A Good Book for Pesonal Reflection

books:


	• Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students Denise Clark Pope Yale University Press, 2003 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Worthwhile Reading

While it has been a year or so since I've read this book, during this time I have recommended this book to several parents with high school aged children. As a student who attends a supposedly "elite" university, I often wondered where, or from whom, my classmates developed their misplaced sense of ethics when it comes to achieving academic success....and then I began tutoring students in the very competitive high schools that surround this university. I witnessed students who were more interested in getting A's in all of their classes - by whatever means necessary - than in actually understanding the material at hand. As a result much of their time was spent devising ways in which to "work the system", which, it seems, are good skills to acquire if one wishes to attend the top universities. God forbid that any of these students should attend a "second tier" university, for their parents would have to hide their faces in shame when among their peers.

It no longer surprises me when the students around me resort to the methods outlined in Ms. Pope's book. True, not all of these methods are "technically" prohibited and (fortunately) not all students approach their studies in this way, but enough of them do that it is time to reevaluate just what is most important when approaching our children's education. Ms. Pope's book attempts to redirect this focus so that American students do not continue to fall further behind the rest of the world.

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required for class

I bought this book as a requirement for a teaching class, and its not too bad. Not a book I would snuggle up and read for fun of course, but as far as required reading goes, its a nice read. Has a good flow and doesn't dull you to tears like most required books.

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A Good Book for Pesonal Reflection

Ms. Pope superbly examines the question - can the pursuit of high grades to lead to unhealthy consequences in a child's mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health? As a parent (and I think most parents would agree), the answer is yes. This book encourages parents to reflect on whether their children are involved with such an unbalanced lifestyle, and most importantly, whether I as a parent am encouraging (usually unwittingly!) such an unbalanced lifestyle.
Ms. Pope falls short when she tries to generalize her conclusions about the five students she followed over the course of a school year to an indictment of the state of education in that particular high school (and ultimately, the state of education in America as a whole). These students suffered from multiple problems such as probable sleep deprivation, to possible mental illness and personality disorder, to family dysfunction. Just to examine whether the high school itself was a prime culprit in fostering an unhealthy emphasis on grades, Ms. Pope would have needed a much larger study including psychiatric, social work, and medical evaluation of the students, but also the families, teachers, administration, and even of the characteristics of the surrounding community.
Even then, generalizing her conclusions to other school districts would have been impossible, since the problems facing any given school system are unique. For example, poverty, racism, and drugs didn't seem to be prominent problems for the students in her study, but I am sure teachers and administrators in other districts might say that such problems are of paramount importance to them.
As a result, as a scientific investigation of the state of education in the high school Ms Pope studied (and in America as a whole), Ms. Pope's book is useless.
Forget the inflammatory title. I highly recommend this book as it was written - a call for parents to reflect on the lives of their children.

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"Food for Thought"

I'm not much for long winded paragraphs so I will just quote Albert Einstein "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has fogotten the gift." With this said, are we creating a society lacking in compassion, insight, and understanding and less capable of DEEP thought and CRITICAL thinking? We as parents, teachers, and administrators should give this some DEEP THOUGHT.

Great read

Nice study, but very limited for the conclusions she draws.
Good read, pretty informative.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

This book offers a revealing?and troubling?view of today?s high school students and the ways they pursue high grades and success. Veteran teacher Denise Pope follows five highly regarded students through a school year and discovers that these young people believe getting ahead requires manipulating the system, scheming, lying, and cheating.

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