The narrative demonstrates a clear progression from a woman’s dream for a model school to that reality, which has made a...
The methods one principal used to create a safe learning environment for her students.
Opening a new school in Brownsville, “one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in all of New York City,” may seem like a crazy idea to many, but Lopez knew that she could make a difference in the futures of the children who would attend her school. This book shows how she turned her dream into reality. The author readily admits the countless obstacles she faced during the first year. “Kids screamed at the top of their lungs or walked out of rooms in the middle of class; it felt like an asylum rather than a school,” she writes. “Every single day there was a fight….When they set fire to the bathroom, by burning toilet paper, I didn’t think it could get any more insane.” Despite the many challenges, however, Lopez continued to fight for her school and eventually received nationwide recognition for her efforts. Throughout the book, she walks readers through the steps she took, each fraught with stress and anxiety. She believed in each scholar and insisted each teacher develop a strong relationship with every child; she enforced discipline, but her office door was always open to anyone who needed to talk; she demanded respect among all members of the school, children and adults; and she made sure she and her peers understood the scholars’ backgrounds and the dangers they faced the minute they stepped back onto the street outside the school. The personal stories of many of the students show that it wasn’t always sunshine and roses, as Lopez describes some of the bleakest moments at the school. For anyone in education who thinks a student is beyond learning, Lopez’s story will prove them wrong.
The narrative demonstrates a clear progression from a woman’s dream for a model school to that reality, which has made a huge impact in its neighborhood and across the country.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98025-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
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
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