Day 18 David and Goliath

On the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook, the twenty day blogging challenge created by Kelly Hines was mentioned and I decided to give it a shot. So here is the challenge for today:

“Tell about your favorite book to teach or share. Provide at least one example of an extension or cross curricular lesson.”

I recently read the book David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell and thought it had some interesting points. These are the quotes that I think would make great starters for a discussion.

1. David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.
2. Inverted U curve – Left (doing more or having more makes things better, the flat middle (doing more doesn’t make a difference), right (where doing more or having more makes things worse.)
3. What is the perfect class size?
4. We form our impressions not globally but locally by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves. Our sense of how deprived we are is relative.
5. Making questions “disfluent” causes people to think more deeply about whatever they come across. They’ll use more resources on it. They’ll process more deeply or think more carefully about what’s going on. (For example, changing the font to a gray instead of black.)
6. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
7. People who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice – that if they speak up, they will be heard.
8. The law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today.
9. The authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.

This would be great to use in a professional development session among teachers or high school students. It would be fun to break people up in 3-4 groups and have them discuss specific quotes. They would decide on 3 important points they want to make about each quote and then share it with the entire group. Then it would be great to interesting to compare the views of the teachers vs. the students.

Have you read this book? If so, please share what you think about it.