Book Club / English Class

Do your children have a book other than school books?

I guess they don’t read a single book in a year if they are older than elementary school age without counting the books for personal curiosity or interest, exclude books for school work. The age of paper books is over with our children. We need to agree with it. They read more from websites like Facebook, Instagram, and other sources. They are watching rather than reading. They are getting used to avoid reading and better at finding ideas from images and videos. Maybe that will work for up to the high school level, but not in the college. All the precious knowledge is vaulted in the book, especially in higher education. Many students in college having trouble read and comprehend the textbook for their major.

SAT and ACT, both test students’ reading skills that are the core of the learning process. Surprisingly many students cannot understand the material they read. They only pretend to understand parts or some words of material. When questioned about the material, they usually give answers from reconstructing the material with their background ideas or prejudice. Their academic illiteracy sho up until they confront the tests.

A Plus Academy Book Club / English class is designed for developing critical reading skills. We focus on teaching students to master reading slowly but accurately and reading unfamiliar and complex ones. Especially among Summer Program, this is the most popular English class. But we don’t recommend this course to the student who needs to take the standardized tests soon, they need to actual test prep course.

Here is the list of reading sources for proactive students.

Magazines

• National Geographic http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/
• New Republic https://newrepublic.com/
• Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/
• Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/
• Smithsonian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/
• The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/
• The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/
• Time http://time.com/
• Wired https://www.wired.com/

Non-Fictions

• An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, Ali Almossawi
• An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming, Al Gore
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport
• Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson
• Feynman, Jim Ottaviani
• Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, and Stephen Dubner
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
• How We Beat the Street, Sampson Davis
• Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis, et al.
• Packing for Mars: the Curious Science of Live in the Void, Mary Roach
• Phineas Gage: A Gruesome But True Story About Brain Science, John Fleischman
• Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, Thomas Clathcart
• Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination…, Stuart Brown
• Rocket Boys: A Memoir, Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
• Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
• Talent is Overrated, Geoffrey Colvin
• The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History…, Carol Strickland
• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr
• The Story of Mankind, Hendrik Willem van Loon
• The War to End All Wars: World War I, Russell Freedman
• The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, Richard Preston
• This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel J. Levitin
• Why Do We Fight? Conflict, War, and Peace, Niki Walker
• Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem, Rosalyn Schanzer