Recommended reading for all educators, from starry-eyed neophytes to seasoned veterans.
A well-balanced combination of classroom anecdotes and educational strategies.
In this debut work, Iaccarino draws upon three decades of experience, primarily at the elementary level, with occasional forays into that special wilderness also known as middle school. The author recognizes her own early sources of inspiration, most notably a high school history teacher who selected her to participate in a Saturday lecture and discussion program at Yale University, despite lackluster grades. By means of this rare opportunity, Iaccarino came upon an insight that ended up guiding her entire teaching philosophy: Apathy is the real enemy. This book is not a treatise on educational reform, but the author is not shy about commenting on the changes—both positive and negative—that she has witnessed over the past 30 years. Certainly among the veiled criticisms is the notion of standardized testing as the ultimate indicator of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Throughout the text, Iaccarino employs self-deprecating humor and parenthetical asides, keeping the tone light and breezy, without minimizing the importance of her subject matter. She offers practical, tongue-in-cheek advice: If one is going to employ the “talking stick” method for maintaining classroom order, lightweight cardboard materials are preferable in the event of violent outbursts. She also recounts her experiences using Shakespeare, medieval English history and Native American cultures to motivate students, helping them make connections between schoolwork and overarching themes that would shape their own lives. The section on the six basic syllable types is not to be missed, as Iaccarino employs narratives that will resonate with children and enable them to learn pronunciation rules. Observe how “Secret Agent Silent E” furtively appears at the end of a word and allows the previous vowel to speak its own name: “at” versus “ate.” Parents can use this valuable resource not only to familiarize themselves with challenges faced in the classroom, but also to reinforce beneficial educational habits at home.
Recommended reading for all educators, from starry-eyed neophytes to seasoned veterans.Pub Date: March 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479305209
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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