Kids in Crisis: A Workable Plan for Successful Parenting
Ross Wright with Dean Merrill
B&H Publishing Group
978-0-8054-4399-8

How did this get categorized as a book about religion?

All right, I see it. I went to the publisher’s website and this is what it says:

“From its original core of Bibles, textbooks, and reference titles, B&H has blossomed into a major publisher of Christian living, fiction, homeschool, youth, history, and other categories.”

I’m sorry to tell you B&H Publishing (and even sorrier to inform the author), that you’re shooting yourself in the foot with this knee-jerk categorizing based first and foremost on religion. Just because someone mentions a Psalm, does that make it a Christian book? Because someone doesn’t mention a Psalm, does that make it a non-Christian book? Just because a book is labeled Christian, does that make it acceptable to ALL Christians. How about books (the vast majority, to put it mildly) that don’t carry the Christian stamp of approval… Are they to be considered, by Christians, as bad or corrupting or simply off topic. As a non-Christian, is it impossible to gain understanding about, say, parenting, from a book found on the Religion shelf of a library or bookstore.

Of course not.

However, I’m not going to find a book about parenting on the Religion shelf of a library or a bookstore because I’m not going to look there. I’m going to look on the Parenting shelf, or as BISAC calls it, “Family & Relationships.”

And that’s what I mean about shooting yourself in the foot. Kids in Crisis is an interesting, thoughtful, and useful book based on experience, no matter what your thoughts on faith, and it’s destined for a quiet and uncommented death unless someone, like me, picks it up and reads it for the title instead of shelving it according to a rigid category stamped on its backside.

So, got that out of my system. Let’s talk about the book. As the parent of two ex-teens, believe me, I’ve been to the Parenting section of my library looking for hints on how to deal with -- even understand -- crisis.  Theirs and mine.

Here’s a question for you, then. Say your teenager comes home, alcohol on his breath, car keys in his hand. He’s left the headlights on, so you go out to turn them off, and discover the front fender smashed in. You march back inside, only to find him passed out and insensible to your calls. In the morning, to make matters worse, he won’t get up to go to school. He’s too tired.

Honestly, what’s your first reaction?

Honestly, mine was to shout and threaten, followed closely by slam, rattle, bang, etcetera.

It was almost always completely useless.

So right, say the authors. There is no quick fix (i.e. drugs and beatings won’t help). “If force could solve our issues with difficult kids, we would have achieved family peace a long time ago.”

The authors liken a child in crisis to a steel bar, and they note some of the different “hammers” families use -- like grounding and time-outs -- to reshape the steel bar. The problem is, that to shape steel, you need heat and pressure and time. Bashing the bar on the door isn’t going to do anything but create dents.

 “Discipline only works when you have total power and control,” say Wright and Merrill. And after a kid is about two years old, you do not have total power and control unless you’re willing to maim, imprison, or kill you kid for his misbehavior. Rules alone don’t work, they say; your job isn’t to beat the child at his own game, it’s to “organize the match and keep it flowing within proper boundaries.” To do this you need relationship and rules.

The authors quote Josh McDowell, a youth speaker. “Rules without relationship is a jail. Relationship without rules is a zoo. Relationship with rules if a home.”

And here’s the gist of the argument in Kids in Crisis: that discipline in the sense of overpowering a child does not have any real goal in sight beyond the immediate one of obedience. That a farsighted goal, and one that most parents truly desire for their children, is “emancipation” not rank obedience. Parents want their children to be able to be in control of themselves when they grow up -- to do the right thing because they want to not because they’ve been told to.

How do you achieve that? Read the book. Wright and Merrill have some very interesting things to say about what works, what doesn’t, and signs to watch out for.

Ross Wright is CEO and executive director of Hope & Home, a Christian foster care agency. Dean Merrill is a child psychologist and author.

The view out the north windows this morning is pedestrian. The sky flat and chalky. A cement gray band of lake stretches between two maples which have sullenly refused to color up this fall. The cars go back and forth, back and forth on the parkway. The river looks like cold tea. It’s gloomy. It looks too much like how it really is. I want to pull down the shades and let the lamplight transform reality.

On the other hand, out the east window I’m gazing over rooftops to the freshly painted face of the old Whiting Hotel. The bricks are café au lait and the window frames cherry. Beyond that, pigeons, gulls, and starlings whirl around the copper peak of the Park Place. The clouds are darker on this side, more dramatic. This could be somewhere else. This could be the view of not home. This could be a café.

And I could be writing a letter to a dear friend. Or finishing a poem. Or jotting down metaphors of yesterday’s landscape.

