books to teach about social studies topics. (“Let’s use the Sneetches and discuss prejudice!” “Let’s read about Ellis Island, then talk to people we know who are immigrants!”) If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, you’d probably be interested in it. It is mildly annoying that one of the suggested lessons is about reducing one’s garbage output, when in reality excessive garbage production is not a particularly urgent environmental issue and it would be much better if they had talked about climate change instead.

Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs: In case you’re wondering, these skills are focus and self-control, perspective-taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and self-directed engaged learning.

To build focus and self-control: support your child’s interests; play games that encourage executive function, like guessing games, puzzles, sorting games with changing rules, Simon Says, and Do The Opposite Of What Simon Says; have children participate in reading books by repeating refrains or familiar words; for children over the age of two, show them age-appropriate, meaningful, educational, and nonviolent television; no background television; encourage children to play pretend; get children to make plans, follow plans, and then discuss what they accomplished; ensure your child is well-rested and has breaks; model focus, self-control, and taking breaks yourself.

To build perspective-taking: model perspective-taking; teach children collective problem-solving skills, like brainstorming possible solutions and identifying ways to meet everyone involved’s goals; be warm and kind to your children; validate your children’s feelings; talk about feelings– yours and theirs; talk about other people’s points of view in everyday life; encourage playing pretend; when a child does something that hurts others, explain how it hurts others; ask children to try to figure out the goals and motivations of people they know and fictional characters.

To build communication: model a love of language and literature; talk a lot to infants and toddlers; talk about subjects that go beyond the here and now, like what happened in the past and might happen in the future; talk about what your children find interesting; tell stories about your life and ask children to tell stories about theirs; read to children and talk about books with them; play word games; encourage children to write; use cognitively engaging talk and complex words; give children access to many forms of media, including music, art, and the performing arts.

To build the ability to make connections: tell the child about other things that are connected to their passions (e.g. a knight is like a superhero in the past); acknowledge that making mistakes is part of learning; give children open-ended toys like balls and dolls; use spatial words like “above”, “behind”, “below”, etc.; when playing with children, don’t boss them around, but instead ask questions, describe, and point out mathematical concepts; play hide-and-seek and treasure hunts; use math talk in everyday situations, such as giving out cookies; give children chores that involve math; play board games and dominoes, which involve counting; show children optical illusions; give them feedback on the strategies they chose for thinking about problems.

To build critical thinking: encourage your child’s curiosity and interests; let them play; give them accurate and valid information, even if you have to look things up; help children find other experts; teach children how to assess if things are true; talk about television shows and ads to encourage media literacy; when you and your child have a conflict, help them brainstorm ways to resolve the conflict; talk to your children about confounding variables (or someone else will).

To build the ability to take on challenges: model managing your stress, talking to others about stress, and taking time for yourself; don’t protect your child from normal bad experiences; have a warm, caring, and trusting relationship with your child; don’t freak out about your child hurting themself; help them develop coping strategies for stress; have reasonable expectations; have your child come up with a plan for following your rules and meeting your expectations, including a plan for if their first plan doesn’t work; let shy children watch new situations and gradually come to participate; promote your child’s passions; praise effort not ability; teach them that the brain is like a muscle and it gets stronger with use and hard work.

To encourage self-directed and engaged learning: be trustworthy and reliable, providing safety, security, and structure; help children set and work for goals; always include a social, emotional, and intellectual aspect to learning; when a child is recalling a past event, practice a high-elaborative style, in which you ask open-ended questions, show interest, provide feedback to the child, and repeat what the child says; have conversations that explore the past, the future, and fantasy; have children explain what they’re learning; have children strive for their personal best; give children accountability through clear expectations, acknowledging their strengths, and praising effort; create a community of learners.

How To Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success: You know that thing where people say DARE makes kids use drugs more because it normalizes drug use by telling them about all the other kids who are doing drugs? I don’t know about DARE but that is definitely true of this book for me. Normally, I think that unstructured play is the best thing for children, and my parents gave me plenty of time for it. I know there are a lot of great schools; I’ve met enough people who went to Ivies to be aware that their college experience honestly wasn’t that much different than my own. And I had a full-time mental illness as a teenager which meant that I didn’t do three hours of homework a night or go to fourteen extracurriculars.

But then I read this book and I was like “holy shit, people will judge your child for going to Barnard instead of Stanford? People hire coaches to help their children optimize their college applications? People start trying to get their children into prestigious preschools as soon as they’re born? THERE’S SUCH A THING AS A PRESTIGIOUS PRESCHOOL???????” and now I have tons of anxiety disorder fuel I didn’t before. Thanks! Very helpful.

