Amy Nathan is an award-winning author of books for young people including The Young Musician’s Survival Guide: Tips From Teens and Pros, out now in a new expanded second edition. A Harvard graduate with master’s degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Columbia’s Teacher’s College, she is an ever-struggling piano student and the mother of two musical sons: one a composer and trumpeter, and the other a saxophone-playing government major.

Which six of the following professional musicians were instrument-switchers as kids (answers at the end of the post)? Instrument-switchers start learning to play one kind of instrument that either they (or their parents) thought would be great for them — only to discover later that there is another instrument that they love a whole lot more. And so they switch.

( ) Joshua Bell, violinist
( ) André Watts, pianist
( ) Paula Robison, flutist
( ) James Galway, flutist
( ) Ann Hobson Pilot, harpist
( ) Cynthia Phelps, violist
( ) Carter Brey, cellist
( ) Sherry Sylar, oboist

At this back-to-school time of year when kids are returning to music lessons, many parents have a nagging worry that their kids will turn out to be instrument-switchers. What if they don’t stick with the instrument the parents just shelled out a lot of money for? What about all the money spent on lessons? Will that be wasted? If they switch, how will they ever catch up with kids who didn’t switch?

Judging by the high level of musicianship of the pros in this quiz — switchers and non-switchers alike — switching isn’t the disaster that some parents fear it will be. However, the prevalence of instrument-switching does mean that it’s unwise to rush out and buy an expensive instrument for kids until they’ve spent a year or so learning to play it and are sure they really like it. If a family doesn’t already own an instrument a child can learn on, start by renting — or borrowing.

Making up lost time on the new instrument didn’t pose a serious problem for the switchers in the list above. Many had been reluctant practicers with their first instrument. But when they switched, practice time became less of a chore, turning instead into something they actually wanted to do — well, at least much of the time. After all, the new instrument was one that they chose for themselves, one whose sound spoke to them, one they really wanted to play. They were willing to put in regular practice time in order to master it. As for all those lessons with the first instrument — they weren’t a waste, but provided an introduction to music that carried over to the new choice.

“Switching is okay, but don’t switch too soon,” warns Daniel Katzen, who plays French horn with the Boston Symphony. He started on piano at age six, tried cello for a while at age nine, and then two years later finally found the instrument that was right for him, French horn. As he explains in The Young Musician’s Survival Guide, “You can’t tell about an instrument in just a few months. Other instruments always look cool. But after you start playing, you find that no instrument is really easy if you want to play it well.”

Instrument-switching may actually be something a parent could encourage a youngster to think about if the child loves music but never wants to practice. Of course, a lack of interest in practicing could come from other causes, such as the type of music the youngster is learning, the approach the teacher is taking or an overly busy after-school schedule. But it could also be that the instrument just isn’t the right one for that kid. A better match may present itself if the youngster does a little exploring by listening to a variety of kinds of music, going to concerts at school or in concert halls, watching performances on TV, having the school music teacher demonstrate different instruments. Maybe that reluctant practicer will discover an instrument he or she really wants to play, as happened with Ann Hobson Pilot, principal cellist of the Boston Symphony. She struggled with piano lessons for years, not liking them much and not wanting to practice. But when she had a chance to try harp in high school, “I felt more expressive,” she says. “I loved it from the start. So I practiced more.”

Answers to Quiz: In addition to the Boston Symphony’s Ann Hobson Pilot, three other instrument-switchers in the list above are also orchestral musicians, members of the New York Philharmonic: Cynthia Phelps, who switched from violin to viola; Carter Brey, from violin to cello; Sherry Sylar, from piano and flute to oboe. The other two are soloists: André Watts, switched as a youngster from violin to piano; Paula Robison, from piano to flute. The two who didn’t switch: Joshua Bell and James Galway.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at what happens when you judge too quickly. See his previous OUPblogs here.

