Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America by Mike Rose
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(Paperback)
- Pub. Date: September 1996
- 488pp
- Sales Rank: 207,110
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: September 1996
- Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
- Format: Paperback, 488pp
- Sales Rank: 207,110
- ISBN-13: 9780140236170
- ISBN: 0140236171
- Edition Number: 544
Synopsis
Over the past four years, Mike Rose has been visiting classrooms across the country and has been struck again and again by their intellectual and social richness and by what they suggest about education in a democracy. We are told continually by both entertainment and the news media that our students don't measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries. Schools are depicted as mediocre or violent and chaotic places where students are raucous and teachers are not up to their jobs. As a result, increasing numbers of people don't even consider public schools as an option for their children, and more and more, we speak of the schools as being in decline. In Possible Lives, Rose shows us what really goes on in good classrooms: how teachers work, how students learn, what schools give to their neighborhoods.
Publishers Weekly
Rose (Lives on the Boundary) spent four years crisscrossing the U.S. to sit in on public school classrooms in New York, Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles, from the Mississippi Delta to Kentucky's coal district to the bicultural California city of Calexico on the Mexican border. In a hopeful journey through America's public school system, he emphasizes examples of inspired teaching, insight and connection, achievement against odds. The effective teachers whom he profiles through interviews, oral testimonies and reportage evinced solidarity with students' backgrounds, maintained high expectations and let students shape the direction of discussion; their classes demanded thought, participation, effort. Rose, who directs the UCLA writing program, sets these portraits of dynamic classrooms in the context of school-policy battles, community action and a legacy of systematic underfunding. Condemning the ``strange mix of apocalyptic vignettes'' that passes for public discussion about the state of American education, he offers a constructive and inspirational resource for anyone concerned about the health of public education. (Sept.)
Customer Reviews
Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in Americaby Anonymous
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November 22, 2003: Rose tells the truth about American public education. His account of innovative teachers, administrators, students willing to learn, and schools suceeding amidst all fiscal and logistic handicaps restablishes hope and confidence in public schools. Rose exposes in this book the destructive effects of one-dimensional critique of public school education. He suggests a multi-dimensional form of critique--one that takes into account what is going on the classrooms and in the general context of public schools. The book is a manual of teaching styles and a must read for teachers,students, administrators and the general public.
Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in Americaby Anonymous
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May 19, 2002: Written in response to 'A Nation at Risk,' Mike Rose visited classrooms throughout the US. His report became 'Possible Lives,' with anecdotes and details about teachers who are doing a great job teaching. It is an inspiration for all, especially teachers.
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