Skip to main content

Ender's Game


Summary: 
Ender is a Third in a world where families are only allowed to have two children. His sadistic older brother and a school bully make his young life miserable. Then his monitor is removed and he is taken up to Battle School. Ender is pushed by his teachers and Bonzo, the battle school bully, to his absolute max. Ender is successful in the battle room and is quickly promoted to Command School. Realizing that his accelerated promotion means that the commanders believe he may be the next great military mind, Ender feels the pressure as he realizes that winning the Bugger War and the fate of Earth both lie in his hands.

Strengths: 
Orson Scott Card creates a immersive future world with disturbing clarity. The government programs set up to identify gifted children and the world of Battle School are well described. The slightly more controlled, Lord of the Flies type world is believable. The story is told in third person with almost all of the narrative focused on Ender, though there are some sections told by the adult commanders as well as a few inner chapters that focus on the political scheming of his two older siblings as they work to affect Earth's political landscape in preparation of the end of the Bugger War. The violence in the book is unflinching and brutal. The brutality of war both in a physical and mental sense is a strong theme in the book.

 Card, O., & Harris, J. (1991). Ender's game (Rev. ed.). New York: Tor. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

El Deafo

Summary:  When 4 year old Cece gets meningitis, her parents are scared. But she recovers and everything seems like it is going to be just fine, until they discover that Cece has suffered permanent hearing loss. Told through a graphic novel, Cece Bell's somewhat autobiographical story stars a world of bunnies where Cece navigates her first grade year while dealing with her deafness, wearing a hearing aid and making friends. She copes by creating an alter ego for herself, "El Deafo", the hearing aid wearing superhero. In the end, Cece gains confidence and learns to be more assertive with other people who just don't understand how their interactions with her can have an effect. Strengths: This graphic novel is geared towards a younger set of readers than most of the books I will be reviewing this fall in this blog, but it still has some value and strengths for the young adult reader. The theme of dealing with being different will resonate with young adult readers,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bloom's Taxonomy for a Digital Age

Bloom's Taxonomy. One of the things we are constantly hearing in our school is the push for increased rigor in our classroom, as a result of the STAAR tests and others like it becoming more rigorous. We are told to push for higher order thinking and questioning from our students. One of the tools we use to look at how we can increase rigor is Bloom's Taxonomy. But some things about Bloom's don't translate exactly when we are talking about the digital age and the classroom or library. For example, remembering is the lowest piece of the triangle for Bloom's, but remembering looks different when you have instant access to a powerful computer that can use essentially limitless online resources to find answers. I've mentioned to my husband just how much more this and future generations will know about the world around them simply because they no longer have to remember everything they're interested in knowing. If I pass a historical marker for a place I haven...
7 comments
Read more

The Clark-Kozma Debate in the 21st Century

In the 1980s and 1990s, as educational technology was first becoming a budding field, Richard Clark published an analysis of data where he determined that the media that delivers instruction is no more than a delivery tool. He used an analogy of a truck carrying the information to the learner. He concluded that the media chosen has no effect on the learning taking place - that the instruction in the only thing that influences the learning.  In 1994, Kozma responded and prompted the current debate. Kozma states that some media have specific characteristics that do effect learning as more than a vehicle. While there is little research to support Kozma's claim, he suggests that the way the media helps shape the learning does have impact and that evaluating this impact requires more than raw data as the media and the way we use it has become more complex and nuanced. Clark has stood by his original conclusions and has even subsequently released articles further supporting his stanc...
2 comments
Read more