In his press conference on July 22, President Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to call what the Cambridge police department did “stupid” was poor form. The president thought he was avoiding the hot spot when asked about the Gates arrest by saying that the controversy offered a “teachable moment.” But having admitted that he had imperfect knowledge of the facts, he went on and assumed that this particular incident invited a lesson about racial profiling and made the very indictment that his conversational segway was intended to avoid. In so doing, Obama confirmed conservatives’ belief that minorities love to whine about their beleaguered status (also another knee-jerk belief, incidentally) even if Obama could have made a case had he marshalled the evidence appropriately. Obama spoke like a liberal before he thought, and that was his mistake.

In so doing, he repeated the same mistake that Professor Gates made. Like Obama, Gates, too, jumped to the conclusion that Sgt Crowley was racist. I do not know if Sgt Crowley acted hastily in arresting the Professor for allegedly exhibiting “tumultous” behavior, so I won’t jump to conclusions but simply note my suspicion that there was probably a contest of egos on both sides. Those who have rushed to Crowley’s defense should ask themselves if they do not also have a knee-jerk reaction to give the benefit of the doubt to a law enforcement officer (or a soldier or a partisan affiliated with the Commander-in-Chief.)

Gates, Obama, and possibly Crowley were not the only people who have been jumping to conclusions, substituting unreflected intuition for a careful weighing of the evidence. Frank Luntz and his political students are encouraging Americans to become thoughtless automatons responding to carefully researched code words like “government takeover” and “health-care rationing.” The issue domain is different, but the error is the same.

It is very difficult to prove racial-profiling, for it demands an investigator to go inside the head of the alleged perpetrator. It is equally difficult to prove that the president’s and Democratic Congress’s plan for a “public option” is a precursor to a completely government-run health-care system. If it is not appropriate to rush to accuse someone of being racist, then it is at least premature to rush to accuse of someone of being socialist (assuming that that is a bad thing).

Those who are accusing Obama and Gates for rushing into judgment should look into the mirror to see if they too have not rushed to conclude that liberals are whiners and socialists who want a government takeover of health-care. At some level, we all have the instinct to cherry-pick the evidence to come to the conclusions we want.

Ideologies, like stereotypes, are cognitive cues or heuristics. They help us to “think” before we get the facts. They allow us to abdicate our duty to make sense of the world with our own independent judgment. They do the easy but intellectually dishonest work of guiding our reactions to the conclusions we want without us having to do the hard work of getting to know a person or a proposed policy before we came to a judgment. The people who are reinforcing such behavior in our politics are destroying our democracy and robbing us of our first freedom – the freedom of independent thought.

So the Gates controversy is a teaching moment, and the lesson is quite simple. Look before you leap; think before you conclude. It is probably the first lesson  of critical thinking, but two professors forgot it last week. If Obama wants us to learn this lesson, he should have been clearer about what the nature of his lapse was. It wasn’t that the president miscallibrated his words – for the question wasn’t about the intensity of what he said, but the very fact that he said something at all. Obama should have apologized for expressing what he felt and intuited without having first perused the evidence. If he had done that, he would have claimed the moral ground to shame some of his opponents in Congress into admitting that they too are doing the same thing in their knee-jerk opposition to what they call “Obamacare.”

The Oxford Dictionary of Education edited by Susan Wallace, covers educational terms and concepts from the UK, the US, South Africa, Australia and Canada. Some of the words, like “Big Brother Syndrome” are unique to the 21st century while others—“regius professor”—have been around for hundreds of years. The Dictionary is UK-focused, so I thought it would be interesting to look at some terms that we don’t hear very often in the US. Below, I’ve excerpted some of the words from the “A”, “B”, “C” and “R”, “S”, “T” sections.

Active vocabulary: The range of words which an individual is able to use accurately in their speech (active spoken vocabulary), or their writing (active written vocabulary), or both of these. The active vocabulary does not include words which are only recognized and understood, either by reading or hearing, but not actually used. At most stages of learning of a language, the learner’s active vocabulary will be more limited than their comprehension. In other words, their understanding will outstrip their ability to express themselves.

