Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew
by Ellen Notbohm
from Future Horizons
Framed with both humor and compassion, the book defines the top ten characteristics that illuminate the minds and hearts of children with autism. Ellen's personal experiences as a parent, an autism columnist, and a contributor to numerous parenting magazines coalesce to create a guide for all who come in contact with a child on the autism spectrum.
Making the Most of Small Groups: Differentiation for All
by Debbie Diller
from Stenhouse Publishers
From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America's Public Schools
by Steve Baldwin
from WND Books
What's really going at your local public school? In From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America's Public Schools, Steven Baldwin and Karen Holgate let parents, concerned teachers and students speak for themselves about the dismal state of government education in America today.
The conclusion? Today's schools are laboratories for disaster, where failed methodologies and policies continually find new life thanks to bureaucracies more interested in maintaining power than in educating.
Lavishly armed with your tax dollars, government at every level encourages mass social experimentation on our kids - success optional. In From Crayons to Condoms you'll discover...
- * The lesbian gym teacher who hands out a paper called "101 Ways To Do It Without Going All The Way" in every class.
* The "Inventive Spelling" curriculum which demands of parents that they "avoid giving in to our natural desire to correct the mistakes" because it's "harmful to the children"
* The "innovative name-calling" program for kindergarteners and first graders that teaches new words and concepts like "dyke" and "faggot."
* The required courses in "death education" that actually encourage teen depression and suicide.
* The math classes in which students write down how they "feel" about math problems...as opposed to learning fractions, algebra and multiplication tables.
Can our schools be saved? Yes say the authors, but only if parents are informed and ready to fight for their children every step of the way. The stories in From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America's Public Schools are sure to horrify and energize anyone concerned about today's kids - and our nation's future.
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
from Viking Adult
New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today’s most important and popular science writers.
Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.
With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life—why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56
by Rafe Esquith
from Viking Adult
From one of AmericaÂ’s most celebrated educators, an inspiring guide to transforming every childÂ’s education
In a Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by guns, gangs, and drugs, there is an exceptional classroom known as Room 56. The fifth graders inside are first-generation immigrants who live in poverty and speak English as a second language. They also play Vivaldi, perform Shakespeare, score in the top 1 percent on standardized tests, and go on to attend Ivy League universities. Rafe Esquith is the teacher responsible for these accomplishments.
From the man whom The New York Times calls “a genius and a saint” comes a revelatory program for educating today’s youth. In Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire!, Rafe Esquith reveals the techniques that have made him one of the most acclaimed educators of our time. The two mottoes in Esquith’s classroom are “Be Nice, Work Hard,” and “There Are No Shortcuts.” His students voluntarily come to school at 6:30 in the morning and work until 5:00 in the afternoon. They learn to handle money responsibly, tackle algebra, and travel the country to study history. They pair Hamlet with rock and roll, and read the American classics. Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire! is a brilliant and inspiring road map for parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about the future success of our nation’s children. BACKCOVER: Praise for Rafe Esquith:
“Rafe Esquith is my only hero.”
—Sir Ian McKellan
“Politicians, burbling over how to educate the underclass, would do well to stop by Rafe Esquith’s fifth grade class as it mounts its annual Shakespeare play. Sound like a grind? Listen to the peals of laughter bouncing off the classroom walls.”
—Time
“Esquith is a modern-day Thoreau, preaching the value of good work, honest self-reflection, and the courage to go one’s own way.”
—Newsday
The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
by Jonathan Kozol
from Three Rivers Press
Over the last 15 years, the state of inner-city public schools has been in a steep and continuing decline. Since the federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation of black children has reverted to its highest level since 1968. In many inner-city schools, a stick-and-carrot method of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons is now used with students. Meanwhile, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society.
Filled with the passionate voices of children, principals, and teachers, and some of the most revered leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56
by Rafe Esquith
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
This New York Times bestseller gives any teacher or parent all the techniques, exercises, and innovations that have made its author an educational icon, from personal codes of behavior to tips on tackling literature and algebra. The result is a powerful book for anyone concerned about the future of our children.
Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning
by Peter H. Johnston
from Stenhouse Publishers
Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn
by Rebecca DuFour
from Solution Tree
Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don t Learn examines the question, What happens when, despite our best efforts in the classroom, a student does not learn? . A professional learning community creates a school-wide system of interventions that provides all students with additional time and support when they experience difficulty in their learning. The authors describe the systems of interventions, including Adlai E. Stevenson High School s Pyramid of Interventions, created by a high school, a middle school, and two elementary schools. The authors also discuss the logistical barriers these schools faced and their strategies for overcoming them.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)
by Steven Pinker
from Harper Perennial Modern Classics
In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
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