Also, what is it with old people and the trophy thing? Yes, I got a participation trophy for soccer when I was six. No, I was not somehow deceived into thinking I was good at sports; I was perfectly fucking aware I sucked at sports. No, I don’t think it screwed me up. Can’t we wait for relentless competition until the kids are no longer reading books with pictures in them?

The Happiest Baby on the Block: When babies are born, they are not 100% finished yet. Human babies are far more dependent than nonhuman babies, because we have big heads and narrow hips and if we waited for the babies to actually be finished mothers would be way more likely to die in childbirth. Therefore, babies are likely to be very fussy and bad at self-soothing for the first few months of their life.

The solution is to create an environment that imitates the womb. This is what The Happiest Baby on the Block calls the 5 S’s:

• Swaddling– tightly wrap your baby. You can do this really tightly; most parents wrap far too loosely, for fear of causing damage.
• Side or Stomach– put the baby on their side or their stomach, not their back. (Always put the baby on their back when they sleep, to reduce risk of SIDS.)
• Shhhhhh– Make a loud shushing sound near the baby’s ear. Try to be as loud as the baby’s crying. You can also use a white noise CD.
• Swinging– Rock the baby, put them in a swing, or even stick them on the washing machine. For this one, it’s important to be gentle, because shaking a baby can cause brain damage.
• Sucking– Give the baby something to suck on, such as a pacifier, your finger, or your boob.

The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How To Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old: The part of toddlers’ brains that is good at language and logic is immature, and therefore the emotional and impulsive part of their brains is in the driver’s seat. It is best, therefore, to think of yourself not as your child’s boss or as your child’s friend, but as an ambassador from Adult Land to the exotic country of Toddlerlandia, with its strange customs and manners. An ambassador is unfailingly polite and respectful, and they’re willing to negotiate. But when a country is trying to get away with something that is absolutely unconscionable, an ambassador is willing to put her foot down and say “my country will not accept this.”

When a toddler is upset, always begin by echoing what she wants and feels, to make her feel understood, before taking a turn to tell her your important messages. (Of course, if your child is doing something that harms herself or others, always stop her first and then empathize. You don’t her to be hit by a car because you empathized while she was running into the street!) Use language toddlers understand: short phrases, repeated several times, with animated gestures and an expressive tone of voice.

If your child is behaving in an annoying but not dangerous way, first empathize with her, using words she understands. Then offer her a win-win compromise where you both get something you want. If she continues to behave in an annoying way, clap your hands hard and growl “no!” If she still does that, then kindly ignore her until she quiets, checking in every twenty to thirty seconds to empathize again. If your child is harming herself or others, or breaking one of your firm rules, use an appropriate consequence such as a time-out or taking away a privilege.

The best way to combat bad behavior is to prevent it. Therefore, give your child plenty of attention and praise when they’re doing well. Praise is often more likely to be believed if you say it to another person where the toddler can overhear. Offer your child age-appropriate choices (although not with more than two options, which is the most she can handle). Sometimes pretend to be incompetent at things (“do the pants go on your head?”) to make your child laugh and feel confident. Occasionally delay something your child wants for ten or twenty seconds, to give the child practice with patience and teach them that things they want will come if they wait. Help them practice breathing slowly, so they can do it when overwhelmed. Spend special time with them (as little as five minutes) several times a day, and talk to them at night about things they did well over the course of the day. If your child does not have a lovey or transitional object, help her find one. To teach appropriate behavior, tell stories about children who behave in appropriate ways, notice and praise other children who behave appropriately, and role-play troublesome situations when the child is calm.

[content warning: depressing fact about the Holocaust]

Free To Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life: It turns out this whole time Mike Blume and I have been unfairly blaming the Prussians and school was just as bad before then. The 17th century Protestants are going about memorizing little ditties about how if you tell a lie you will go to hell and be tortured for eternity. Not to be outdone, the Catholics were memorizing “What does it mean to resist authority? To resist authority is to rebel against the divine order. What happens to those who do not submit to authority? They will suffer eternal damnation.”

The basic thesis of this book is that children have a natural drive to learn, which schools successfully manage to beat out of them over the course of twelve years. This seems plausible to me. Preschoolers are, after all, known for their incessant questions. Human beings evolved to have an extended childhood because of how much we need to learn. It seems extraordinarily strange that evolution would have us pay all the costs of taking care of a child for ten or fifteen years instead of having new children, and not bother to evolve children a desire to actually learn things as opposed to being dragged into learning kicking and screaming. Other animals learn through play, and children do have a notoriously strong desire to play. We know that extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation dead. And hunter gatherer tribes do not explicitly teach their children; instead, their children play games, imitating the adults, and over time acquire all the skills they need to be successful hunter gatherers. The fact that children have to be forced to learn is very strange, and primarily because for a very long time obedience and respect for authority were far more important virtues to teach children than independence and autonomy. Since, nowadays, independence matters more, it makes sense to shift back to a forager model of learning.