Big Brother Syndrome: A growing tendency among younger learners to voice an ambition for celebrity without notable achievement. Derived from a reality television programme of the same name, the term is now in widespread use by teachers and other professionals involved in work with young people. It expresses a concern not only about values, but also about the difficulties of motivating learners toward academic achievement or useful qualifications which learners themselves may dismiss as irrelevant to their goal of being thrust into a celebrity lifestyle, since their Big Brother role models often make a virtue of having achieved fame despite having little or no academic success at school.

Controlled schools: A specific kind of school in Northern Ireland, owned and funded by the *Education and Library Boards. Boards of governors are now taking more control. These are mainly Protestant schools and the Church is represented on the board of governors.

Regius professor:*Professorships (or chairs) at the *universities of Oxford and Cambridge and some Scottish universities, which were funded, or endowed, by the Crown and for which the Crown retains the right to nominate appointees. In practice, candidates are chosen on the advice of senior government ministers. The first such chair to be founded was that of Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in the 15th century.

Summative assessment: *Assessment which takes place at the end of a course of study and provides the final judgment on, or ‘sums up,’ the candidate’s performance. The most common form of summative assessment is the end examination.

Tripos: A course of study leading to an *honours degree at Cambridge University, where the student is required to pass two tripos examinations in order to be awarded their *Bachelor of Arts. The name refers to the three-legged stool on which, in medieval times, graduates sat to deliver a satirical speech at their degree ceremony.

The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Mathematics, edited by Christopher Clapham and James Nicholson, covers both pure and applied mathematics and statistics and includes linear algebra, optimization, nonlinear equations, and differential equations.  With over 3,000 authoritative entries it is a one-stop math resource.  Since I usually don’t deal with math I thought it would be fun to excerpt some entries.  Below are some samples from the “A”, “B”, “C”, “Q”, “R”, and “S” sections.  Enjoy!

Achilles paradox: The paradox which arises from considering how overtaking takes place.  Achilles gives a tortoise a head start in a race.  To overtake, he must reach the tortoise’s initial position, then where the tortoise had moved to, and so on *ad infinitum.  The conclusion that he cannot overtake because he has to cover an infinite sum of well-defined non-zero distances is false, hence the paradox.

Break-even point: The point at which revenue begins to exceed cost.  If one graph is drawn to show total revenue plotted against the number of items made and sold and another graph is drawn with the same axes to show total costs, the two graphs normal intersect at the break-even point.  To the left of the break-even point, costs exceed revenue and the company runs at a loss while, to the right, revenue exceeds costs and the company runs at a profit.

Cuboctahedron: One of the *Archimedean solids, with 6 square faces and 8 triangular faces.  It can be formed by cutting off the corners of a cube to obtain a polyhedron whose vertices lie at the midpoints of the edges of the original cube.  It can also be formed by cutting off the corners of an *octahedron to obtain a polyhedron whose vertices lie at the midpoints of the edges of the original octahedron.

QED: Abbreviation for quod erat demonstrandum.  Latin for ‘which was to be proved’.  Often written at the end of a proof.

Radius (radii): A radius of a circle is a line segment joining the centre of the circle to a point on the circle.  All such line segments have the same length, and this length is also called the radius of the circle.  The term also applies in both senses to a sphere.

Subtraction: The mathematical operation which is the inverse operation to *addition which calculates the difference between to numbers or quantities.  So 7-2=5, and (3x+5y)-(x+2y)=2x+3y.

Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall. His book Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics captured my imagination. In a series of essays he explores aspects of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from the early twentieth century to the present. His first two essays, “On Not Getting on with it: The Criticism of Cyril Connolly” and “Rolling it out: V.S. Pritchett’s Writing Life,” seemed to me to represent two very different ends of the writing spectrum. Some writers openly admit that writing is arduous for them, like Cyril Connolly. Others like V.S. Pritchett make the rest of us jealous by setting up a productive routine that works for them day in and day out. Below is a short excerpt from each of these essays. Let us know in the comments what kind of writer you are.

“On Not Getting on With it”

When Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise was published in 1938, W.H. Auden sent its author an admiring letter:

As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more than Eliot or Wilson you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror.

