An effective explanation of a successful teacher-training program.
An overview of a university program that helps train African-American men in how to be both teachers and role models.
Jones, the executive director of Clemson University’s Call Me MISTER program, uses his debut (co-written with educator Jenkins) to showcase the initiative, which takes its name from actor Sidney Poitier’s famous line (“They call me Mister Tibbs”) from the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. Its participants often come from underprivileged backgrounds, work with mentors and go through rigorous preparation for teaching in the classroom in addition to regular academic work. The program’s dominant theme is respect: Participants learn to respect education as a profession and to present themselves as role models that their students can admire. When Jones helped create the program a decade ago, there was a distinct lack of African-American male teachers in South Carolina. When Southern schools were desegregated in 1954, the formerly segregated schools hired few male, African-American teachers, establishing a pattern of disconnection between African-American students and their predominantly female, white teachers, the authors write. The Call Me MISTER program aims to fill that gap. The book isn’t an unbiased analysis but an endorsement by an enthusiastic leader, but readers won’t feel as though they are being subjected to a sales pitch. The book doesn’t directly contrast Call Me MISTER with better-known programs, such as Teach for America, but it does make clear that it encourages its graduates to make teaching a lifetime career—not just a brief stop before moving on. Although the authors are primarily interested in preparing young men to teach in South Carolina, they note that several other colleges and universities around the country have licensed Call me MISTER and are implementing it locally. The book includes numerous testimonials from the program’s graduates and current students, providing a personal interpretation of the authors’ theory and statistics in support of the program.
An effective explanation of a successful teacher-training program.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1599323398
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
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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