Just a reminder of what the back cover of Think Like a Teacher looked like.
I decided to rewrite the back-cover contents to make them less confrontational:
I'm off Reddit now, but one thing I learned during my time at r/Homeschool was that a lot of parents are homeschooling for not-so-rightie reasons: they're worried about bullying (which I tangentially address in my book), and many parents are also irrationally worried about school shootings. For that reason, I've decided I can reach a wider market by making my back cover a bit less confrontational. Not to worry: the book's first paragraph will remain the same:
Welcome! You might have bought this book for any number of reasons: you’re sick of allowing your child to have his or her head filled, by public-school teachers, with a “woke” agenda that insists America is a bigoted cesspool, and that math and science are racist and “privileged” pursuits. You don’t want your kids growing up with a distorted sense of their country’s history, culture, and core values. You might be looking for a more religion-friendly alternative to what public schools offer. You might be disgusted by how teachers’ unions seem to hold your children in thrall, and how authorities insist that parents should have no say in what your children should learn. You’re worried that today’s classrooms have become little better than zoos: full of noisy kids with bad attitudes who impede the learning of their classmates while teachers look on helplessly. With American education in crisis, there are many reasons to pull your kids out of the mainstream and teach them personally.
Digression re: parents' irrational assessment of risk—while it seems as if mass shootings are in the news almost every day, you have to look at the stats rationally: maybe a few dozen people per year are killed in mass shootings. Compare that to the total US population of a third of a billion: a few dozen is a vanishingly small percentage. Consider, too, that mass shootings make the news precisely because they are rare. When was the last time you read an in-depth report about an inner-city shooting? They're not reported on because they're a dime a dozen. The problem is that human beings are terrible at assessing risk, which is how you end up with people who are terrified of flying in airplanes: all they can think about is how horrible it would be to crash. It never occurs to such people that there are 16 million flights per year globally, or about 44,000 flights per day. As for plane-crash deaths, stats have been trending downward since 2006, going from 900-some to 170-some deaths per year—again, globally. With an average of 200-some people per flight, that's about 3.4 billion people flying per year (2022 data). Divide 170 deaths by 3.4 billion yearly global flyers, and you get a mortality statistic that's very close to zero (0.00000005%). Granted, death by plane crash is horrible when it happens, but the fact is that it just doesn't happen that often. So while I sympathize with the Reddit parents who want to homeschool because of bullying, I frankly don't get the parents who think a mass shooting will likely happen at their kids' school.
At any rate, my book's in-Korea version has a new, less politically skewed back cover now. My two brothers lean liberal (Sean claims to be a libertarian, but he's a leftie), so I ought to be able to mail them copies of my book, now, without triggering them. Heh.
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