Teaching is a tough job, but Esquith shows that its rewards can be profound.
Award-winning teacher Esquith (Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World, 2009, etc.) shares the ups and downs of his career.
The only classroom teacher to receive the National Medal of the Arts, the author has taught fifth and sixth grade for more than 25 years at Hobart Elementary, an inner-city Los Angeles school where few of the parents speak English, poverty is rampant, and too often children lack supervision at home. Many of his students become high achievers, going on to college and professional jobs, but Esquith explains that his main aim is to give the children he works with a moral foundation—“to teach kids to be honorable in a world where dishonor stares them in the face constantly.” The values he teaches are simple (self-respect, kindness, strong work ethic, etc.), and the author stresses the importance of the teacher consistently modeling these for students. Despite daily provocations—noisy, disrespectful students, interfering parents, narrow-minded school administrators—it is the teacher's responsibility to remain calm and professional, speaking quietly and injecting humor where possible. The author describes how he treats students with respect; his classroom is always immaculate and attractively decorated, and he has a mix of extra projects available as rewards for good work—e.g., creating a multicolored rug from assorted pieces of wool or engaging in a scientific experiment. Esquith also freely gives his time for extracurricular activities, including early-morning math teams, a top-notch after-school Shakespeare program and an annual visit to Washington, D.C. Children voluntarily come to class early and stay late, and the author spends 11 hours on the job.
Teaching is a tough job, but Esquith shows that its rewards can be profound.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-01464-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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