Though there isn’t one overriding formula for everyone, the authors’ comprehensive analysis highlights many of the tools...
Insight into the childhoods of highly successful people and the lessons to be learned from their examples.
Is it possible for a parent to steer their child from the earliest days of infancy toward a successful career later in life? Ferguson (Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap, 2007, etc.) and Robertson (co-author: Media Circus: A Look at Private Tragedy in the Public Eye, 2015) believe so. Based on their analysis of more than 100 graduates from Ivy League schools, the authors compile a list of eight traits or “roles” that those parents used during the graduates’ childhoods. The most critical stage is the infancy to 5-year mark, when the child’s brain is like a sponge, soaking up everything. Consistently, the parents had taught their children how to read simple words and the basics of math before the age of 5, and “they had talked to their child as an equal, respecting their intellect and answering their questions after careful thought.” The result is a stimulating environment that encourages children to reach their highest potentials and fullest sense of well-being. The authors share the backstories of many of their interviewees, providing information about a wide variety of childhoods. They illustrate how, despite poverty, self-doubt, race, class, and other adversities on any level, a child can still rise to an above-average level of prosperity due to the actions of parents who encourage hard work, resilience, and confidence. In one particularly useful section, the authors offer a comparison between a parent who follows the authors’ “formula” and a tiger parent, clearly illustrating the differences in the two parenting styles. Parents, educators, and others who work and live with children will benefit from the knowledge here.
Though there isn’t one overriding formula for everyone, the authors’ comprehensive analysis highlights many of the tools necessary for creating a solid foundation for a fruitful and happy life.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946885-06-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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