I routinely find myself in conversations more complicated than I'd like when I accidentally let my actual opinions fall out of my mouth, particularly on the subject of grading. My belief is simple: It's not a teacher's job to care about grades; it's a teacher's job to care about learning. This means that grades are only useful to the degree that they accurately measure true learning.
Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It by Joshua Eyler was a pretty solid discussion. I only gave it three stars, primarily because he takes a very strange turn about 2/3 in to drag Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve," which is a perfectly reasonable book much-maligned by many who fail to read the whole thing (or the rest of Murray's work) and rely on poorly-distilled, decontextualized talking points.
The rest of the book, though, is worthwhile, even if you disagree with Eyler. He does a good job discussing some of the problems that emerge from grading as it's currently practiced in most places, and there will be something here that is likely to prompt you to consider your own grading practices more carefully.
After that one, I needed something diversionary, so I turned to The Kill Artist and The English Assassin by Daniel Silva. I love a good spy / crime series (see also: John Sandford's Prey novels, John Connolly's Charlie Parker series, and Lee Child's Reacher novels), and these two delivered sufficiently that I'll be finishing Silva's series. Any good series like this needs an intriguing central character, and "diligent art restorer / reluctant Israeli spy" certainly fits the bill.
The novels read like John le Carre, if le Carre were capable of writing a novel fewer than 9 billion pages long. It was especially intriguing to read these books, whose stories stretch back to 1975 (so far), in light of current tensions in the Middle East, since many of the players haven't changed. Four stars each here.
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