Provocative insights about teaching and business mixed with irrelevant digressions.
Stapleton discusses applying Transactional Analysis principles and techniques in the classroom throughout his 40-year career.
The author, a retired professor who holds advanced degrees in organizational behavior and business administration, is also a Certified Transactional Analyst. This book, most of which is derived from Stapleton’s previously published work, describes how he used TA concepts to enhance students’ learning by minimizing covert psychological games. The first four chapters explain basic TA concepts such as the Parent, Adult, and Child ego states, strokes, transactions, psychological games and rackets, life scripts, and OKness, and outline how they show up in a classroom. (The name of one of these games provides the book’s title.) The chapters that follow detail the author’s concept of a “learning contract,” various possible classroom setups, common classroom games, and his invention, the “Classroom De-Gamer,” as well as his teaching methods. An additional section (“Aspirations, Applications, Ideas”) supplies information about the author, including his family history, his athletic, academic, and business achievements, his teaching, consulting, and administrative experience, and his previous articles and publications. Stapleton also presents his research on students’ evaluations of professors, evidence for the effectiveness of his case study-based teaching methods, and chapters on his views regarding politics and the future of “Spaceship Earth.” The text also contains questions for self-evaluation and numerous diagrams, tables, and charts, along with a 10-page bibliography. The author’s tone is direct and matter-of-fact, but peppered with TA jargon such as “cathect,” “Earthian,” and “NIGYSOB.” (A glossary would have been a useful addition.) Sometimes, a single sentence constitutes an entire five- or six-line paragraph. Stapleton’s ideas are intriguing, and he offers biting commentary on society; however, most of the autobiographical and family history material will be of little interest to the general reader. Other inclusions, such as references to the 2016 and 2024 U.S. presidential elections, JFK assassination conspiracy theories, and observations about popular culture, are outdated and unnecessary.
Provocative insights about teaching and business mixed with irrelevant digressions.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798330508105
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Genre Library Solutions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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