A book with rich content about teen life that’s hampered by suboptimal presentation.
In Block and Edwards’ nonfiction book, teenagers explain what they need to stay motivated and engaged.
As a university professor, Block noticed that many first-year students showed up to her introductory writing class with no greater goal for themselves beyond passing the class. Ultimately, she realized that she needed to explore ways to help kids care about their work before they get to college, which inspired her to leave academia and work for organizations that support K-12 educators. As she studied youth development, she realized that the first step in helping students thrive is simply to listen to their wants and needs. Edwards was one of Block’s interview subjects before she became a coauthor, and she details her difficult transition from high school to higher ed. After spending five years observing and talking with young people and their parents, they compiled their insights into this book; they also include observations from a child psychiatrist and other educators. The anonymized voices are diverse throughout, and include Muslim, Catholic, gay, straight, cisgender, and transgender kids, among others; some are struggling academically, while others are high academic achievers. Block and Edwards offer analysis throughout, and they helpfully shape their interview excerpts into discrete chapters on topics such as student-teacher relationships and screen-time distractions. Their choice to let their interviewees speak for themselves effectively reinforces their overall theme, and their stories are engaging and enlightening; at one point, for instance, a high schooler dealing with her parents’ divorce: “I remember writing in my journal: ‘This moment where you are struggling is temporary, fleeting. This momentary struggle will pass away. It won’t last forever.’” Some readers will benefit from this book’s insights and take notes along the way. However, the authors’ choice to forgo some devices employed by self-help authors, such as bullet points and brief chapter summaries, may make this book less appealing to overworked teachers and others with significant time constraints.
A book with rich content about teen life that’s hampered by suboptimal presentation.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798891322905
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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