A useful professional development resource for English educators who are hungry for new ideas.
Educators Berry and Degen of Dallas-based Jesuit College Preparatory School present practical classroom strategies for English teachers.
This book is aimed at people who teach, design curricula, or create instructional material for secondary English classes, and it asserts that their students would greatly benefit from classroom instruction that’s informed by the expertise of neuroscientists, psychologists, and athletics coaches. Berry and Degen, who have four decades of teaching experience between them, champion class activities involving physical movement, as well as “movements of the mind” that hone the skills and thought processes involved in complex intellectual endeavors. They cite research that says that physical movement sharpens people’s memories, increases their motivation, strengthens connections between neurons, improves the brain’s adaptability, promotes social engagement, and automates skills. This book also proposes that, just as an athletics coach trains students to visualize a path to higher achievement with practice, an English coach can create a playbook to show students what expert performance looks like and how to get there. It shows, for instance, how teachers can prepare students to read closely, recognize patterns and draw conclusions, creatively organize evidence, and engage with evaluating their own writing. It also gives concrete examples of how educators, after challenging students, can provide “brain breaks” as a relief from information overload. In addition, the book recommends using instructional time only for clear, direct feedback, and not for personal anecdotes, so that students have more time for guided discovery.
The best thing about this book is that it aims to make teachers aware of how instructional choices can draw on scientific knowledge—specifically regarding the effect of neurotransmitters on learning, which is rarely included in professional development programs. To that end, it addresses the effects of dopamine, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, serotonin, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and cortisol. The authors also provide plenty of effective examples of how teachers can train students in specific skills. “The Quotation Game,” for instance, is based on the principle of chunking, which involves analyzing specific quotations, rather than an entire novel—narrowing the scope of the lesson while raising its intensity. The book uses excerpts from or refers to classics by Geoffrey Chaucer, Virginia Woolf, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare, and George Orwell, among others, so that educators can make swift connections between what they learn from this book and what they apply in their classrooms. Another strength is the book’s emphasis on the direct relationship between repetition and neurological development, arguing that all students can excel via coherent strategies. This viewpoint may make teachers interrogate their own biases about struggling students. However, although the book addresses working with students with short attention spans, it does not talk about pupils on the autism spectrum. This seems like a lost opportunity to foster more awareness of neurodiverse students’ educational needs. However, the authors do effectively prod teachers into using peer editing as a part of classroom instruction, so that students can learn and grow together.
A useful professional development resource for English educators who are hungry for new ideas.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780985384968
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Telemachos
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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