My one point of disagreement is that Free to Learn adheres to a Sudbury school/unschooling model in which children basically do whatever they want. I agree that that is the ideal and it works best for hunter-gatherers. However, hunter gatherers also have thousands of years of social technology, which means that the games children want to play are games which teach them skills useful in a hunter-gatherer society. We have, clearly, wasted our last couple of thousand years of cultural evolution on getting children to memorize things about eternal torture. So in the meantime I think something like Montessori is correct.

That said, time for unstructured play is also very important. Consider Little League versus a game of baseball with your neighbors. Because you have a coach at Little League, you’re probably going to be better at baseball, if for some reason you care about elementary schoolers actually being good at baseball. But if you play with friends you get the same amount of exercise, you’re free from adults, and you get practice resolving conflicts fairly and compromising with others about what you want to do. Kids who really really don’t want to play baseball don’t have to, and there’s an incentive to make playing baseball more fun for kids who suck at it– otherwise, you won’t have enough players to make up the team. And Mom doesn’t have to drive anyone anywhere. It just seems like a better system all around.

Interesting fact: The Baining are apparently the world’s most boring people, and at least one anthropologist quit studying them in disgust at how dull they are. They think that natural things are shameful and that the purpose of human life is work. Almost uniquely among human cultures, they don’t really tell stories; most of their conversation focuses on work and details of daily living. Free to Learn argues this strange behavior is linked to the Baining finding children’s play shameful and discouraging or even punishing it.

Other interesting fact: At Auschwitz, Jewish children played gas chamber.

[content warning: child sexual abuse]

Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education For Grades K-1: You know how sex-positive feminists are always like “we need comprehensive sex education that goes beyond STIs and putting condoms on a banana. Sex education should talk about pleasure. It should give children an opportunity to think about sexual ethics and their sexual values, without assuming the only way to ethically have sex is to wait until marriage. It should be inclusive of disabled people and LGBT+ people. It should help people set boundaries and teach them to respect other people’s consent.” Well, good news, this exists and it’s called Our Whole Lives.

I particularly liked the abuse education lesson. Child sexual abuse education is very important, but I worry that if you only talk about genitals in the context of abuse, then it winds up treating genitals as bad and wrong and forbidden, which is not the message we want to send. The lesson on abuse begins by talking about healthy things we do for our bodies like exercising and eating vegetables, then talks about how loving touch is another healthy thing we do with our bodies which makes people feel good. Then masturbation is discussed briefly, along the lines of “masturbation is touching your own vulva or penis. Some children do this and other children don’t. Either way it is fine, but masturbation must be done in private.” Then they move to talking about how no one should ever touch you without your consent except in an emergency, and you don’t have to put up with touch that makes you feel angry or afraid. Only after all this context has been laid out do they talk about sexual abuse. I think this gives the message that (a) touch in general and sexuality in specific is a good thing, but (b) some bad people use touch in a way that is hurtful to others. Which I think is the right message to be sending.

Disability is included casually throughout the program: for instance, some of the children in stories are disabled, and the teacher is asked to specifically point out that disabled bodies are also wonderful.

Book Post for August

Tags

ada palmer, discworld, ozy blog post, parenting, PRECIOUS sexual energy, rationality, this is a prussian education system hateblog, world's worst vegan

[Thanks to Linch and Nick for buying me books. If you like my blog, you too can buy me a book by clicking on the link in the upper left-hand corner of the blog.]

Raising Steam: After I discovered Terry Pratchett had Alzheimer’s, I stopped reading Discworld, because I didn’t want to read the last Discworld book. After it was pointed out to me several times that my options are reading the last Discworld book or dying with a Discworld book unread, I picked up Raising Steam.

Raising Steam is interesting because like a lot of Pratchett’s later work it’s quite serious– this is a book about the process of a fantasy world undergoing the Industrial Revolution– but there’s a bunch of little worldbuilding details left over from earlier books that were far more silly. So the dwarves’ political intrigue is about who gets to sit on the Stone of Scone, and it’s pointed out that one dwarf really just wants control of the treacle mines, and so on. I actually like this: actually existing worlds are sometimes quite silly.

Pratchett’s dwarves are a really obvious Islam metaphor, but actually remarkably sensitively handled (especially given his racist jokes in earlier books): he emphasizes that there’s nothing undwarvish about progress or about feminism, that what ‘dwarvish’ means must and has to change, and that the opinions of extremist clerics do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the dwarf on the ground.

