LISNews: Librarian News

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Arne Duncan to be the next Secretary of Education.

Gary Stager, "teacher educator, education journalist, speaker, school reformer" is not happy with the choice of Duncan, whose appointment he considers to be just another 'social promotion'.

CEO of Hooked on Phonics, Judy L. Harris, is not happy with what Gary Stager had to say about the appointment; specifically, ""Gary Stager is entitled to his opinions regarding President-elect Obama's selection of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and education policy generally. However, it is unfortunate he has tried to trivialize my views by likening my company and its product -- Hooked on Phonics, a product that has helped millions of children learn to read -- to a sponge (with all due respect to the folks at ShamWow). " Here's the rest of her statement.

A movie star and a prominent scientist have teamed up to reassure the public that childhood vaccines are safe and do not cause autism.

Amanda Peet, who starred in films including The X-Files: I Want To Believe and Syriana, is working with Paul Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Their goal is to counter the assault on vaccines led by celebrities including Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey and Holly Robinson Peete.

Full story on Morning Edition on NPR

Mint Canyon (Santa Clarita, CA) Elementary School Principal Betsy Letzo has come up with some pretty wild ideas. But none have been as hair-raising as her latest reading-enhancement scheme, according to The Signal.

These were the conditions: If students could read and pass comprehension tests on more books that their teachers, the teachers had to sport a Mohawk for a day. Participating faculty lost the heated competition and walked around campus Monday with their hair sprayed into long, stiff, colorful Mohawks. Check out the photo!!

The New York Times has an interesting essay by Jon Meacham on Oct. 31, 2008, on what presidents read, and what books influenced their lives.

Andrew Jackson was, to put it kindly, no scholar. When Harvard voted to give him an honorary degree in 1833, a Massachusetts newspaper wrote that he deserved an “A.S.S.” along with his “L.L.D.” From afar, the man Jackson had defeated for the White House, John Quincy Adams, was horrified his alma mater was recognizing a barbarian who could barely spell his own name.

As usual, though, the press and Jackson’s enemies did not have the man exactly right. I just finished five years of work on Jackson and his White House years, and I found that the reconstruction of his literary interests, from youth to old age, illuminated much about the arrangement of his intellectual furniture. His heroic sense of possibility? He loved Jane Porter’s novel “The Scottish Chiefs.” His thunderous rhetorical habit of posing a question and then answering it? He grew up memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church. His provincial obsession with manners, bearing and etiquette? He was a fan of Lord Chesterfield’s letters. His reflexive characterization of enemies like Henry Clay as “Judases” and his dependence on imagery from the Old Testament? He cherished the Bible and his late wife’s copy of Isaac Watts’s translation of the Psalms. His shrewd political sense? He was an unlikely admirer of the French philosopher Fénelon’s “Telemachus,” a kind of Machiavellian guide to ruling wisely. .. -- Read More