In this unique collaboration, naturalists Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble investigate how children come to care deeply about the natural world. They ask searching questions about what may happen to children denied exposure to wild places – a reality for more children today than at any time in human history. The authors remember pivotal events in their own childhood that led each to a life-long relationship with the land: Nabhan’s wanderings in the wasteland of steel mills and power plants of Gary, Indiana, and in the Indiana Dunes; Trimble’s travels in the West with a geologist father. They tell stories of children learning about wild places and creatures in settings ranging from cities and suburbs to isolated Nevada sheep ranches to Native American communities in the Southwest and Mexico. The Geography of Childhood draws insights from fields as various as evolutionary biology, child psychology, education, and ethnography. The book urges adults to rethink our children’s contact with nature. Small children have less need for large-scale wilderness than for a garden, gully, or field to create a crucial tie to the natural world. Nabhan suggests that traditional wilderness-oriented rites of passage may help cure the alienation of adolescence: ‘Those who as adolescents fail to pass through such rites remain in an arrested state of immaturity for the remainder of their lives’. Trimble’s fatherhood leads him to question how we grant different freedoms to girls and boys in their exploration of nature – and how this bias powerfully affects adult lives. Both authors return to their experiences with indigenous peoples to show how nature is taught and wilderness understood in cultures historicallygrounded outside of America’s cities and suburbs. The Geography of Childhood makes clear how human growth remains rooted, as it always has, both in childhood and in wild landscapes. It is an essential book for all parents and teachers who wonder what our children may miss if they never experience local wildlife or wild landscapes.
Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’
Introduction to Discrete Mathematics with Isetl
Intended for first- or second-year undergraduates, this introduction to discrete mathematics covers the usual topics of such a course, but applies constructivist principles that promote – indeed, require – active participation by the student. Working with the programming language ISETL, whose syntax is close to that of standard mathematical language, the student constructs the concepts in her or his mind as a result of constructing them on the computer in the syntax of ISETL. This dramatically different approach allows students to attempt to discover concepts in a ‘Socratic’ dialog with the computer. The discussion avoids the formal ‘definition-theorem’ approach and promotes active involvement by the reader by its questioning style. An instructor using this text can expect a lively class whose students develop a deep conceptual understanding rather than simply manipulative skills. Topics covered in this book include: the propositional calculus, operations on sets, basic counting methods, predicate calculus, relations, graphs, functions, and mathematical induction.
Sec Regulation of Public Companies
Sec Regulation of Public Companies
Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America
Highlighted by more than two thousand digitally enhanced color photographs, a comprehensive guide to the insects of North America contains information–including life histories, behaviors, and habitats–on every major group of insects found north of Mexico.
Ags Algebra
Ags Algebra
