A dedicated teacher sends a valentine to some charming students—and to himself.
Children’s author Swope (The Krazees, 1997, etc.) chronicles his three years conducting writing workshops with a group of elementary-school students in Queens.
Although this is a throwback to those teaching memoirs that proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s by John Holt, Herbert Kohl, et al., the author seems unaware of these ancestors in his generally blithe and often self-flattering report from the front lines of American urban education. After falling in love with the third-graders in what was supposed to be a ten-day workshop and continuing to work with them through fifth grade, Swope does his best to battle the organizational demons that rule his new world: bureaucracy, burnt-out or incompetent teachers, parents who seem to have no aspirations for their children, and youngsters who cannot make themselves behave in ways beneficial to them. Following his first year with a classroom teacher he really admired, he found himself working with colleagues he did not completely respect; the kids’ fourth-grade teacher in particular comes off as dim and dysfunctional. (The author has changed all the students’ and teachers’ names.) Swope had great advantages denied to classroom teachers: he met privately with individuals and small groups; he worked with a principal who supported his efforts to take students on frequent field trips; he was free to create nontraditional projects that caught the youngsters’ attention and earned their affection. (Two long-term activities on islands and trees were especially engaging.) The novice instructor became deeply involved in his students’ lives. He interviewed and visited their parents, helped the kids apply to magnet middle schools, talked with them on the phone, discussed with them the intimacies of their lives. Some produced good writing; others managed only drivel. Swope’s tale is occasionally vitiated by his need to tell us how wonderful he is when a simple recounting of his deeds would have sufficed.
A dedicated teacher sends a valentine to some charming students—and to himself.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7334-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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