You don’t sound like a know-it-all and I’m really glad for your comment! Umm, talk about sounding like a know it all — I’m writing about gerunds and analytic categories?! Next time I write a book review, it’s going to be colloquial.

I did get certified in Massachusetts five or six years ago during my last year in college. My certification program was new and streamlined to one year and what we read in the courses was pretty lame. I can say with certainty that those readings were useless. I think the phrase I read somewhere along the line, “ed lit is a mile wide and an inch deep,” seems pretty accurate from my very local viewpoint.

But as you said, my training in history has taught me to read really critically — tear apart assumptions and deconstruct a text into a finite set of arguments which can be evaluated alone and then together. That aspect of it was very mathematical. It’s all about evidence, clarity, and the theoretical framework the author either consciously or unconsciously agreed to work in. Those are some key structural pieces that the historical community (and mathematical communities) agree to evaluate when they approach a text.

It is somewhat disconcerting to me that something like ed lit doesn’t share those same values? (Okay, maybe it does; I’m making wide assumptions based on the few things I have read, and years ago.)

And I think what you said I said but in a better way (“the text can say something valuable about the real, messy world even though it isn’t all that intellectually satisfying”) is spot on.

-Sam

The six analytic terms are not well-defined and are stretched too thin. The lack of cohesion that seems to me to be the hallmark of the book forces me to wonder if my six summaries above would be even close to the summaries other readers might give.

This made me laugh, and I suppose in the following I’m going to sound like an annoying know-it-all, but – most educational literature shares these traits. You haven’t acquired a credential yet? Reading educational texts when you have any background whatsoever in analytic philosophy (which must to some degree have been part of your history-of-science background) is frustrating in perhaps the way engineering texts are annoying to pure mathematicians (not that I know what the latter is like; just have heard real math people complain): There’s the lack of definitions, the unstated assumptions, the apparent arbitrariness of categories, the lack of discussion of those limiting cases and counterexamples that in other academic fields are what we look for first… I think you’re approaching the text in the most constructive way possible, figuring that the text can say something valuable about the real, messy world even though it isn’t all that intellectually satisfying :)

Huh, reading this comment again, it’s sounding so obnoxious I should perhaps not publish it, but – what the heck.