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nerd teacher [books]

whatanerd@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 1 month ago

Exhausted anarchist and school abolitionist who can be found at nerdteacher.com where I muse about school and education-related things, and all my links are here. My non-book posts are mostly at @whatanerd@treehouse.systems, occasionally I hide on @whatanerd@eldritch.cafe, or you can email me at n@nerdteacher.com. [they/them]

I was a secondary literature and humanities teacher who has swapped to being a tutor, so it's best to expect a ridiculously huge range of books.

And yes, I do spend a lot of time making sure book entries are as complete as I can make them. Please send help.

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The Selfish Gene (Paperback, 2016, Oxford University Press) 3 stars

This man is too verbose, and I think his verbosity is what makes people just zone out on what he's doing while reading this.

He double-speaks, he contradicts himself, and he treats the whole natural world like it's engaging in capitalistic tendencies. I do not understand the popularity this book has endured because it's so often just ridiculous.

And even on a review purely around his writing style and structure, it's just bad. The editors he thanks so often did him a disservice of not forcing him to write a coherent book, allowing him to drone on and on and on until you've forgotten what the point is.

And he keeps fighting in the notes with people who disagreed with him (especially Stephen J Gould, who he has a particular hate-on for).

Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Paperback, 2015, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform) 2 stars

Such an Infuriating Read

2 stars

I want to first say that I wanted to like this book, especially because it's such a bizarre mystery story. I also had a bit of nostalgia for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and knew that it was largely inspired by this book, and I was fully aware that the book and the movie shared little in common when I started reading.

I don't mind that. I love when people take creative liberties and create something wildly different from the inspiration a piece of media gives them, so my issue isn't even that I wanted it to be the same.

My issue is that it really does have some great potential, and you can see how someone was able to create the movie from this book (and holy shit were we lucky that the movie was pushed in the direction it went because this Eddie Valiant is so bloody frustrating, while …

Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Paperback, 2015, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform) 2 stars

Four pages later (125), and I get "from the Toons who had been living here" and then "imported from China"... which makes the Toons sound like an allegory for indigenous peoples and Chinese people, too? Basically, Toons are all non-white people, it seems?

Another three pages, and it's Appalachian Toons. Basically, humans are anyone white and from the city?

This book is messy.

Holes (2015, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc) 4 stars

Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather and …

The Ending Always Bothers Me

4 stars

Overwhelmingly, I adore this story. It's a book that I've often found interesting for how commonly it's recommended in schools and usually used within the curriculum of English classes, particularly as the core elements of the text should provide ample material for someone to start questioning everything that's happening.

It should provide kids with a moment to go "Wait, there are juvenile detention centers? Prisons for children?" But then I remember the ways in which the book is usually taught, and you find a bunch of teachers who seem to think that sometimes kids do need them, and they teach the book in a way that still reflects a common belief: If you're guilty of something, you should do the time. If you're not guilty, it's bad. (And if it's taught outside the US, it puts special attention on the fact that this is what Americans do... …

reviewed Holes by Louis Sachar

Holes (2015, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc) 4 stars

Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather and …

The Ending Always Bothers Me

4 stars

Overwhelmingly, I adore this story. It's a book that I've often found interesting for how commonly it's recommended in schools and usually used within the curriculum of English classes, particularly as the core elements of the text should provide ample material for someone to start questioning everything that's happening.

It should provide kids with a moment to go "Wait, there are juvenile detention centers? Prisons for children?" But then I remember the ways in which the book is usually taught, and you find a bunch of teachers who seem to think that sometimes kids do need them, and they teach the book in a way that still reflects a common belief: If you're guilty of something, you should do the time. If you're not guilty, it's bad. (And if it's taught outside the US, it puts special attention on the fact that this is what Americans do... …

Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Paperback, 2015, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform) 2 stars

The more I read this book, the more it feels like:

  1. An author's self-insert story, though even the cover and back cover art don't help that (the man on the cover is Gary Wolf; the picture on the back is him sitting in a car with Jessica Rabbit);
  2. A questionable allegory for segregation, using Toons as stand-ins for Black people;
  3. A book that, like, is okay with talking shit about people from rural and poor communities, even though the detective is poor.

... I still think the movie took a lot of the positives and did them justice.

Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Paperback, 2015, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform) 2 stars

This book is so bizarrely different from the movie it inspired. The things, thus far, that really remain the same are the concept, genre, a handful of characters, and setting. There's also a few things that were kept, though they were changed drastically, including something about Toons and alcohol. I think there's also a line from Eddie Valiant that was kept, too.

Otherwise, entirely different. I'm not super enjoying it? But it's okay. Have no idea how they made such a good movie out of what is, thus far, a mediocre book.

Holes (2015, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc) 4 stars

Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather and …

He didn’t have any friends at home. He was overweight and the kids at his middle school often teased him about his size. Even his teachers sometimes made cruel comments without realizing it. On his last day of school, his math teacher, Mrs Bell, taught ratios. As an example, she chose the heaviest kid in the class and the lightest kid in the class, and had them weigh themselves. Stanley weighed three times as much as the other boy Mrs. Bell wrote the ratio on the board, 3:1, unaware of how much embarrassment she had caused both of them.

Holes by 

As someone who was a fat child in school who was constantly harassed because of my weight, even by the teachers, it is hard for me to believe that they weren't aware of what they were doing. Having children stand on scales and weigh themselves is something that definitely is a conscious decision and can negatively impact a lot of us, especially those of us who are "abnormal" weights (according to society).

I adore this book, but this bit does bother me because it's giving space to an unthinking teacher who has never interrogated their beliefs to do something wrong "by accident," when that something wrong requires multiple conscious decisions in their curriculum and lesson planning.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (2013, HarperCollins) 4 stars

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha …

Enjoyable.

4 stars

This is probably one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels, and it's largely because of the structure. I absolutely adore the style of this one, especially because it was rarely a common form for the genre even though it is definitely something that I would've thought was done far more than it ever has been.

All of that sounds vague, and that's because to explain it would be to spoil the story itself.

It is definitely slow-moving at the beginning, but once it picks up? It keeps going and builds a lot of good suspense. It forces you to ask a lot of questions and to figure out which questions aren't being asked or even considered. What's not being said, even though it's being hinted at? Honestly, I adore it.

(The one thing I'd love to do, since I skimmed them, is remove the introductory texts that were inserted in …