The Animal Activist’s Handbook: I love this book! The Animal Activist’s Handbook provides tips for vegetarians and vegans looking to create more vegetarians and vegans, including specific scripts for dealing with common questions, like “where do you get your protein?”, “don’t plants suffer too?” and “didn’t God make animals for us to dominate?”

Example advice: Share vegan food with meat-eaters, but make sure it’s food they don’t find repulsive– leave the tofu-and-carrot burgers with nutritional yeast sauce at home. Don’t try to convince people of your favorite raw-food diet. Don’t freak out about vegan purity: the effect of an occasional egg in a hamburger bun or bit of whey in a candy bar is far outweighed by omnivores thinking vegetarianism is difficult, time-consuming, and isolating. Don’t talk about health: people don’t stick to fad diets. Dress like the people you’re trying to reach out to; if you’re talking at churches, get a haircut and wear nice slacks. If someone asks about vegetarianism at the dinner table, say “I’m glad you’re interested, but I don’t want to monopolize the conversation and I’ve found that it can put people off their food. Can I have your email to talk to you about it later?”– it creates positive feelings from those who were expecting a vegetarian lecture. Always look to find common ground: get people to agree that animal cruelty is bad. Encourage people to do whatever they can: in particular, try to get them to stop eating birds and fish, which result in most of the animal suffering an omnivore causes. Practice the Socratic method: ask questions and let people draw their own conclusions. Befriend omnivores instead of isolating yourself out of vegan purity. Never get angry. Never get snarky. Never insult anyone. If someone insults you, smile and say something like “hey, you started the conversation!” Never get derailed onto another topic, like abortion or the death penalty. Know where people can get more information about vegetarianism, or ideally carry pamphlets with you.

The core of the book is that the influence you have on others is just as important as the animals you don’t eat yourself. Through nonjudgmentally encouraging others to recognize the contradiction between their opposition of animal cruelty and their support of factory farming, you can get people to reduce or even eliminate their animal consumption. Therefore, it is really important that we as vegetarians be kind, don’t lecture people, and model vegetarianism being an easy and pleasant way to live.

I appreciated the first chapter’s emphasis on altruism as something you do to make you happy and to find meaning in your life, instead of a grim duty.

In spite of coming out in 2009, this book feels extremely effective altruist to me: it talks about cause selection, emphasizes the importance of evidence when selecting tactics, and uses numbers when talking about how much good you can do. Is that just the Singer influence?

Mating in Captivity: A book about how to have a hot sex life while monogamously committed, which I purchased on the grounds that monogamous people are doing satisfactory sex lives on hard mode and can therefore be expected to have advice for easy-mode people like myself. Mating in Captivity avoids the “Ten Tips For A Hot Sex Life Tonight”-style advice, instead talking about improving one’s sex life through improving one’s relationship. A lot of the book is about how increased intimacy can destroy passion. Through developing stability and the confidence that your partner will stay there, you become bored. That’s how you get the famous “our relationship is great! they’re the love of my life! …except that we never have sex” couples. The solution is for both partners to maintain boundaries and autonomy, and be open to the existence of ‘the third’ in relationships. (Which doesn’t necessarily mean nonmonogamy– it can simply mean flirting or acknowledging your partner’s crushe son other people.) A lot of Perel’s other ideas are frankly not very insightful: did you know that BDSM can be very erotic, but some people think it’s degrading or anti-feminist? Did you know that American society is simultaneously prudish and licentious in a way that screws people up about sexuality?

Not nearly as good as Come As You Are, which I still want to give out on street corners as a sort of sex-positive missionary.

How To Win Friends and Influence People: In lieu of evidence, this book has a bunch of stories in which some person goes through Insert Absurd Levels Of Hardship Here and then comes to Absurd Levels of Success through application of Principle Discussed In This Chapter, and then it turns out that man… was Albert Einstein. (Well, actually, mostly Abraham Lincoln.) I assume this is because it was written in the 1930s and they had weird self-help book writing styles back then.

I completely approve of the advice provided in this book, which is mostly about not complaining, giving honest compliments, and looking at things from other people’s point of view. And I like the reminder that being nice is not just ethical but also more effective. But fundamentally I object to a self-help book in which half the content is anecdotes about early twentieth century celebrities. I don’t care! Get to the good part! Someone needs to write a different version of this book catering to me.

Expecting Better: A much-needed dose of sanity in the hysterical, overprotective world of pregnancy advice. Emily Oster, an economist, sensibly deals with many unreasonable and non-evidence-based beliefs with regards to pregnancy. Is coffee consumption bad? (Not if you consume less than three or four cups a day.) Is sushi really going to hurt my baby? (No.) Do I have to worry if I’m gaining five or ten pounds more than the doctor says I should? (No, and it’s much better than gaining five or ten pounds less.) Do I really have to eat that much fish? (Unfortunately, this one is a yes.) Perhaps Oster’s most controversial advice is her advice that there is nothing wrong with consuming a glass of wine with dinner while pregnant. As long as you take care not to consume more than one unit of alcohol a day– the amount the liver can easily and quickly metabolize– she argues, not only is there no evidence it harms your fetus, there’s not even any plausible mechanism for it to do so.

