In Stupidity and Tears, renowned educator and National Book Award winner Herbert Kohl offers us a thoughtful and ultimately optimistic meditation on the forces that conspire to keep teachers and students "stupid"-i.e., frustrated and unable to excel in an education system that is clearly failing them.
Among the topics explored by Kohl are the pressures of standards based assessments and harrowing sink-or-swim policies, the pain teachers feel when asked to teach against their pedagogical conscience, the development of a capacity to sense how students perceive the world, and the importance of hope and creativity in strengthening the social imagination of students and teachers.
A rousing call for common sense in the face of dwindling budgets, crippling state mandates, and injudicious politics, Stupidity and Tears is "vintage Kohl-incisive, funny, reflective, profound . . . a provocation to educators to better teach all our children" (Norman Fruchter, NYU Institute of Education and Social Policy).
Language
Product notice
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-1-56584-982-2 (9781565849822)
Schweitzer Classification
Herbert Kohl is a celebrated writer, teacher, and advocate. He is the author of more than forty books, including "I Won't Learn from You": And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment, Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children's Literature and the Power of Stories, The Discipline of Hope: Learning from a Lifetime of Teaching, Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times, She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and The Herb Kohl Reader: Awakening the Heart of Teaching (all published by The New Press), as well as the bestselling classic 36 Children. He is a co-author, with Judith Kohl, of The View from the Oak: The Private Worlds of Other Creatures and a co-editor, with Tom Oppenheim, of The Muses Go to School: Inspiring Stories About the Importance of Arts in Education, both published by The New Press. A recipient of a National Book Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, he was the founder and first director of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York City, has served as a senior fellow at the Open Society Institute, and established the PEN West Center. In 2010, Kohl was named a Guggenheim Fellow in education. He lives in Point Arena, California.
