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CYBERSLAMMED

UNDERSTAND, PREVENT, COMBAT AND TRANSFORM THE MOST COMMON CYBERBULLYING TACTICS

A solid foundation to help educators teach young people about appropriate behavior both on- and offline.

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A curriculum guide for teachers—and parents—who want to explore issues of cyberbullying with teens and preteens.

In six thematic lesson plans, each based on an example of a different type of online bullying behavior, Stephens and Nair present background information, discussion questions, and group and individual exercises designed for use in the classroom or an after-school program. The topics include ganging up against one person in an online environment, creating fake social media profiles, misuse of rating websites, and distribution of inappropriate photos and videos. The authors are aware of the fast-changing nature of social media platforms and wisely do not spend much time on the specifics of Facebook, YouTube or other currently popular sites. Instead, they break the incidents down into their individual components, encouraging students to understand the motivations behind inappropriate behavior, identify points at which a situation could be defused instead of escalated, and develop their own strategies for coping before problems arise. Each lesson includes “threat level assessments”; students are instructed to recommend responses to incidents that range from minor annoyances to significant issues. The lessons also include a one- to two-page essay directed at students that provides suggestions for emotional resilience and coping strategies, drawn largely from the work of a bullying and martial arts expert. The book’s format should make it clear to potential readers that it’s not written for a general audience; readers interested in narrative works on cyberbullying should look elsewhere. But the authors understand their target audience and provide all the information necessary for teachers to use a prepackaged curriculum or design their own. Some of the exercises provided are weaker than others, particularly an exploration of genocide included in the chapter on “Haters’ Clubs”; the authors note that it’s “the original text of this document and could not be altered for this workbook,” but it still seems to be stretching the metaphor too far.

A solid foundation to help educators teach young people about appropriate behavior both on- and offline.

Pub Date: July 10, 2012

ISBN: 978-0615641805

Page Count: 260

Publisher: sMashup Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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