My favorite fact from this book is that there was a remarkably effective medication for pre-pregnancy nausea which is no longer sold for fear of lawsuits, since some women who took it and got birth defects threatened to sue. A meta-analysis found that this nausea medication led to a non-statistically-significant decrease in birth defects, and it is a combination of a B vitamin and Unisom, a Class B drug (that is, a drug which has an above-average safety profile in pregnancy). Oster recommends rolling your own.

The best thing about Expecting Better, I think, is that it allows the reader to choose their own risk tolerance, based on their own assessment of the risks and benefits. Oster is clear that the decisions individual pregnant people make are just that– individual. A professional wine taster will have a different cost-benefit analysis on consuming alcohol than a person who has no interest in drinking; someone who would welcome a child with Down Syndrome has a different cost-benefit analysis than someone who is already struggling with two intellectually disabled children. There is no right or wrong answer; it depends on your goals, your comfort with risk, and your preferences. This sort of clear-headed compassion is desperately needed in the parenting advice field.

Gender Dysphoric Person Rating: 10/10, contains absolutely nothing about your innate womanly nature. Are there PEER-REVIEWED STUDIES of your innate womanly nature? No? Then Emily Oster doesn’t care.

Taking Charge of Your Fertility: I do not recommend this book unless you happen to be in the category “people who have a uterus, like gross things, and are also complete nerds.” Like, if you are the sort of person who really deeply in your heart of hearts wants to make a chart of the functioning of your cervical mucus and also cherishes fantasies about showing up gynecologists with your expert knowledge of your own reproductive system, then this book is for you. If your thought on that is more “cervical mucus is gross” or “I don’t like graphs”, then I must say I don’t really understand your psychology, but this is probably not the book for you.

Gender Dysphoric Person Rating: 8/10. There’s a little bit of woo-woo feminist stuff about how every woman should be in tune with her body, but it’s relatively brief and then we get back into Cervical Positioning And You and How To Self-Diagnose Your Infertility Problems.

Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy: First of all, that cover.

I told Topher that he had to get the heterosexuals to stop. He said that he had no control over what other heterosexuals decided to do, because they are “97% of the population” and “not a hivemind.” I am pretty sure this is just an excuse.

Anyway, it’s a pregnancy book, with pretty much the same pros and cons as any other pregnancy book. The descriptions of what is happening week by week are interesting. The descriptions of what can go wrong are horrifying. The advice has vaguely heard of the concept of “acceptable risk” but is extremely suspicious of it.

Gender Dysphoric Person Rating: 8/10. Actually does a remarkably good job of avoiding gendered stereotypes in discussions of self-care or getting back into sex. I docked a point for all the natural pain relief being incredibly frou-frou and girly, but that might not be the Mayo Clinic Guide’s fault, and another point for the fucking cover.

The Sinner’s Guide To Natural Family Planning: Susie Bright is my favorite person. A lesbian sex-positive feminist, she was browsing the Internet one day when she stumbled across the blog of a Catholic woman who believes birth control, homosexuality, and nonmarital sex are all sinful. Naturally, Susie Bright’s reaction is to say “wow! This woman is a great writer!” and send her an email saying that she should definitely publish a book and if she ever does Susie Bright will be her editor.

Anyway, I’m not Catholic and don’t use NFP, so I am not in Fisher’s target audience twice over. However, Fisher is a genuinely witty and likeable woman with a good heart; the book explains in vivid detail what it’s like to use NFP and what people get out of it. Without shying away from the negative effects of Catholic teaching on the body, she manages to make this atheist understand why some people would adhere to it. It’s a really good book. If you’re interested in theology of the body or want to humanize a group of people you might not know very much about, I recommend it.

What To Expect Before You’re Expecting: From this book, I learned that having sex with the intent to conceive is called “baby dancing.” This is the most ridiculous and cutesy euphemism I have ever heard.

I would suggest not reading the chapters on infertility before you try to conceive, as then you will start being anxious about whether your period cramps mean you have endometriosis, at least if you are me and have an anxiety disorder. The rest of the book is pretty good, but not necessarily groundbreaking. It turns out that in order to optimally conceive, one must treat their illnesses, refrain from taking mind-altering substances, eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly, get enough sleep, and refrain from stressing. The observant reader may note that this is also the advice doctors give about how to be healthy the rest of the time too.

