The End of Mr. Y starts slowly, although with a hint of weirdness. Ariel Manto, the narrator of the book, a PhD student in literature, finds a copy of a very rare Victorian book: so rare that there is one known copy of it in the whole world (in a bank vault in Germany). That book, also titled The End of Mr. Y, is special because it is said to have a curse: anyone who reads it soon ends up dead.

I almost thought that this book might turn into an intellectual, slightly bookish work, a bit like Paul Auster perhaps. Books about books, with some thought experiments and philosophy about the nature of reality thrown in. How very wrong I was.

Once the story starts rolling, it soon picks up speed and energy very quickly. In a short while it’s positively racing along, with sex, love, homeopathy, sharing consciousness with a mouse, and being chased by mysterious violent goons. Ariel starts to realize that the curse might be very real. And then it goes on from there.

It’s a weird book, hard to pin down to any one category (which is almost always a good sign). A fantastical philosophical thriller perhaps? As befits a good thriller, the plot is tight and gripping – the kind of book you don’t want to put down because you need to know how the protagonist could possibly survive. But there are also wild thought experiments, deconstructivist musings on the nature of reality, language and fiction (which I didn’t pay as much as attention to as they deserved, since there was too much suspense).

Thomas also shows a good sense of humour, and creates good characters: very realistic, flawed but easy to sympathize with. Foremost among them is Ariel herself: intelligent, lonely, poor, obsessive, disconnected from the people around her.

It almost feels churlish to voice any complaints about such an ambitious, interesting, compelling, enjoyable book. But I did find the ending disappointingly weak, and Ariel’s emotional disengagement from the world occasionally made it hard to care about her as a person. Like another reviewer, my fondest and strongest memories from this book are of the mice whose consciousness Ariel visits – both the free city mice in the beginning and the laboratory mice in the end. Those are the scenes with the most emotion and the least Derrida in them.

As usual with this kind of wild suspenseful doesn’t-fit-into-any-mould kind of book, I’d recommend you to not read any reviews before reading the book: almost all have far too many spoilers. (The only one you can safely read is this Salon review.) Just trust me and buy the book.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

I got a pleasant but agitated letter from an intelligent and highly trained psychologist who had heard my talk. How, she demanded, could children possibly learn unless we corrected all their mistakes? Wasn’t that our responsibility, our duty? I wrote a long reply, repeating my point and telling still more stories about children correcting their own mistakes. But she seems to be as far from understanding me as ever. It is almost as if she cannot hear what I am saying. This is natural enough. Anyone who makes it his life work to help other people may come to believe that they cannot get along without him, and may not want to hear evidence that they can, all too often, stand on their own feet. Many people seem to have built their lives around the notion that they are in some way indispensable to children, and to question this is to attack the very center of their being.

I would have been less tempted to correct this child’s little mistake had I not, like so may adults, been under the spell of the Bad Habit Theory of Learning. This tells us that every time a child makes a mistake, in speaking, reading, or whatever, we must instantly correct it, lest it freeze into a “bad habit”, impossible to correct. The theory is simply untrue. Most of the many things children learn – to walk, talk, read, write, etc. – they learn by trying to do them, making mistakes, and then correcting the mistakes. They learn by what mathematicians call “successive approximations”; that is, they do something, compare the result with the desired goal (doing it the way bigger people do it), see some of the differences (their mistakes), and try to reduce these differences (correct their mistakes). All children do this, and all are good at it; even in the homes of the busiest mistake-correctors, the children themselves correct many more mistakes than are pointed out to them.

One of the wittiest and truest remarks I have ever heard about education was made not long ago by a Catholic educator, a veteran of many years of teaching and teacher training. He was talking to a group of Catholic high school superintendents about handling your teachers, and was urging them not to be too quick to point out and correct mistakes that the teachers, given a little time, might see and correct themselves. “A word to the wise,” he said slowly, shaking an emphatic finger, “is infuriating.” We all laughed, because he has fooled us, and because he was so right. Infuriating is just what it is. We all know the kind of person who is quick to interrupt whatever we are saying to correct some unimportant mistake. Strangling seems much too good for him. […] A word to the wise, or even the unwise, is infuriating because it is insulting. When we teach without being asked, we are saying, in effect, “You’re not smart enough to know that you should know this, and not smart enough to learn it.”

