Inspired, breath-of-fresh-air reading, especially for those who have ever questioned what the public school system can do...
A veteran educator's uplifting account of how he introduced schoolchildren to global problems through a visionary game that charged them with saving the world.
In 1978, Hunter decided that he wanted to teach his inner-city students about global issues in such a way that "they could experience the feeling of learning through their bodies." So he developed the “World Peace Game” and used a three-dimensional structure to represent the entire planet "in four layers: undersea, ground and sea, airspace, and outer space." Hunter plunged children into a complex matrix of problems and forced them to face such crises as nuclear proliferation; ethnic, religious and political tensions; and climate change and environmental disasters. His goals were twofold: He wanted to get his students to learn how to think in meaningful ways about difficult issues, and he hoped they could overcome petty hostilities and ego and organize themselves into a larger collective. Every class discovered a unique way to save the world, and no game ever ended without at least a few students walking away more aware of their own hidden strengths and weaknesses. Hunter also examines what the World Peace Game taught him. Creative entities, such as the collectives his students forged, moved through identifiable stages, some of which he admits have caused him profound anxiety. But as a teacher, he learned that his duty was to work in harmony with the group rather than seek to control either the participants or their responses, knowing that, “like adults in the real world, they might fail.”
Inspired, breath-of-fresh-air reading, especially for those who have ever questioned what the public school system can do for American children.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0547905594
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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