Gender Dysphoric Parent Rating: 3/10. Way too many cutesy jokes about what men are like and what women are like, and the section on how to keep baby-making sex exciting is just unbearable. also, WHY would you feel the need to describe sperm competition as the result of innate male competitiveness? WHY? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Too Like the Lightning: Dense, complex, fascinating worldbuilding. I was very confused until halfway through the book, and I think I’m going to reread it now that I fully understand the difference between Utopians and Humanists, whom I kind of thought were the same people for the first fifty pages. Too Like The Lightning very much trusts its reader: it fully believes that if it drops you in an alien world full of incomprehensible slang, you will be able to find your footing and follow the plot. A lot of books feel the need to hand-hold you through exactly what their far future society is like; Too Like The Lightning trusts that you are smart enough to figure it out on your own.

Too Like The Lightning also managed to pull off the “all the characters know something but the reader doesn’t” reveal and have it actually work instead of feeling like a cheap gag. (Partially because the narrator assumes his readers, being from the future, know the thing too. Did I mention it’s written in eighteenth-century pastiche? It’s written in eighteenth-century pastiche.)

There’s a system in this book that divides different people into categories. My understanding is that one of the single most important factors in the success of a science fiction or fantasy series is whether there are categories in it that people can put themselves in, so in case you are concerned: you can definitely argue about whether or not you are a Cousin or a Brillist.

(Utopians represent!)

One World Schoolhouse: The book by the founder of Khan Academy. About half the book is a somewhat dreary memoir about the founding of Khan Academy, which I suppose might be interesting for some people, but I personally don’t care a lot about how he decided to quit his job to make videos. The really interesting part of One World Schoolhouse is Khan’s explanation of what went wrong in education and how it should be fixed. He holds with the theory that modern education is a product of the Prussian system in the 19th century, designed to produce obedient and reasonably well-informed soldiers and factory workers, and that while that’s all very well in its place the modern world has rather more need of innovators than factory workers.

Khan’s vision of an ideal school was interesting. He wants classes of perhaps a hundred students, with four or five teachers. All classrooms would be age-mixed, to allow older students to mentor younger students and younger students to look up to older students. The homework would be watching filmed versions of classroom lectures and reading textbooks; there would be no lectures in class, since those are trivially easy to film. At school, students would spend about a fifth of their time using computer programs like a much more advanced version of Khan Academy’s math problems; when they got stuck, they could call over one of the circulating teachers. These programs would follow mastery learning principles: you don’t move on to the next lesson until you get 100% of the answers right. (Khan is a big fan of mastery learning. As he points out, if you get an 80% on an algebra test– sloppy arithmetic errors aside– it’s because you understand 80% of algebra. A person who understands 80% of algebra is not going to do a good job of understanding calculus. While this might make students move on slower, he argues complete grasp of algebra is better than a poor grasp of calculus.) Since the class is age-mixed, there is no reason for children to stay with their own age group; the very bright may speed through the studying, while the very slow get to stay working on some problems until they understand them. The rest of the time, students would engage in project-based learning, small-group discussions, and explorations of their own mathematical, scientific, literary, and artistic interests, guided by the teachers.

Mandatory X Studies Classes Is An Astonishingly Counterproductive Strategy

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my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, this is a prussian education system hateblog

When I was reading up on the University of Missouri protests, I noticed that their list of demands included mandatory ethnic studies classes for everyone. This is a mind-bogglingly bad idea and I can’t imagine why anyone would support it on the grounds of making the campus more welcoming for people of color.

I mean, there is the obvious fact that many people of color already know that racism exists, and don’t want to sit through an entire class in Did You Know That Everyone Hates You? It’s True! Perhaps they would rather study physics so that they don’t have to think about the structural racism that shapes every aspect of their daily lives.

But it gets worse.

When I was a gender studies student, I had several classes that debated whether nonbinary trans people existed, or whether we only thought we were trans because of internalized misogyny.

And this isn’t an isolated thing that only affects trans people. My classes also debated whether men being forced into PIV intercourse or being hit by their partners counted as rape or abuse. My classes debated whether mental illness is a real thing or just society pathologizing deviants. And we had a Maoist, which I can’t imagine would have been a great experience for people whose families had fled China during the Chinese Civil War.

I’m not talking here about abstract debates like “does male privilege exist?” or “are black women structurally oppressed?” I’m talking about things that would genuinely be hurtful for everyone: “am I really the gender I say I am?” “is the person who beat me actually the real victim?” “am I faking my problems?” “was the man who killed my relatives actually a great guy if you think about it?”

I don’t know what those debates specifically are in ethnic studies, because due to budget cuts my school didn’t have an ethnic studies professor until the year I graduated. But I promise you that there are debates like that. Any time you talk about oppression there are debates like that.

