Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi

Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi was a bit of a weighty read at times, but a good book with really solid material in it. The three authors are all educators and subtitle of their book is 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, with some of the key things that stuck with me noted below...

Concepts around practice
- Practice makes permanent, basically the building of muscle memory, and if practice not done properly, the incorrect way to do something can become ingrained.
- Practice shouldn’t be about scrimmaging or simple repetition of a general activity, it should be made up of drills focused on skill mastery.

Planning of practice
- Practice needs to be planned well to be well executed and there should be a specific objective to practice, not just a purpose.
- There should be systems to help enable effective practices, like signals to bring people to order and names for drills.
- Oftentimes there’s too many things practiced, the most important steps should be simplified and practiced; when successfully executed, complexity can be added.
- Once there's great proficiency at the simple tasks, it enables creativity to come through as energy doesn't have to be expended on the simple.

During practice
- Feedback is an integral and standard part of practice, not simply a critique when something done wrong.
- Specific feedback is key, and should come right at the moment something done.
- Someone should practice applying feedback immediately after getting it.
- Should praise the work that people have put into something so they know results are connected to work.
- Modeling is incredibly important, along with description of what’s going on, people don’t know until they know.
- Should model skinny parts, don’t try to cover too much, just as with practice.
- Remember that people won’t usually say they don’t get something.
- Video can be extremely helpful, both someone watching video of their own practice, and in viewing videos of practice conducted by people in that field.

The Great Halifax Explosion by John U. Bacon

The Great Halifax Explosion by John U. Bacon was an interesting historical read on the December 16, 1917 calamity in Halifax, Nova Scotia that killed 2,000, wounded another 9,000, and left 25,000 homeless as the result of the most powerful man-made explosion until Hiroshima decades later.

Bacon tells the story of The Mont-Blanc freighter in New York getting packed full of explosives to be used in WWI, then heading to Halifax before the planned trip across the Atlantic and colliding in the harbor with another ship, the Imo.

It was interesting reading of the choices people made, going towards disaster or fleeing it, with the crew of The Mont-Blanc abandoning in the harbor their burning ship, knowing it would explode, but not warning people, juxtaposed with the story of train dispatcher Vincent Coleman seeing the burning ammunition ship and telling co-workers to flee, while staying to send a telegram warning away an incoming train.

Noted in the book was that the explosion 83 million times more powerful than a gun being fired, with subsequent ground waves causing shaking 110 miles away, followed by even more destructive air waves, or shock waves, gas bubbles racing outwards destroying things in it's path. The explosion killed roughly 1,600 people instantly, and in it's aftermath, people and communities rushed to assist, with one outcome of the disaster the strengthening of ties between the United States and Canada, with specific mention made in the book of Boston's contributions and how there's every year a Christmas tree delivered from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts in thanks, a tradition from shortly after the explosion that restarted in 1976 and has occurred annually since.

Monday, January 15, 2018

Books from 2017

The 35 books that I finished in 2017 covered a wide variety of areas and while it's of course an imperfect science to group them, below are the categories that the books felt to belong within, along with the count:

Fiction - 4
Memoir - 4
Sports - 3
History (recent as well as past and both biography and otherwise) - 11
Self-Improvement (a very broad definition and including both memoir and otherwise)  - 13

In terms of favorites, below are the ones that were the most memorable for me, whether due to the writing, the topic, or both... with the hyperlinks for each to my writeup on the book:

Memoirs:
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Paul and Me by A.E. Hotchner
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

History:
The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Self-Improvement:
10% Happier by Dan Harris
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner 

In going a step further in picking favorites, the ones that stood out the most to me were the three noted in the memoir category above. Each featured solid writing, with Shoe Dog written along with Knight by one of my favorite authors, J.R. Moehinger, and Lab Girl as well as Paul and Me telling stories that both inspired and brought a smile to my face. Additionally, these last two had the cache of being by people I hadn't heard of and felt to be in the hidden gem category, especially Lab Girl by a geobiologist about her life and work.