What we must remember about this ability of children to become aware of mistakes, to find and correct them, is that it takes time to work, and that under pressure and anxiety it does not work at all. But at school we almost never give it the time. When a child at school makes a mistake, say, in reading aloud in a reading group, he gets an instant signal from the environment. […] At any rate, something will happen to tell the child, not only that he goofed, but that everyone around him knows he goofed. Like almost anyone in this situation, he will feel great shame and embarrassment, enough to paralyze his thinking. Even if he is confident enough to keep some presence of mind in the face of this public failure, he will not be given time to seek out, find, and correct his mistake. For teachers not only like right answers, they like them right away. If a child can’t correct his mistake immediately, someone else will correct it for him.

The result of this is a great loss. The more a child uses his sense of consistency, of things fitting together and making sense, to find and correct his own mistakes, the more he will feel that his way of using his mind works, and the better he will get at it. He will feel more and more that he can figure out for himself, at least much of the time, which answers make sense and which do nt. But if, as usually happens, we point out all his mistakes as soon as he makes them, and even worse, correct them for him, his self-checking and self-correcting skill will not develop, will die out. He will cease to feel that he has it, or ever had it, or ever could have it. He will become like the fifth-graders I knew – many of them “successful” students – who used to bring me papers and say, “Is it right?” and when I said, “What do you think?” look at me as if I were crazy. What did they think? What did what they thought have to do with what was right? Right was what the teacher said was right, whatever that was.

A friend told me a story about his daughter, not yet a year old. She had been given a little plastic whistle, which she loved to toot. It was her favorite toy. One day one of her parents picked up the whistle, and, seeing that it had holes, like a recorder, began to play a little tune on it. They both amused themselves with it for a minute or two, then gave the whistle back to the baby. To their great surprise, she pushed it angrily aside. At the time her father told me the story, she had not blown it since.

It is certain that a child is greatly inspired and helped by what are often called “competence models” – people who can do things better than he can. But we ought to remind ourselves now and then that sometimes a competence model can be altogether too competent. Child psychologists write a good deal about what they call “infant omnipotence”. Their theory seems to be that infants and young children really believe they can do anything, and only gradually, as they grow up, learn how little they can do. I do not believe this is true, even of babies; I am sure it is not true even of children as young as two or three, who know all too well how little they know, or understand, or can do, and for whom this awareness is very often frightening and humiliating. This does not mean that we must try to keep our superior knowledge and competence a secret from children; it would be impossible even if it were desirable, which it isn’t. But we must be aware that their ignorance and clumsiness are often painful to them, and we must be careful not to rub their noses in it.

It doesn’t take a child long, by such steps, to grasp the basic idea of a cello, the relationship of the bow, the string, and the left hand. But while he has been figuring this out, he has been ceaselessly active. One could say that he is having too much fun – a weak word, really – playing the cello to want to take time to figure it out. A scientist might say that, along with his useful data, the child has collected an enormous quantity of random, useless data. A trained scientist wants to cut all irrelevant data out of his experiment. He is asking nature a question, he wants to cut down the noise, the static, the random information, to a minimum, so he can hear the answer. But a child doesn’t work that way. He is used to getting his answers out of the noise. He has, after all, grown up in a strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make sense of a tiny part of what he experiences. His way of attacking the cello problem is to produce the maximum amount of data possible, to do as many things as he can, to use his hands and the bow in as many ways as possible. Then, as he goes along, he begins to notice regularities and patterns. He begins to ask questions – that is, to make deliberate experiments. But it is vital to note that until he has a great deal of data, he has no idea what questions to ask, or what questions there are to be asked.

But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it.