There are civility requirements in a classroom. In most environments, my response to the idea that nonbinary trans people have just internalized misogyny is “fuck off”. But in a classroom, you must be calm, you must be civil, you must carefully lay out evidence for the viewpoint that you are worthy of basic respect and human dignity, you must treat the opposing idea respectfully as a valid alternate opinion.

And the thing is… if you’re a student who’s generally privileged, you are in general not going to have this experience. Classrooms do not discuss whether cis men only feel that they’re men because of their internalized misogyny. If your family never had to flee a mass murdering dictator, the mass murdering dictator’s supporters are mostly funny.

To be clear, I’m not saying that this is something that should be changed. There is debate in the field of gender studies about whether nonbinary trans people actually exist, and one of the purposes of my classes was to familiarize me with active debates in the field. This is something I signed up for when I decided to major in gender studies.

And even if you tried to change it, how would it work? The whole reason those topics are up for debate is because people don’t agree which positions cause harm; if there was already an academic consensus on it, they would just teach that instead of hosting a debate about the subject. You certainly agree with me that forcing men into PIV is rape; but many of the professors are people who will say “well, obviously forcing men into PIV isn’t rape, and we shan’t debate it because of the tremendous harm it would cause to real rape survivors.”

Furthermore, debating issues is a lot of x studies education’s pedagogical method. None of my teachers were Maoists, but Maoist Student would still have made the classroom tremendously hurtful for many people, and it is unclear how to prevent this without simply stopping Maoist Student from talking (which is probably bad precedent, as much as I would have appreciated it at the time). Even worse, transphobic people voicing their transphobia is a necessary step to them having their transphobia challenged; if they aren’t allowed to speak it up, you’re not even accomplishing your goal of making people less bigoted.

So for multiple reasons gender studies classrooms have to be this way, and it is probably good that they are this way. What I am saying is that participating in this should be optional. It is inhumane to require trans people to civilly debate whether they should be misgendered as a condition of graduating college. And therefore no one should require gender studies courses.

X Studies classrooms are, of course, far from the only classrooms that have this problem. The personality disordered student taking abnormal psych may very well find herself debating whether she is inherently abusive; the developmentally disabled student in a philosophy class may have to write a paper about whether he should have been murdered at birth. However, as far as I am aware, no one is trying to make those classes required– and they’re definitely not trying to make them required in order to make schools more welcoming to disabled people. So I wish to express my fervent disapproval of this strategy.

Improve Education By Teaching Less

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ozy blog post, this is a prussian education system hateblog

(Okay, everyone, we know that Ozy Is Not An Education Reform Specialist Or A Teacher And Has Actually Not Even Taken Sociology of Education Yet Despite It Being Offered Every Year, right? Please take this as more “food for thought” than “serious policy suggestion.”)

Right now, schools try to cram in a lot of stuff. Anyone remember the American history classes that never got past the Civil War? Biology classes that never got around to covering vertebrates? World History classes that have a week for Greece and Rome or a day for Vietnam? Math classes where half the textbook could have been blank white pages, because you’re certainly not addressing any of it?

Not just that, but a lot of the stuff schools teach is totally useless. I spent three years in middle school learning how to write five-paragraph essays and four years in high school learning how to write literary criticism. I find it amazing that I spent seven years of my life learning how to write the only two genres that absolutely no one in the world wants to read. I mean, Jesus, I could have spent seven years working on my sonnet skills. At least that would get me laid.

Let me be clear: I’m not blaming teachers for this shit. Most teachers are good people doing the best they can in an absolutely crappy incentive system.

“Our students should learn about Important Subject X!” is popular and “maybe we should take some of this out of the textbook?” leads to cries of dumbing down education. So textbooks have more information than you could possibly teach to a bunch of bored freshmen no matter how good a teacher you are. Someone decided that reading and writing ought to be taught in the same class and “students write about what they’re reading” is a natural way to synthesize that. Someone else decided that a single essay in a prescribed and absurdly artificial format* should be the sole way of assessing how well students are doing at writing, and you cannot blame people for responding rationally to incentives.

But the problem remains: students are being taught things they don’t need to know, and not being taught things they need to know, and this is a terrible way to run an educational system.

I suggest triage. Create a bare minimum list of things that people absolutely need to know– things that are highly effective in making people happier and better citizens, that either you or people around you will seriously regret your not knowing– and concentrate on teaching that. My preliminary list:

• How to read.
• How to write a clear sentence and paragraph.
• Some foreign language fluently. Probably more than one.
• Basic arithmetic.
• Statistics.
• How to assess information for quality (statistics is related to this).
• The scientific method.
• Basic science: how evolution works, what the atom theory is, etc.
• Civics.
• Basic psychology.
• Et cetera, I highly doubt this list is complete.

