Reviewing Niceties

Reading Jacob Silverman’s “Against Enthusiasm: The Epidemic of Niceness in Online Book Culture” has me yet again doing my own navel-gazing. “Not nice” for my 4th grade students can be code for anything they don’t like. Good thing that I’m thick-skinned enough at this point in my career to know that their identifying me this way is generally temporary due to one irritating moment and that soon enough something else will happen to redeem me in their eyes.

When it comes to the world of children’s...