The Black Swan

Over the recent holidays, I listened to the unabridged CDs of The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. This author surfaced because he was one of the few people to warn years ago that the U.S. was on the verge of a economic catastrophe. The Black Swan may put off readers who may not enjoy listening or reading about economics, however. In my case, I follow economics as a hobby.

In a broad sense, the book has me thinking more about how our society discounts or tosses out ideas, people, products, and more that don't fit the norm or conventional wisdom. What comes to mind is the situation in education where departments of education at state and federal levels have adopted phonics as the one-best-way approach for teaching reading. I'm among the millions of children who learned to read using the whole word method prior to the advent of phonics. Therefore, I believe both methods can be used effective.

So, I now look for black swans, statistical outliers. I'm willing to analyze them, particularly in regard to early childhood education, to make sure good ideas aren't tossed because they are outside view of the gaggle.