“But Ozy?” I hear you say. “What about the love of learning, knowledge for its own sake? Don’t you value that?” Of course I do. I read textbooks for fun. But the love of learning cannot be coerced. You can’t make someone be passionate about learning world history because you passed a law that says everyone in tenth grade has to learn about world history. And even if that magically worked, they would probably be endlessly frustrated that you only spent a week on Greece and Rome.

Once you teach people the absolute basics, they can go where their passions take them: solving math problems, doing experiments, going to Shakespeare performances, writing poems, playing drums, programming, learning everything there is to know about the Abbasids. If people do things they care about, they are more likely to actually remember them a decade later; furthermore, it teaches important skills like How To Find Things Out that are way more important than a half-remembered quadratic equation.

Some people think people wouldn’t learn unless you coerced them. I highly doubt this. Humans’ comparative advantage is intelligence; we evolved to be thinking animals. It is really a sign of success at… something… that schools have managed to convince so many people that learning is boring and sucks. Besides, I highly doubt Hypothetical Would Rather Sit On Her Ass Than Learn To Play Drums Or Something Lady would be much good at learning things in a regular school system either. 

So basically I propose modified unschooling! With a caveat that some things are important enough that everyone has to learn them even if they don’t want to! Okay.

*People who didn’t spend three years learning how to write a five-paragraph essay, you cannot imagine how terrible they are. Imagine the guidelines an Overly Literal Genie who’s read too much Strunk and White would give for writing an essay. “There must be an introduction, a conclusion, and three paragraphs of evidence. The introduction contains two sentences of hook, two sentences of transition, and a thesis statement which says exactly what the next three paragraphs are going to say…”

Why Discussion-Based Classes Suck

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ozy blog post, this is a prussian education system hateblog

I absolutely love discussion. There’s nothing better than hanging out till 4 am exploring different facets of an idea, critiquing each other’s ideas, learning from another person’s lived experience, synthesizing different worldviews into a more full and nuanced whole, finding out what Judith Butler was saying from someone who could actually put up with that asshole’s terrible writing.

So, of course, I picked a school that advertised its seminar-style discussion-based classes.

As it turns out, discussion has roughly the same relationship to discussion-based classes as brie does to Extruded Cheese-Based Snack Product.

When you talk about interesting ideas with people, they’re generally people you choose to talk to. Of course, you don’t want to just talk to people who agree with you, that’s boring. (In fact, one of my favorite people to argue with is a libertarian moral realist Kantian.) But you get to filter for things like “has insight and interesting ideas” and “is willing to change their mind when presented with new evidence” and “listens and attempts to understand your point of view.”

In a discussion-based class, you are talking to an arbitrary collection of random students. (Occasionally, in upper-level classes, they may even be an arbitrary collection of random students from your major.) This means you have to put up with That Guy who thinks of themself as a great philosopher, as shown by their tendency to interrupt social psych class with questions like “what is love really? Like, on a spiritual level?”

Furthermore, there’s a certain level of trust and mutual respect you need for a really good conversation about ideas. The kind where you’ll wait and see where someone’s going with that absolutely ludicrous notion, or ask for clarification instead of just assuming that someone meant something utterly idiotic. The kind where you can point out flaws in your own position or defend the other person’s, because both of you know that this is not a game where you win by proving the other guy wrong (whether they are or not). The kind where either you have similar worldviews or you understand why and how your worldviews are different, so you don’t run into the rocks trying to explain things to each other.

It’s really hard to get that kind of trust in a discussion-based class unless everyone knows each other really well already (which is uncommon, especially if you have classes with asocial cockends like me).

In any given class, there are a couple people who don’t want to be there. The class fit their schedule, or it’s a requirement for their major or a distribution requirement, or their best friend is taking it, or they got dropped from the class they wanted to take at the last minute, or they have an enormous crush on the professor, or whatever. Those people are likely to be utterly uninterested in the topic and, thus, have very little of interest to say about it. But since the class is partially graded on participation, they have to speak up anyway. People being forced to talk about things they don’t care about is a recipe for conversational disaster and lack of insight.

In addition, in any class, at least half the people did not do the reading. (These probably include the uninterested people, but also a bunch of other people who are lazy, disorganized, depressed, taking six other classes and supporting themselves so they don’t have time for this bullshit, or more interested in parties than studying.) In normal discussion, you can simply explain the author’s point and move on; in addition, since you’re basically familiar with what people have and have not read, you can just talk about the things both of you have read. But since we’re all participating in the collective fiction that everyone has done the reading, no one is allowed to explain the reading to the people who didn’t do it or decide to talk about something everyone has read instead.