When did I stop writing in cafes? Easy enough to say it happened when I got a fulltime job, but that’s not the case. I spent six years independent contracting, and never once – not one single time – did I opt to trade my desk at home for the downtown cafes. Maybe it’s that the personality of cafes has changed. In the old days of Northern Michigan, there weren’t “real” cafés with leather couches and fake fireplaces and espresso machines. There were diners and Big Boys, unselfconscious places, perhaps because we were using them in a manner to which they were not intended. Like a beach rock holding open a door.

Next month, Toby Press is bringing out a memoir by Aharon Appelfeld called A Table for One. One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, much of his work was written at different tables in different Jerusalem cafes. In this new book, he talks about the unselfconscious kind of cafes, not

…a nexus, a point of transition, a place where you wait impatiently…. Real cafes are inviting, they tempt you with fresh coffee and a cake straight out of the oven, and offer the chance to spend a precious hour or two alone with yourself.

Appelfeld also talks about the people who frequent cafes:

Those who sit in cafes are generally people who find their own homes cramped, or for whom loneliness is a frequent companion, people from foreign parts who have gathered so they can speak their native tongue and share memories.

But mostly, he talks about his café education:

Cafe Peter was my first school for writing. There I learned that simple words are the precise ones, and that daily life is our most true expression.

At Café Peter I learned how to listen to speech, to distinguish between what was spoken and what was unspoken; about what it was possible to speak of and about what was forbidden. At Café Peter, I became aware of myself and the people around me.

Aware but not self-conscious, for a café may offer coffee and cake, but there is so much more.

There are times I feel that a café is a port to which all gates of the imagination are open. You sail toward distant lands, you are again with people you loved. Toward evening, a café can resemble a secular prayer house in which people are immersed in observation.

I bow my head to early winter afternoons and small cafes and a book, empty or not.

Over the last few months, I’ve been collecting books about teaching. Although a couple of game (mind and body) books from Hunter House were sent out for review for the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of ForeWord, the selection on my shelf was remarkably scanty—compared to, for example, Latin America, which is measuring over a foot; music, about the same; or travel/memoir which I finally had to throw into a box the other day because it no longer fit on one shelf.

 Why so little to say about teaching? Aren’t American schools in crisis? Are teachers and parents at East Side Los Angeles schools more upset that less than 10 out of 100 students could do grade-level math, or that their schools are failing No Child Left Behind standards and are in danger of closure or complete reorganization?

 I, for one, would like to hear more honest talk about problems and solutions than this go-nowhere cover-your-butt job protection rhetoric. But then I’d like to hear that kind of talk from the presidential candidates as well.

 Anyway, here are some wonderful picks for teachers who really enjoy their jobs.

 SpacEFLight
Stephen Kear
Illustrated by Wei Qiqin
Lulu.com
178 pages
Softcover, $19.94
978-1-4303-2638-0

There’s nothing better than an EFL job when you’re traveling the world—and there’s nothing worse than a class full of surly gum-chewing adolescents. As Kear says in his prologue, “EFL Teaching used to be … a way for backpackers to finance their travels … but the expectations are higher today, and so are the demands. Many a ‘gap year’ student, retired insurance agent or widowed grandmother have seen their inadequacies revealed on an EFL stage somewhere.” I know that speaks to me: those 13-year-olds in La Orotava just about ate me alive. Kear goes on to compare teaching to stand-up comedy, dance routines, and soap opera direction—all absolutely valid and necessary arts in my experience. But the real treasure inside this book is the selection of games. As any language teacher knows, lecturing is only good for as long as the students are actually learning. When they stop listening, better start jumping around—or better yet, motivate them to get physical with their skills.

The games are divided into six categories depending on how the students participate. In the first section, “Red and Blue,” the class is split into two halves. The next section is mostly for pairs and concerns vocabulary. The third section, called “Chatterboxing,” encourages students to speak. Sections on listening and writing conclude the volume.

I hunted high and low for books like this one during my teaching years, for there are remarkably few. I still have one that I carried around with me from Mexico to Spain and back to the US. This book come highly recommended, from one teacher to another, and can be adapted to any language.

Teaching Kids to Care: Nurturing Character and Compassion
Bettie Youngs, Joanne Wolf, Joani Wafer, and Dawn Lehman
Foreword by Larry King
Hampton Roads
216 pages
Softcover, $16.95
978-1-57174-548-4

My first reaction to this book—without even cracking the pages—was, only parents can teach kids to care. The authors agree. Not five sentences into the Preface they say, “Children learn by example and, as parents, we are their first and most effective teachers. Our actions and words set the blueprint for their characters.”