A child’s understanding of the world is uncertain and tentative. If we question him too much or too sharply, we are more likely to weaken that understanding than to strengthen it. His understanding will grow faster if we can make ourselves have faith in it and leave it alone.

He has to get the correct hunch many times, and test it, and see it proved right, before he can feel sure of it. Each time he is right, his hunch becomes stronger and surer; but it takes a long time – longer for some children than others – before it becomes what we think of as certain knowledge. […] Children’s first hunches about anything are extremely faint and tentative, the merest wisps of intuition that a certain thing may be so. Each time children test one of these faint hunches and have it confirmed by experience, the hunch becomes a bit stronger. What we might call a 5 percent hunch becomes a 10 percent, the 10 percent a 20 percent, and so, slowly, all the way to the point where they will say with conviction that they know that such-and-such is true – something, as I showed in How Children Fail, that even the “brightest” children in the “best” schools will rarely ever say.
[…]
Knowing this about children’s hunches makes me understand more clearly than every why, and how, our constant checking up on children’s learning so often prevents and destroys learning, and even in time most of the capacity to learn. […]
The first reason has to do with this matter of hunches. When we constantly ask children questions to find out whether they know something (or prove to ourselves that they don’t), we almost always cut short the slow process by which, testing their hunches against experience, they turn them into secure knowledge. Asking children questions about things they are only just beginning to learn is like sitting in a chair which has only just been glued. The structure collapses. Under pressure, children stop trying to confirm and strengthen their faint hunches. Instead, they just give them up. More times than I can remember, I have heard children being tested say of their hunches, “This must be wrong,” or “I know it’s wrong”.

Bill Hull once said to me, “If we taught children to speak, they’d never learn.” I thought at first he was joking. By now I realize that it was a very important truth. Suppose we decided that we had to “teach” children to speak. How would we go about it? First, some committee of experts would analyze speech and break it down into a number of separate “speech skills”. We would probably say that, since speech is made up of sounds, a child must be taught to make all the sounds of his language before he can be taught to speak the language itself. Doubtless we would list these sounds, easiest and commonest ones first, harder and rarer ones next. Then we would begin to teach infants these sounds, working our way down the list. Perhaps, in order not to “confuse” the child – “confuse” is an evil word to many educators – we would not let the child hear much ordinary speech, but would only expose him to the sounds we were trying to teach.

Along with our sound list, we would have a syllable list and a word list.

When the child had learned to make all the sounds on the sound list, we would begin to teach him to combine the sounds into syllables. When he could say all the syllables on the syllable list, we would begin to teach him the words on our word list. At the same time, we would teach him the rules of grammar, by means of which he could combine these newly learned words into sentences. Everything would be planned, with nothing left to chance; there would be plenty of drill, review, and tests, to make sure that he had not forgotten anything.

Suppose we tried to do this; what would happen? What would happen, quite simply, is that most children, before they got very far, would become baffled, discouraged, humiliated, and fearful, and would quit trying to do what we asked them. If, outside our classes, they lived a normal infant’s life, many of them would probably ignore our “teaching” and learn to speak on their own. If not, if our control of their lives was complete (the dream of too many educators), they would take refuge in deliberate failure and silence, as so many of them do when the subject is reading.

Timetables! We act as if children were railroad trains running on a schedule. The railroad man figures that if his train is going to get to Chicago at a certain time, then it must arrive on time at every stop along the route. If it is ten minutes late getting into a station, he begins to worry. In the same way, we say that if children are going to know so much when they go to college, then they have to know this at the end of this grade, and that at the end of that grade. If a child doesn’t arrive at one of these intermediate stations when we think he should, we instantly assume that he is going to be late at the finish. But children are not railroad trains. They don’t learn at an even rate. They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be.

Not only that, but they often don’t learn in what seems to us a logical sequence, by which we mean easy things first, hard things later. Being always seekers of meaning, children may first go to the hard things, which have more meaning – are (in Papert’s word) less dissociated from the world – and later from these hard things learn the “easy” ones.

