A powerful and inspirational work for teachers that’s limited only by its religious emphasis.
A veteran educator blends a debut memoir and teaching advice.
Like many new teachers, Ming took it personally when students misbehaved or refused to put their best efforts into her class. After all, she believed that “irritating” student behaviors negatively impacted “MY classroom, MY ability to teach Geometry, and MY peace as an educator.” But when one of her problematic students died by suicide, she realized only too late the missed signs of personality changes and hallmarks of lethal preparation. The student’s death “haunted” the author for years, and she even took a job in the private sector for a time. Upon returning to the classroom years later, Ming rededicated her life to service to students in Maryland and Washington, D.C., becoming the 2021-2022 Project Lead the Way Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Combining her personal failures and successes in the classroom with advice gleaned from decades of experience, the author offers teachers encouragement and advice on the value of being patient, humble, and perceptive in the classroom. Ming, who works in predominantly urban and Black parochial schools, is also outspoken about her faith, noting that she was “inspired and called” into the classroom by Jesus to help “students exercise their God-given gifts and mind to His glory.” Thus, for example, she not only emphasizes the value of aesthetics and the physical maintenance of classrooms (“Students,” she convincingly argues, “treat their spaces differently based on perceived value and importance”), but she also urges teachers to adorn their rooms with Christian-themed inspirational messages, posters, and Scriptures. Many of her favorite posters and images are included in the work’s appendix material. As useful as this may be for private Christian educators, much of the book’s religiously inspired advice to teachers would not be permitted in public school settings. This drawback notwithstanding, Ming is an evocative writer whose work touches on important themes in education today, from racism and mental health to the encouragement of Generation Z students, whose learning styles and needs are drastically different than their predecessors’.
A powerful and inspirational work for teachers that’s limited only by its religious emphasis.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-944348-62-5
Page Count: 136
Publisher: PENDIUM
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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