A somewhat overlong account that offers amusing anecdotes about teaching.
A veteran New York teacher delivers her first memoir.
Ehrlich is the kind of English teacher most kids would love. The author offers a detailed account of her nearly 34 years teaching in the rough-and-tumble New York public school system. Wry and no-nonsense, Ehrlich recalls incidents and encounters with her many students, fellow faculty members and administrative personnel. Her bemused attitude allows her to survive kids who neither work nor attend class, teachers who have stopped caring about students, and an administration that seems at best removed, and at worst hostile, ignorant and out of touch. The memoir is inhabited by characters such as Roger Roam Da Hall who “roamed da halls and right out da door never to be seen again”; the officious administrator Bea Z, Belle of the Hall, “who could be both callous and sympathetic in the same breath”; and Ehrlich’s irrepressible student Frankie, who is a “classic Italian-American wise guy wannabe.” This is a narrative that will appear familiar to those readers who have explored Bel Kaufman’s 1960s account, Up the Down Staircase, an incisive critique of the New York education system that shocked people at the time. Indeed, Ehrlich acknowledges Kaufman’s influence as a mentor. It’s not Ehrlich’s mission to offer the reader a revealing social critique, however. Rather, she handles her subject with a light touch to amuse rather than provoke. The most revealing portraits, Ehrlich saves for a special chapter devoted to students that she could not erase from her memory. This material might perhaps have been richer had it been worked into the entire book to offer more thematic context for her narrative. Addressed to both new teachers and veterans, Ehrlich’s book provides some amusing reading for those interested in the challenges of teaching.
A somewhat overlong account that offers amusing anecdotes about teaching.Pub Date: June 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1463696597
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.
A former NFL player casts his gimlet eye on American race relations.
In his first book, Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports who grew up in Dallas as the son of Nigerian immigrants, addresses White readers who have sent him questions about Black history and culture. “My childhood,” he writes, “was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80-90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.” While the author avoids condescending to readers who already acknowledge their White privilege or understand why it’s unacceptable to use the N-word, he’s also attuned to the sensitive nature of the topic. As such, he has created “a place where questions you may have been afraid to ask get answered.” Acho has a deft touch and a historian’s knack for marshaling facts. He packs a lot into his concise narrative, from an incisive historical breakdown of American racial unrest and violence to the ways of cultural appropriation: Your friend respecting and appreciating Black arts and culture? OK. Kim Kardashian showing off her braids and attributing her sense of style to Bo Derek? Not so much. Within larger chapters, the text, which originated with the author’s online video series with the same title, is neatly organized under helpful headings: “Let’s rewind,” “Let’s get uncomfortable,” “Talk it, walk it.” Acho can be funny, but that’s not his goal—nor is he pedaling gotcha zingers or pleas for headlines. The author delivers exactly what he promises in the title, tackling difficult topics with the depth of an engaged cultural thinker and the style of an experienced wordsmith. Throughout, Acho is a friendly guide, seeking to sow understanding even if it means risking just a little discord.
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-80046-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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