Expanding The Mind

Read both the periodicals I brought along for the trip, finishing the February issue of the New York Review of Books this afternoon. In the process I learnt a lot, but will probably find a way to forget a good deal of what I learnt in the very near future. Still, the important thing in some ways is coming to appreciate just how much I don't know about what's going on in the world - indeed, just how difficult it is to grasp even a tiny amount about the vast complexity of it all. Had no idea at all, for example, of how Taiwan has sought to make itself indispensable in global terms by becoming the key manufacturing centre for all the world's advanced processor chips. In fact, I completely underestimated just how crucial computer chips have become to, well, pretty much everything. In the words of one Peter Tasker, who sounds like he knows what he's talking about in his review of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller, who also sounds like he knows what's what: The world consumes a trillion chips a year. They are embedded in nearly every complex device we use. They are as strategically important as oil and gas, but, unlike oil and gas, there is no substitute technology on the horizon. And while oil and gas can be sourced from many parts of the globe, nearly all advanced semiconductors are manufactured in East Asia, the likely flashpoint of any military conflict between China and the United States. Gosh!

Mind you, the most striking of the reviews I read in the NYRB just confirmed what seemed to me to obvious, something I thought we all knew. In her review of a podcast about teaching reading entitled, Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, Christine Smallwood makes it quite clear that teaching reading through phonics is simple common sense and actually works when other methods don't. I suppose this just reinforced something I've known since I started teaching: if a theory about learning clashes with the practicalities of getting stuff done then it's wrong, no matter who says otherwise.