[…]
What makes things easy or hard for our minds has very little to do with how little or how much information they may contain, and everything to do with how interesting they are and, to say it once again, how much sense they make, how connected they seem to reality.

It is a serious mistake to say that, in order to learn, children must first be able to “delay gratification,” i.e., must be willing to learn useless and meaningless things on the faint chance that later they may be able to make some use of them. It is their desire and determination to do real things, not in the future but right now, that gives children the curiosity, energy, determination, and patience to learn all they learn.

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words – Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple – or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves – and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality”, or saying bitterly “If I could put up with it, they can too”.

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel that we need to worry so much about what many people all “motivation”. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the thing that he sees bigger people doing.

Children resist, almost always angrily, all such unasked-for teaching because they hear in it the (perhaps unconscious) message, “You’re not smart enough to see that this is important to learn, and even if you were, you’re not smart enough to learn it.” Naturally it makes them hurt and angry.

The worst damage we do with all this testing is to the children’s own confidence and self-esteem, their belief that others trust them to learn and that they can therefore trust themselves. For every unasked for test is above all else a statement of no confidence in the learner. That I check up at all on what you have learned proves that I fear you have not really learned it.

This book did not change, as I had hoped it might, the way schools deal with children. I said, trust them to learn. The schools would not trust them, and even if they had wanted to, the great majority of the public would not have let them. Their reasons boil down to these: (1) Children are no good; they won’t learn unless we make them. (2) The world is no good; children must be broken to it. (3) I had to put up with it; why shouldn’t they? To people who think this way, I don’t know what to say. Telling them about the real learning of real children only makes them cling to their theories about the badness and stupidity of children more stubbornly and angrily than ever. Why do they do this? Because it gives them a license to act like tyrants and saints. “Do what I tell you!” roars the tyrant. “It’s for your own good, and one day you’ll be grateful,” says the saint.

John Holt was a teacher, back in the 1950s-60s. Disillusioned with the school system and becoming more and more convinced that schools hindered rather than helped learning, he published several books about education and learning, and later on (as he lost hope that the school system would ever be reformed) about home schooling.

His first book, How Children Fail, talks about the shortcomings of schools. The second, How Children Learn, talks about how children (especially small children) naturally learn.

How Children Fail is a diatribe, and while I can agree with much of what it says (and it made me think seriously about home schooling) it’s rather negative in tone: the focus is on what is wrong, not how to fix it. Not a book I’m going to re-read for fun. How Children Learn on the other hand was interesting and inspiring in a completely different way, and a very enjoyable read.

Because it’s an ideas book, I think the best way to give a feel for what it’s about is through quotes, so I’m going to follow this with a couple of (longish) posts with quotes from the book.

Learn: Amazon US, Amazon UK.
Fail: Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Den hemlige kocken (The Secret Cook) is about “the unknown cheating with the food on your plate”, i.e. how the food you get is not what you think you get – because of additives, or cheap ingredients replacing the real thing, or shortcuts in the production process.

I care (more than the average consumer, I believe) about what I eat: how it tastes, how it feels, how I feel after eating it, and what’s inside. As a result I do a lot of cooking from scratch so we don’t buy many food products, but we still buy dairy goods, bread and biscuits, and some cooking sauces.

It was interesting and enlightening to read about all the shortcuts and tricks and engineering feats that the food industry has come up with. The concept of producing artificial flavourings to approximate the taste of natural ones (vanillin for vanilla) was no surprise to me, and I was aware of the existence of “smoke aroma”. (Mostly because I avoid products with smoke aroma, because they have a for me unpleasant taste of meat.) But half a dozen different kinds of smoke aroma powders? Spinach to make pistachio ice cream look green? The Chorleywood Bread Process which replaces a few hours of fermentation with a few minutes of intense mechanical mixing? News to me.

But the information content of the book wasn’t as good as it could have been. Of the 263 pages of actual content (before a list of sources and an index) only 161 is actually about the main topic. The remaining 100 pages are filled with a purchasing guide, and a list of all EU approved additives, the so-called E numbers.

