Parents have questions for school administrators. They want to know how they hire teachers, erect facilities, select learning materials, protect students, allocate budgets, use data, make forecasts, measure progress, and compete with for-profit schools. This book examines the questions they pose, the answers they elicit, the allies they attract, the adversaries they arouse, and the improvements they prod.
Parents want teachers to explain how they instruct children. They become annoyed when the teachers are silent or surly. Parents counter with explicit, common sense questions: how do teachers arouse interest, design curricula, reinforce discipline, assign grades, designate textbooks, and select technology? This book examines the parents' questions, the answers they elicited, the allies they attracted, and the improvements they initiated.
Parents wondered exactly what was transpiring in classrooms. Although they asked their children, they did not have complete confidence in their responses. When they quizzed teachers, school administrators, school board members, and politicians, they realized that they sometimes had conflicting interests. They resolved to get the information they wanted on their own: they would examine classroom textbooks. This book recounts the common sense questions that parents posed about these materials.
Teachers Go to Rehab examines the advice given to teachers from multiple critics both historically and recently. This book looks at the scope, cost, and impact of this advice to teachers, as well as the motives behind it. It poses precise questions about the groups that gave the advice. Who were they? What did they recommend? How did they estimate impact? How did they calculate costs? What aims did they profess? What aims did they conceal? Whom did they attract? Whom did they alienate? When did they succeed? When did they fail?
THE STORY: Set in a seedy hotel of a black neighborhood in a Midwestern city, the play introduces a series of finely drawn representative characters: a pimp who sends his girl out on the street to earn money for his drugs; the light-skinned dancer
Parents asked educators about their children’s learning. Frustrated when they were ignored, they asked politicians to put pressure on the educators. They were then surprised when the politicians provided personal advice about the optimal way to nurture learning. They were even more surprised when the politicans prescribed changes to instruction, curriculum, textbooks, technology, school safety, teacher retention, student behavior, school funding, and even the menus for school cafeterias. More frustrated than ever, they intensified their barrage of common sense questions.
You've just boarded a plane. You've loaded your phone with your favorite podcasts, but before you can pop in your earbuds, disaster strikes: The guy in the next seat starts telling you all about something crazy that happened to him--in great detail. This is the unwelcome storyteller, trying to convince a reluctant audience to care about his story. We all hate that guy, right? But when you tell a story (any kind of story: a novel, a memoir, a screenplay, a stage play, a comic, or even a cover letter), you become the unwelcome storyteller. So how can you write a story that audiences will embrace? The answer is simple: Remember what it feels like to be that jaded audience. Tell the story that would win you over, even if you didn't want to hear it. The Secrets of Story provides comprehensive, audience-focused strategies for becoming a master storyteller. Armed with the Ultimate Story Checklist, you can improve every aspect of your fiction writing with incisive questions like these: • Concept: Is the one-sentence description of your story uniquely appealing? • Character: Can your audience identify with your hero? • Structure and Plot: Is your story ruled by human nature? • Scene Work: Does each scene advance the plot and reveal character through emotional reactions? • Dialogue: Is your characters' dialogue infused with distinct personality traits and speech patterns based on their lives and backgrounds? • Tone: Are you subtly setting, resetting, and upsetting expectations? • Theme: Are you using multiple ironies throughout the story to create meaning? To succeed in the world of fiction and film, you have to work on every aspect of your craft and satisfy your audience. Do both--and so much more--with The Secrets of Story.
Parents had questions about the tests their children took at school. They considered them to be common sense questions. They posed them to the businesspeople, publishers, and politicians who championed tests. They also posed them to the school administrators, teachers, and union leaders who criticized them. This book examines the questions the parents posed, the answers they elicited, and the changes they prodded.
The sad and almost comical ways in which our public schools functionThe tragedy is that our public schools work so poorly. The comedy is the off target comments about educational reform made by educators, business leaders, secretaries of education, presidents, and congress. Mathematical impossibilities, pompous postmodern pap, seemingly scholarly non-sequiturs, and lot of other nonsense give us much to laugh about.