Beginning with the account of the horrific beating and consequent death of a teenager, the book questions why no one came to the boy’s rescue. Why did the other young people just stand there and watch it happen? Jump directly to parenting styles. “Understanding your particular parenting style,” say the authors, “—the things you say and do that form the basis for your children’s behavior—is not only important but imperative.”

Identifying five Essential Touchstones, Teaching Kids to Care goes on to discuss how to foment gratitude and connection, for example, into yourself, your family, your child. Testimonials and community project inspiration are contained in the end chapters, as well as an appendices of website resources and recommended readings. As Larry King writes in his foreword, “Have you noticed that some people are ‘significant’ because they live ‘in the whole world’ and not just their own space?” Hopefully this book will indeed cause parents and children to notice that success and influence is not just about money, infamy, or good looks.

 The Writer’s Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing
Gregory L. Roper
ISI Books
178 pages
Softcover, $18.00
978-1-933859-33-0

Now here’s a concept: forget the grammar. If a kid hasn’t learned to speak well by listening to his parents, then he sure as heck isn’t going to get it by looking at charts and filling in the blanks. Gregory Roper’s approach to learning to write (and speak) well—not just well but convincingly, descriptively, elegantly—is imitative. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton all learned to write this way, musicians still learn their riffs and chord patterns in this manner, and artists their proportions, brush strokes, the use of line. Sure, says Roper, contemporary textbooks are full of writing examples from the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, and students are encouraged to imitate. But all the examples are “monotone in style: all the texts feature that contemporary conversational essay style so favored by such periodicals, a style that hides its very structure, that displays a voice not too distinctive as to offend.”

Not that Roper wants to offend, but he did want to know why the kids who read at home did so much better in school than those who did not. As a professor at Northwest Missouri State University, he and a colleague began to inquire into the puzzle and came up with the following theory: that students who read at home acquire, through this simple and seemingly passive act, the patterns of good grammar and sentence construction. As a child learns to speak through imitation, so does text seep in and instill patterns.

And, if the key to writing is reading, then the key to good writing is “deep reading” and exercises that “lead the students to think and read more carefully about the writing we teachers set before them, and then, by imitating that writing, to consider it in even more detail, and produce far more complex writing….” Roper’s textbook presents seven lessons, meant to be followed in order, with exercises in description, definition, and rhetoric. Broken into two major sections, the first deals with the construction of “Foundations” and the second “Precision Tools and Finer Crafts.” Each chapter leads with a writing assignment for students to do on their own, then several readings, examples, a section called “Why We’re Doing This,” and additional assignments of thinking and transformation. This is a superb text to shake up the college-level composition class; as challenging and exciting for teachers as for students.

The Challenge of Teaching Controversial Issues
Hilary Claire and Cathie Holden, editors
Trentham Books
196 pages
Softcover, $32.25
978-1-85856-415-9

Ask children to name a controversial topic and they might ask for a definition of terms, but they won’t have any problem naming an issue or two. Even children of the so-called “heartland”—far from the coastal clash of civilizations, are no doubt served double helpings of Farm Bill and subsidies at dinnertime, or water rights, or mine safety, or outsourcing. Not to mention drugs, sex, and hip hop music. Heck, and there’s hardly anything more controversial than money—a familiar issue that could use a little mom and pop dialectic.

Editors Claire and Holden think that teachers also need some up-to-date tools to deal with controversial questions. For deal with them they must if education is to teach to the continued existence of life on this planet. “We do not know what threats to peace, social justice and progress the next decades will bring,” they write in the Overview, “—threats which our children will not just inherit, but must diffuse. Knowing how to make sense of the arguments and how to move beyond knee-jerk reactions, having the skills and strategies to deal with conflicts are not just optional extras in their education, they are essential to the survival of their world.”

In a series of articles by English-speakers from Canada, UK, South Africa, and Pakistan, the editors present a textbook in three parts. The first offers strategies for discussion, debate, and conflict resolution. The second provides plans for introducing controversial topics into the classroom, through literature and drama, for example. This section presents and strategizes for hot topics like climate change, politics, and religion. Part Three, called “Whole School Values and Action” then focuses on issues of pedagogy.

This book should be required reading in all schools at all levels everywhere in the world. For protecting a child from harm cannot mean covering his ears and blinding his eyes. He must see and hear if he is to understand and speak.