(The purchasing guide, by the way, is a weird mixture of instructions on how to choose broccoli, what a Jerusalem artichoke is, etc. Not extensive enough to be of real use, it’s a patchwork list of foods the author cares about.)

The body of the book has two main faults. One: it’s shallowly researched and only skims all the topics it tries to cover. 160 pages isn’t much, but these 160 contain far less actual information than they could. It’s another book written by a journalist who finds a topic he cares about, and decides to write a book without actually knowing anything about the topic, or putting much time into research. He reads some books and articles, surfs the net, interviews a handful of people, and then summarises all the juiciest bits he finds. The E-number guide is very symptomatic of his lack of real knowledge.

And two: I don’t like the author’s tone, which makes everything sound bad. His opinion seems to be that if it’s an additive, it’s got to be bad. And if it’s a modern additive that didn’t exist a hundred years ago, or if it has a long and complex name, it’s got to be even worse.

Not all additives are evil. I’m quite happy that we have additives to ensure that our food doesn’t kill us. And “thickening agents” may sound bad, but any cook would agree that adding cornstarch to thicken a sauce is perfectly OK. The real question is why the additives are used: to create a new kind of food, or to hide problems (such as adding thickening agents to make low-fat cream look creamy). It can be hard to know which is which, and the line between the two is vague.

And not all modern chemical processes make food worse. Packing food in inert gases or a protective atmosphere sounds like a perfect idea to me! I can’t think of a milder way to preserve food.

We want consistent, predictable, pretty-looking, safe food that keeps for weeks. On top of that we want food to be cheap, and most of us wouldn’t be willing to pay the extra price for real (expensive) ingredients, or the cost of food that goes bad before it’s sold. There is no way to get all of that with all-natural ingredients and without technological shortcuts.

What does annoy me is misleading labelling and marketing. The book has made me look more closely at labels. Here’s what I read on the side of a yoghurt package I have in the fridge right now:

Valio Vanilj är en utsökt och lyxig smakupplevelse som för tankarna till mormors hembakta pajer. Mjuk och krämig vaniljyoghurt med bär och frukter, precis som det smakade när vi var små.

Valio Vanilla is an exquisite and luxurious taste experience that brings to mind grandmother’s home-baked pies. Soft and creamy vanilla yoghurt with berries and fruit, just as it tasted when we were small.

And here’s the ingredient list: pasteurised milk, vanilla-berry preparation (sugar, rhubarb, water, thickening agents (modified corn starch, guar gum), aromas (vanilla, vanillin etc), acidity regulator (sodium citrate), colouring (beet red), lactase enzyme, yoghurt culture, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium sp. and vitamin D.

I know for a fact that my grandmother’s pies did not contain beet juice to make them look redder, and she wouldn’t cover up a added water with guar gum.

I wish I had more room for choice when buying food. I can’t choose a more local or natural product (but with a shorter best-before period, or a higher price) because for most stuff there is no such choice in a normal supermarket. (Bread is a great example.) I can only choose between different brands of what’s really the same thing, with marginal differences. And I don’t have the time to run to 3 different shops daily to buy food.

AdLibris.

The World Without Us suggests we “picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.”

The book is full of interesting facts and scenarios – how our houses will be worn down by rain and freezing weather and small animals, and how subway tunnels will flood, and the various possible (disastrous) ways that a petrochemical complex could fall apart.

There are also the things that will survive: rubber and plastic are effectively indestructible (until some microbe evolves that can eat them), old bronze coins are very durable, and Mount Rushmore is likely to be discernible millions of years from now.

However the author often wanders quite far from this main theme. While he does talk about what the world would be without us, he also spends quite a lot of time talking about how we have already changed the world (hunting mammoths to extinction etc) and how we currently affect the environment (plastic floating around in oceans etc) and about various relatively untouched parts of the world. While these can be interesting topics, they make the book unfocused. I didn’t count the pages but I felt that more space was devoted to these excursions than to the promised topic. He isn’t quite delivering what the title and the cover have promised, but something else, which is a bit underhanded.

