Doc Z's collection of links

My big topic: reading--book reading
My essential question: how do I convince my students that taking the time to read books is important--actually critically important to their lives as human beings?

Collection of links:

• TED Talk, from knowledgeable to knowledge-able: talks about students in our hyper-media world needing to be more than meaning seekers. They need to be meaning makers. I think that this involves deep thinking, the kind you can practice when you engage in the complexity that books offer you, complexity you can't get anywhere else. 
• News article about the Stuebenville rape case and the youtube video showing a kid laughing about it. This shows a complete lack of empathy and compassion on that kid's part. Books help us to imagine the experiences of others and this gives us practice in empathy and compassion.
• Blog posts about why stories are important:
• What listening to stories does to our brains
• Stories and the Common Core, excerpt: 
• So narrative isn’t just a cool thing to do- it’s life or death. Telling stories well is power. As we see in every election, every bit of advertising, and every six year old lobbying for a later bedtime or to skip bath (you can tell what my life is like). To get really good at narrative, and to understand it, ourselves and our culture (and the culture of others), we study narratives. Fiction, epic poetry, history, great science, mathematics. All learning is most powerful when couched in terms of narrative. It is why our most profound texts are in the form of stories (In the beginning…) not in the form of action memos from God. It is why the major art forms revolve around narrative, not data sets. Just being exposed to narrative is accessing one of the most powerful learning modes we have. It’s why people believe movies that have no basis in fact, and it’s why advertising is effective. But really understanding how narrative works, and having some skill one’s self is life changing. It also vaccinates the individual against bullshit. If you know how stories work, you know how to judge the story you are being told. You know how to ask critical probing questions about what a story really means. You notice what it doesn’t say and wonder why the storyteller left things out. You can tell the difference between an honest story and crap.
• Book Love, book by Penny Kittle (link goes to my blog post about it)
• A youtube video using excerpts of the 1960's movie adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's novel that imagines a world where books are illegal: 

• This photo about books being the inspiration for HBO programming...yes, there is good TV out there, but there's also TV that damages your soul as a human being. Why not just stick with books?

When studying literature, remember,

If anything's odd, 
inappopriate, 
confusing, 
or boring, 
it's probably important! 

(keep this in mind while doing your mentor text work with our novel)

Why Shakespeare is More Important than Science

"Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril. It is totally misleading to speak, for instance, of 'two cultures.' One literary-humane and the other scientific, as if these were of equal status. There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, is now an important part. But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist."

(Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 1970, p. 33)