After the Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School
Maggie Anderson and David Hassler, editors
University of Iowa Press
184 pages
Softcover, $17.50
978-0-87745-663-6

Following a 1999 anthology about learning poetry in school, this book speaks more generally to the school experience itself. Sixty-two short essays composed by teachers, students, parents, and administrators “create a collage of the successes and failures of elementary and secondary education in the United States from the 1930s to the present.” Fortunately, most of the hindsight comes with humor. There are stories about football, moving seats, art class, and coloring. There are stories about the death of a parent, about the “white, old, tall” enemy, about social science lessons in parochial school, and the long shadow of politics. There are also stories of boyfriends and girlfriends, but mostly there are stories about teachers, teachers, teachers. This is a wonderful book for those at the back and the front of the room—even for those who like to sit right in the middle.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Ché Guevarra. It’s also the day that the U.S. government officially celebrates Columbus Day. At first glance, the coincidence may seem like a match made in heaven for folks like Hugo Chávez, who renamed the holiday Day of Indigenous Resistance in 2002 and sported the iconic Ché t-shirt to the World Social Forum in 2005.

And for me also (I admit I had a gigantic poster of Ché on my wall in high school), the overlap of red-letter days has provided the fodder for a blog – albeit, not of the celebratory variety. I’m sure I had some fuzzy notion in high school that Ché stood for freedom from oppression, disenfranchisement, poverty, just like the fuzzy notion I’d been fed in elementary school that Christopher Columbus was a great man who discovered America. While both of those statements may be true from a certain perspective, it’s the narrow one of the establishment, both left and right.

After the Cuban revolution, Ché’s first job was head of the main prison, La Cabaña (The Cottage), where enemies of the new state, then dissidents, and eventually gays were incarcerated or sent to labor camps. Two years after Castro came to power, there were 300,000 Cubans in prison—one out of every twenty-one citizens of Cuba. According to Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Ché Guevarra, Ché signed 400 death warrants and personally executed as many as 180 people during his first three months at the prison. Stalin and Mao would surely have cheered on the extermination of back-talk, debate, indifference, and alternative lifestyles, but you have to wonder what Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and Prince Harry see in the guy to admire.

Not only that, but there exists the fact of Ché’s legacy and the hundreds of dissidents in Cuba’s prisons at this very moment. In 2003, ten independent librarians decided to offer their solidarity to librarians in Cuba and to join in the demand by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for the release of Cuban prisoners of conscience. For some reason, this decision was not supported by their colleagues at the American Library Association.

Back to Columbus: While the great tragedy of disease perpetuated by the Spanish colonists was not deliberate or even understood at the time (approximately 85% of the native population of America died of infections, primarily smallpox), Columbus personally carried out acutely cruel punishments and death sentences on specific persons and tribes. The Taino of Hispaniola no longer populate this planet.

On the other hand, I don’t see his image on street corners, advertisements, or a president’s chest. Columbus is no poster-boy for explorers and adventurers. No fashion photographer was standing around on a foredeck in 1492, ready to snap the photo of the century like Korda got his in 1960—the photo that ubiquitously adorns the mugs and t-shirts. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, I think in this case it says more about the person who is buying than the man named Ché himself.

Ché once said, “Those who shut down the doors to peaceful resolutions open the doors to violent revolutions.” He should know.

Growing up, there was no censorship in our house but auto-censorship—in other words, what you kept to yourself or hid under your bed. Granted, there wasn’t much trouble to get into unless Twain and Bronte, Poe and Verne are on your no-no list. My great grandmother had belonged to a book club and enormous, leather-bound, mostly red volumes sat heavily behind glass in our living room. Most of them had never been read; the pleasure of cutting the pages of Jane Eyre as I read was perfectly romantic. Bronte and Verne were on the fifth and sixth grade menu, by seventh grade I’d headed off in the direction of my mother’s thick, historical fiction favorites: Desiree by Annemarie Selinko, The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I had an hour-long bus ride to school and I read these leaning into a steamy window.

It was on the bus that I first encountered censorship. No, the bus driver didn’t care what I read, but the Ann did. She was a senior and eldest daughter of a prominent local English teacher. Ann’s father had strict ideas about good and proper English for his family, and these romances were not among the choices. In fact, they were banned, prohibited.

But there I was, day after day – two whole hours every day -- knees up against the back of the seat in front of me, weeping for Ashley or accepting violets from Bonaparte. One day she asked if she could borrow the book when I finished. Of course. But, she said, I would have to take it home with me in the afternoon, and return it to her in the morning.

This we did for a whole year. She would mark her page and slip the book into a plastic bag; I’d put it away with my homework. Now, both of us were slouched against the windows reading.

But, what I want to talk about is the difference between her experience and mine. The difference being that my mother had also read these books and we could talk about them. We did talk about them. Sure, Ann and I perhaps chatted about the stories together, but that could hardly compare with the insights and direction of a parent. Ann’s father, by censoring his daughter, did not stop her from seeking out and finding the literature she desired, but he did quash the opportunity to teach. While censorship may always be a futile exercise, conversation can never be called a waste.