And at the same time, I thought there was too little detail in the scenarios he describes. He paints the broad outlines but skips the fine detail. There was too little actual material, making me think this was a collection of essays stretched by a journalist to fill a whole book.

This probably also explains why the content felt disorganized at times: like a collection of anecdotes without any discernible direction. While I was reading the book, it was mostly very interesting, but without a clear structure, I find it hard to actually remember much of it afterwards.

Weisman’s journalist background shines through in his writing, too: it is quite wordy and mannered. Humans don’t just use a lot of energy, we’re “energy-drunk”, cold winds don’t meet warm air but “slam into” it, and so on on every page.
There are also his formulaic introductions of the various experts he meets. Really, it is of no interest to me whether the expert he quotes is “bespectacled under his wide-brimmed felt hat” or “a lanky man with wavy dark hair”.

On the whole, this was a great idea, but somewhat suboptimally executed. The end result isn’t bad, in fact I’d recommend it, but just a bit disappointing.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

The Estonian playgroup at the Estonian House here in Stockholm operates a small library of children’s books. I borrowed a few books last time we were there (two weeks ago). All three are illustrated verse stories – about a verse per page. (Stories in verse are going down very well with Ingrid just now.) One was Robot Leol on tähtis päev (by Pusa), the other two were Jaak ja lumi and Jaak läheb poodi (by Epp Annus).

I don’t normally review children’s books, but some make such a strong impression on me that I simply cannot keep quiet about them.

The first one (Robot Leo…) is about a robot called Leo who’s expecting a guest, and he wants to offer her some cake. So he’s pottering around preparing for this: fetching a table and a tablecloth, choosing plates and cutlery, finding a cake etc. The story is kind of weird, though. Leo doesn’t bake a cake, or buy a cake – no, he chooses between the cakes he happens to have in his fridge. And there are strange attempts to introduce educational elements into the story: the reader/listener is urged to help Leo find the blue cups etc.

The other two have more normal stories. In one, a small boy called Jaak goes out to play in the snow; in the other, Jaak goes to the supermarket with his father.

The one thing that these books have in common is the writing. The writing is awful. It hurts my brain to read this stuff, and makes me cringe. The rhymes are embarrassing. The meter is off so the lines get stuck in my mouth when I try to read them. Actually I’m now editing them on the fly, changing the text to make the reading experience less painful.

Try reading this out loud:

Aita leida laualina,
selline mis oleks kena!
Äkki ruudud sobiks hästi
kui need oleks risti-rästi?
Ruut on kui kandiline klots,
millel puudub sabaots.

The fifth line so obviously deviates from the rhythm of the rest of this verse that I stumble over it every time. And it would have been so easy to fix.

Or for weak rhymes:

Jaagu käsi on nüüd märg
ja läheb kinda sisse sooja.
Näe, nurga taga maas on pang,
Jaak asub lund kokku tooma.

The rhymes in Robot Leo are not as bad, but they come at a cost: many lines seem to be simple fillers, chosen only to make a rhyme fit, not because the content of the line makes sense or fits the story. (“Klots… millel puudub sabaots” – a square block that doesn’t have a tail – what?) The overall impression is that Robot Leo was written by a 10-year-old and then published without any editing at all. And somehow this book got the support of the Culture Ministry of Estonia.

The books about Jaak are more conventional in style and content so they’re more likely to simply be the works of a mediocre writer.

I really dislike Robot Leo and I have been tempted to hide it so Ingrid cannot ask me to read it any more. I am looking forward to returning it to the library tomorrow.

Actually, the books do have one more thing in common. They were all published by the same outfit: Päike ja Pilv. After this experience I will avoid their books like the plague.

Apollo.ee: Robot Leol on tähtis päev, Jaak läheb poodi, Jaak ja lumi.