The word that catches the eye here is, of course, ‘banking’.  It is typical of Auden’s off-hand daringness to suggest that the experience of writing might in some way measure of to the ‘excitement and terror’ of banking.  Connolly no doubt appreciated both the compliment and the collusion, the acknowledgment from a fellow-writer that he accurately characterized the ‘real occupation’ that they shared.  In fact, Auden’s comment had a wider application to Connolly’s career as a whole, for what, above all, Connolly did was to ‘write about writing’.  That is, he wrote about the literary life as much as about literature; he wrote, with an empathy fed by constantly renewed experience, about the activity of writing, and, famously, about the much more common activity of not writing, the source of so much of the boredom and the terror.  Perhaps no other author has written so much or so well about not writing.  Drawing on the deep wells of his own disappointment and self-reproach, he turned himself into the laureate of literary sloth, the chronicler of time wasted, the learned anatomist of the obstacles to getting down to it.

Enemies of Promise itself is an inventory of the pitfalls that may all too easily prevent the writer from doing the one thing that matters, writing a book that will last.  Several of the headings of this inventory have passed into the vocabulary of modern literary culture – ‘the pram in the hall’, ‘the charlock’s shade’ -as has the parable of the seduction of the promising young author, Walter Savage Shelleyblake, into the drudgery of regular reviewing.  It is, not altogether paradoxically, the book of Connolly’s that has lasted best.  But for someone who turned habitual failure into a positive career move, Connolly actually wrote a great deal else as well…

“Rolling it Out”

It was all done with a pastry board and a bulldog clip. Sheets of paper were clipped to the board, the board rested on the arms of his chair, and the fountain pen began to cover the pages with a scrawl that barely hinted at imitations of legibility. Every day was the same, weekday or weekend: a long morning at the board, lunch, a nap, errands, tea, and then back to the board; a drink or two before dinner, perhaps some more reading after, and then earl bed in preparation for another day of turning the doughy ball of thought into light, crisp sentences. The secret of happiness, it has been said, is to develop habits whose repetition we find enjoyable and whose outcomes we find satisfying. For the greater part of his very long adult life, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems to have been a happy man.

Pritchett’s son, Oliver, later recalled that he and his sister grew up ‘in a word factory’. ‘The handwritten pages, covered in revisions, crossings out, second and third thoughts, and sideways writing in the margins, were given to my mother to type. They would be revised and typed again and again.’ Transposing the usual location of domestic equipment, the Pritchetts lived out a kind of Upstairs, Downstairs version of the literary life: he, upstairs, rolling out the sentences on the pastry board; she, downstairs, pounding, turning the scrawl into copy for the printers, stopping only to prepare the traditional cooked lunch and substantial dinner that marked the end of the day’s two shifts. Given Pritchett’s reliance on his wife’s unpaid labour, and indeed his rather traditional views of women’s role more generally…, there seemed a momentary plausibility to a line the proof copy of Jeremy Treglown’s biography, alas properly corrected in the published version, which had him setting the pastry board, ‘across the comfortable arms of his char’.

‘Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.’ Thus Pritchett, writing on Gibbon in 1941, in the essay that now stands at the head of his 1,300-page Complete Essays. He didn’t really mean that it was depressing, of course: that’s just the note of the twinkly-eyed collusion with his readers’ all-too human weaknesses that graces so many of his essays. Beneath the surface, a more strenuous moral is silently making itself felt, suggesting that his familiar fact is actually sobering or bracing, a reminder to Pritchett to keep himself up to the mark. The last essay in that volume, on Virginia Woolf, written over forty years later, ovserves almost as an aside: ‘She worked harder than ever when she was famous, as gifted writers do-what else is there to do but write?’ That rhetorical question may at first reading seem to strike a bleak note, as though all else had lost its savour, but in context it gestures more towards an inner imperative, that achieved condition of the writer, whether critic or novelist, in which experience is not fully possessed as experience until it has been cropped, shaped, and coloured. Pritchett wrote so well about authors as different as Gibbon and Woolf in part because he, too, knew the compulsions and desperations of the form of willing slavery that is the writer’s life…

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish.  His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon reports on the Dictionary Society of North America Conference.

