A valuable guide to helping teachers reawaken their passion and prioritize their emotional health.
Offering practical advice and exercises, this manual aims to inspire educators to rekindle their spark.
Nearly three times more likely to experience depression than other working adults, modern educators are besieged by evolving expectations and limited time, Veny asserts. The result is an exodus of qualified teachers from the field, with those remaining in the classroom feeling unseen and sometimes unsafe. But sharing his own story of a childhood mental health crisis and examples of students whose potentials were protected by teachers, the author encourages educators to not give up on their classrooms or themselves. Veny provides a wealth of empowering resources, guiding educators back from the brink of burnout and examining a host of relevant topics. Covered in this work are such diverse subjects as finding your “Why,” having mental health conversations, and dealing with the feeling you have “failed” a student. And while the book contains traditional reminders about a balanced diet and adequate sleep, concepts like the “Covey Time Management Matrix,” “Coping Ahead,” and “Worry Time” will introduce readers to new, intriguing strategies for managing key issues. In addition to delivering helpful skill-building activities dedicated to filling “your cup,” each chapter is accompanied by a song selected by the author. From Chicago’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” to Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me,” this free Spotify soundtrack offers a multisensory approach to the lessons presented. It is important to note that serious—and potentially triggering—topics, such as self-harm and suicide, are occasionally discussed, illustrating the challenges faced by modern youths and the teachers who protect them. But the work’s overall tone is optimistic, and professionals of all backgrounds can benefit from the positive, useful advice. Stripping away the complexity surrounding self-care, Veny notes that by creating a detailed plan to manage time and stress and reducing negative influences, emotional wellness and professional excellence can flow freely in educators’ lives.
A valuable guide to helping teachers reawaken their passion and prioritize their emotional health.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798985087864
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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