Welcome to Education Week‘s new book blog, BookMarks!
My name is Catherine Cardno, and I will be blogging here at BookMarks about the latest news on K-12 education books. While this isn’t exactly a re-creation of Education Week‘s “New in Print” feature that many of you may remember from the Commentary pages, it’s a new, online generation of book coverage for Education Week.
My goal is to keep you posted on education-related books that are coming around the corner or have already hit the shelves, be they about policy, curriculum, or professional development. Basically, I’m interested in letting you know about anything and everything that looks exciting in the K-12 education book world.
In addition to helping you keep up with the publishing news, I will chat with authors and ask education thought-leaders to weigh in on specific books with their brief reviews.
This is a wide and diverse field and I expect to post two to three times a week, so stop by frequently or--if you’d prefer--subscribe to the RSS feed or my Twitter feed (@cathycardno). If there is anything in particular you’d like to read about, or would like to see me cover, just let me know: ccardno@epe.org.
In other exciting news:
As I’m sure all of you already know, today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. It seems like everyone has something to say about Dickens and the anniversary, but I came across three items that I thought would be particularly useful for the classroom.
NPR’s story on Dickens from this morning is a nice little seven-minute introduction to today’s events taking place across the globe, as well as Dickens’ books, characters, themes, and applicability today. It was great to be reminded of his extensive contributions to the English language. NPR’s Linda Wertheimer pointed to Ben Zimmer’s post in the Visual Thesaurus blog that identifies many of these--among my favorites: “to get someone’s number” (Bleak House) and “whizz-bang” (The Pickwick Papers).
If you’re so inclined, the Washington Post also has a piece, “Five myths about Charles Dickens,” that will give you useful fodder for classroom planning, presentations, and discussions, including why Great Expectations may not be the best read for high school students.
And lastly, I found the scope of information that the Guardian Teacher Network, out of the UK, pulled together on teaching Dickens truly impressive. Registration is required, but the material encompasses lesson plans, pictures, websites, and podcasts (among other things), and is well worth the effort.
To borrow from the linguistic master: In a word, enjoy!