I spent four days last week sitting in a mildly uncomfortable chair and experiencing the distinct pleasure that comes from listening to people far more knowledgeable than I speak on the subject of dictionaries. It was the biannual meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, held at Indiana University, in Bloomington, and although I learned an enormous amount, I have to confess that there is one question from my time there that still plagues me – why don’t more people go to conferences?

To be more specific about this query, I mean that I don’t quite understand why more people who are not connected with lexicography, linguistics, or some related field do not attend this meeting. I routinely meet people who say they are enchanted by dictionaries, and have questions about how they work and their history, what better way to indulge one’s interest in a subject than to go where you are surrounded by dozens of experts in a field?

Granted, this is not the typical holiday that comes to mind for most, and I guess that is reasonable. But I did see a few attendees, such as my friend Leonard Frey, whose interest in dictionaries is purely amateur (in the best sense of that word), and who drove up from Memphis with his wife. Their obvious enjoyment was so pure and infectious that it constantly reminded me how lucky I was to attend. Among the highlights:

Kate Wild, of the University of Glasgow, gave a talk on re-assessing Samuel Johnson’s usage labels that forever changed the way I’ll read that dictionary. Grant Barrett demonstrated an impressive and potentially enormously productive use of Amazon Turks in creating a database of user-created definitions. And Sarah Ogilvie showed that scholarship and sustaining audience interest need not be mutually exclusive, in a paper that effectively made the case that, while James Murray was certainly one of the greatest lexicographers in history, he was also prone to inordinate bursts of peevishness and paranoia.

However, the greatest enjoyment came from listening to the editors of the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, especially Christian Kay and Irené Wotherspoon (who between them have close to 80 years experience working on that magnificent project). I’ve mentioned the HTOED before, and feel no compunction to avoid repeating myself. If you have any curiosity about the English language go buy yourself a copy – it is not cheap by any means, but no matter the price it is a bargain. And I can imagine no better advocates for it than Kay and Wotherspoon, who exude intellectual grace and humor like few I’ve ever seen. If they decided to write a book on the history of Popsicle sticks and watch fobs I would run out and buy it.

On a side note, I will be taking a hiatus from this blog for the next three months, while I finish a book. See you all again soon.

One of the best tributes to our fallen troops, in my opinion, is taking very good care of their surviving comrades.  To celebrate Memorial Day we have excerpted a piece from the beginning of The G.I. Bill: A New Deal For Veterans, by Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin which looks at just how beneficial the G.I Bill was not only for troops but for all of America.  Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies and the Dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell University.  Stuart M. Blumin is Professor Emeritus of American History, Cornell University.

In July 1995 President Bill Clinton spoke at a commemorative service in Warm Springs, Georgia, soon after the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Looking back on FDR’s long and remarkable presidency, Clinton identified as its “most enduring legacy” an achievement that came neither from the Hundred Days of initial New Deal legislation nor from the structural reforms of the Second New Deal, nor even from FDR’s successful prosecution of World War II.  Rather, Clinton pointed to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944-The GI Bill- a law passed late in Roosevelt’s presidency, following his initiatives but shaped by many others besides himself.  The GI Bill, Clinton observed, “gave generations of veterans a chance to get an education, to build strong families and good lives, and to build the nation’s strongest economy ever, to change the face of America.”  This one piece of legislation, he continued, perhaps with an eye to his own presidential legacy, “helped unleash a prosperity never before known.”  It was a New Deal for veterans and, through them, for the postwar nation as a whole.

Fifty years earlier this would have seemed a very strange choice for an FDR encomium, but by the 1990s it was as reasonable as choosing Social Security, the WPA, or victory over the Nazis.  When Clinton spoke, praise for the GI Bill was widespread and partook of the increasing respect and nostalgia among the vast majority of Americans for what the journalist Tom Brokaw would soon call “the Greatest Generation”-the young adults (many of them boys and girls who quickly became adults) who, in foxholes and bombers, shipyards and munitions factories, helped rescue the world from fascism.  The very large numbers who had served in the military during the war returned to help create a peacetime society of unprecedented prosperity, and it came to be generally understood that the GI Bill was the essential instrument of their successful reintegration into civilian life.  Clinton, himself a postwar “baby boomer,” spoke for a generation of Americans who saw the GI Bill as the key to a kingdom of peace and plenty.

