Posts Tagged ‘books’

Sunday Reading: The Power of One

I spent the first ten minutes of writing this post trying to put together a clever phrase to explain why I was reading a book that is a couple decades old, neither new and fresh nor a bonafied classic, but I deleted those original attempts and decided to just write it simply: I was reading a book written in the 1980’s for no other reason than it was there. And the oddly surprising thing is that not only is did that story happen to be a story about a kid growing up in the springtime of Apartheid in South Africa, but it turned out to be a great story about critical thinking. In fact, The Power of One, by Bryce Courtney turned out to be a story built upon a vein of unlabeled skepticism.

Continue Reading…

Full text from October 26, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Skeptical Mindsets

1 Comment 

Sunday Reading: No? A Daily Ritual.

The importance of an evening reading ritual has become increasingly apparent as The Girl creeps closer to the ripe old age of one. (Have I used that line before? Ah, well.) I may have previously written here the details of this particular habit but I’ll reiterate: each evening following bath-time, we cuddle up in the chair as a family and read a story.

Continue Reading…

Full text from September 7, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Skepdad thoughts

4 Comments 

Monday Meta: Topic Redux

Mondays? Making up excuses for missed connections.

I’d like to write here every day, but it’s just not going to happen. In the meantime, little two-week breaks from my rants provide opportunity to let new ideas and experiences marinate. We have a medium-sized circle of friends, and when I’m not playing with the girl, pounding away on a keyboard, or puttering about the garden, we’re usually socializing. And, even if those friends don’t have kids of their own — which most of them now do — they always have opinions on child-rearing. What’s a skepdad to do? Commentate on those ideas, of course.

Continue Reading…

Full text from May 26, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Encounters of the Mind, Meta-Skepdad

Leave a Comment 

Friday Consumer Culture: Priddy Books

Fridays? Products, from one to five skeps.

We’d likely be kidding ourselves as parents if we thought all the stories we were reading to our very young kids were offering any more benefit than the sound of our voice and perhaps some loose vocabulary development. The girl is seven months old and I’m under no delusion that she is following the plot of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” or “Charlotte’s Web” as we read aloud from them on a nightly basis. But there is a ritual there and I’d like to think that my voice has something of a calming effect on her little mind. This raises the question as to the value of books in the life of a “Really Young Thinker” when books can really be no more than colourful toys to be grabbed and manipulated by equally young fingers. To help answer this, we were lucky to be given an interesting cloth book as a gift early on, and its only recently that the girl has taken to it with devoted fascination and often giggling delight — so much so that we bought another in the series.

Continue Reading…

Full text from May 2, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Encounters of the Mind, Reasoned Education

Leave a Comment 

lost musings

If you’ve been privy to the six months that comprise the early development of this blog, visiting often, reading diligently, and participating on the fringes of wordsmithery that drapes this domain in some vague recollection of pandering advice, then you have also witnessed a bumbling fool of a new father attempt to compose the impossible. I often have this deep rooted fear that my own cherry-picked musings on the state of critical thought are in jeopardy, caught in the gravity-well of logical fallacy — and it is with straining effort and scattered triumph that I continue to pluck away on this project. As such, we were traveling recently, bumbling through an international jaunt with our little hatchling in tow, and lest not be saved from our typical mid-vacation discovery of some local bookstore, we spent a few hours wandering the foreign stacks and perusing literature from a bevy of random topics.

Continue Reading…

Full text from March 25, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Meta-Skepdad

Leave a Comment 

“Is reading aloud even optional?” Part 1

I’ve been trying to dig up some real research on the topic of reading aloud to kids, positive or negative. Other than a few vague correlational analysis there does not seem to be much scientific literature online about this either way. (Perhaps a reader could point me in the right direction. I thought I was adept at searching, but I’m stumped on this one.) Alas…

Continue Reading…

Full text from February 11, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Encounters of the Mind, Reasoned Education

2 Comments 

Over-Educated Toys

My daughter received numerous toys as presents for the holidays from friends and family. (Not from me. I bought her books.) I appreciate that — and I especially appreciate the care with which some of the toys were chosen. Despite being in the first year of her life, she is going to have an interesting time of growing up with so many people actively looking out for her education. But while some of the toys have obvious educational value — and by that I mean books, coloured blocks with shapes, numbers, and letters, and even the (most excellent) “bug bottle” a soft-sided container with a small collection of plush insects inside (actually meant to impress her entomology-enthused father) — some of the toys just try too hard.

Continue Reading…

Full text from December 28, 2007 by Brad
Filed as: Encounters of the Mind

Leave a Comment