Praise for the GI Bill was is by no means restricted to members of FDR’s political party.  Bob Michel, a former Republican congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who served as minority leader in the House of Representatives for fourteen years (the longest minority leadership in U.S. history), has described the GI Bill as “a great piece of legislation” that “cut across the economic strata” and made it possible for “many thousands of veterans, including tens of thousands who would not have thought of college,” to get undergraduate degrees.  Michel points to the almost universal approval of the bill.  “I don’t know of anyone,” he reflects, “who has ever maligned it.”  Michel was himself a highly decorated World War II veteran and a beneficiary of the GI Bill.  Nonetheless, it is clear that his admiration for this legislation is not just informed by his own good fortune but also reflects the experiences of an entire generation.

Leaders from outside politics have also expressed admiration for the GI Bill, and these include many who do not ordinarily favor forceful government solutions to pressing social issues.  Two years before Clinton’s Warm Springs address the widely respected management theorist Peter F. Drucker wrote that future historians might welcome to regard the bill as “the most important event of the 20th century” in that its provisions for government-subsidized college education for World War II veterans “signaled the shift to the knowledge society.”  Drucker’s was a sophisticated appraisal of how one public initiative could, even as a largely unintended effect, unleash larger forces that would in turn transform an entire society.  His analysis reinforces, too, the popular perception of the bill as a product of bipartisan consensus, when what seemed to matter at the moment of its passage was not Democratic or Republican political advantage but the interests of the veterans and the nation at large.  It bears the stamp of neither party.  It is an American document, a mid-twentieth-century Bill of Rights.  The American Legion, pressing hard from late 1943 for its version of a comprehensive veterans’ bill, originally called it the Bill of Rights for GI Joe and GI Jane.

As is suggested by this language of rights and of GI Joe and Jane, much popular praise for the bill has been more personal than that of public leaders asked or inclined to reflect on its general significance.  It was what gave your father or grandmother or some elderly veteran who told you his story the opportunity to realize in his or her own lifetime what could have been only distant dreams while in a foxhole in the Ardennes, in a field hospital in Italy, or in a breadline during the Great Depression.  Personal success stories that trace back to the GI Bill abound within families and well beyond, some of them known to us, to be sure, because, like Bob Michel’s, they involved famous people.

The GI Bill-assisted career of William Rehnquist, former chief justice of the Supreme Court, is one such story.  Rehnquist had a brief taste of college life at Kenyon College before entering the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942.  When his military service was finished, he used the GI Bill to enroll at Stanford University (he was attracted by the California climate), where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science and eventually a law degree.  He became a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, and the rest, as they say, is history.  When asked years later how he had chosen his profession, Rehnquist answered, perhaps with tongue in cheek, “The GI Bill paid for an occupation test that told you what you ought to be.  They told me to be a lawyer.”

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP posted everyday this week to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, check out all our library love.

The answers to our library quiz are revealed. Were you able to identify the works of architectural wonder we discussed?

1) Which library is the apple of this city’s eye? (New York Public Library)

2) Egypt may be known for its wondrous pyramids, but its library architecture is no small feat. (Bibliotheca Alexandrina)

3) This Danish library has a modern take on royalty. (Royal Library in Copenhagen)

4) This library’s unorthodox shape is unlike any other building in the rainy North American city it resides in. (Seattle Public Library)

5) This library belongs to arguably the best law school in the U.S. (Harvard Law Library)

6) Located in three buildings in the U.S. capitol, this library was established in 1800. (Library of Congress)

7) Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Well no worries if you don’t, this library speaks the universal/ecological language of green. (University of Berlin Philological Library)

This library was intended to engage the imagination and aspirations of its home city, as well as provide stunning views of the Wasatch Mountains. (Salt Lake City Public Library)

9) Its Polish home city may have been ravaged during World War II but this “old” library still stands proud as part of the university.  (Old Library at Warsaw University)

10) This library exemplifies that the Irish know length matters. (Long Room Library at Trinity College in Dublin)

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.

Each library has its individual appeal and we at OUP recognize that, so we combed the world to seek out some of these rare gems and put the their trademark qualities into a quiz to test your love of libraries. Make sure to check back in at the end of the day when the answers are revealed.

1) Which library is the apple of this city’s eye?

2) Egypt may be known for its wondrous pyramids, but its library architecture is no small feat.

3) This Danish library has a modern take on royalty.

4) This library’s unorthodox shape is unlike any other building in the rainy North American city  it resides in.

5) This library belongs to arguably the best law school in the U.S.

6) Located in three buildings in the U.S. capitol, this library was established in 1800.

7) Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Well no worries if you don’t, this library speaks the universal/ecological language of green.

This library was intended to engage the imagination and aspirations of its home city, as well as provide stunning views of the Wasatch Mountains.

9) Its Polish home city may have been ravaged during World War II but this “old” library still stands proud as part of the university.

10) This library exemplifies that the Irish know length matters.

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.

Maura Smale, is the Information Literacy Librarian at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. She lives in Brooklyn and takes her 7 year old son, Gus, to the library on the weekends. Her Favorite Library Blogs are ACRLog, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, LISNews and she hearts Jessamyn West’s blog librarian.net. In the post below she discusses how her love affair with libraries began and how she tried to pass along that appreciation to her son.

One of my favorite things about being a parent is watching my kid learn. It’s so interesting and enjoyable to see that “aha!” moment when his brain really grabs onto something new.

By the time he was 6 years old my son was a competent reader, but he hadn’t yet developed the enthusiasm for reading that I’d always hoped he’d have. After all, his mom’s a librarian and the walls of our apartment are lined with bookshelves. It’s his destiny to love reading, right?

I remember being a voracious reader as a child. One summer when I was about my son’s age, my mom took me to our local library to sign up for Summer Reading. I felt so confident when the librarian said that I would only have to read six books to earn a certificate at the end of the summer. Six measly books? I could do that in a month, never mind a whole summer. But I loved getting the certificate all the same, and hung the shiny blue ribbon on my bedroom wall.

Watching my son read last summer I realized that while he’d mastered the basic mechanics of putting the letters together and sounding out words, he wasn’t quite reading fluently yet. Sure, he could read the beginner books easily, but books with the level of plot required to hold his attention were still too much work to be truly enjoyable. So he shied away from chapter books and only read when we asked him to.

Driven by my own nostalgic memories of Summer Reading (and armed with statistics from my time in library school about kids losing ground on their reading over the summer), I marched us off to the library to sign up for summer reading. The incentives were enough to convince him to sign up, and they were much more luxurious than mine were: no minimum number of books required, just bring in your list each week and show it to a librarian to get a small prize of stickers, tattoos, pencil sharpeners, and the like.

I love the classic kids’ books, but it was clear that my son needed an extra push to get him over the hump, and that push could only come from his favorite characters: Star Wars, Spongebob and Pokemon. Over the course of the summer we settled into what has become our usual library routine: we find one book together, then he sits on the bench next to the window and reads it while I browse the shelves, bringing back more and more books that pile up in a stack next to him. When I’ve finished hunting and gathering we look through the stack together and pick out the books that he wants, then he digs his library card out of his pocket and we take them up to the desk to check them out.

And it worked! By the end of the summer my son’s reading had vastly improved, and he moved on to reading chapter books on his own without complaint. As he’s become a better reader the library has become increasingly valuable. Of course we do still buy books, but there are many that I can’t possibly buy at the rate he’s reading them. Magic School Bus, Beast Quest, Ghosthunters, Pokemon (still): the library has, thankfully, acquired them all. And my kid’s already a pro: he knows that we can request a book that’s not available in our branch, which he tells me is his favorite thing about the library. (Me, too.)