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Rose Marie Whiteside's As for Me and My House—Education Is Important Reviewed By Gordon Osmond of Bookpleasures.com
http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/3403/1/Rose-Marie-Whitesides-As-for-Me-and-My-HouseEducation-Is-Important-Reviewed-By-Gordon-Osmond-of-Bookpleasurescom/Page1.html
Gordon Osmond

Reviewer Gordon Osmond : Gordon is a produced and award-winning playwright and author of: So You Think You Know English--A Guide to English for Those Who Think They Don't Need One, Wet Firecrackers--The Unauthorized Autobiography of Gordon Osmond and his debut novel Slipping on Stardust.

He has reviewed books and stageplays for http://CurtainUp.com and for the Bertha Klausner International Literary Agency. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia Law School and practiced law on Wall Street for many years before concentrating on writing fiction and non-fiction. You can find out more about Gordon by clicking HERE

Gordon can also be heard on the Electic Authors Showcase.







 
By Gordon Osmond
Published on April 10, 2011
 

Title: As for Me and My House—Education Is Important

Author:Rose Marie Whiteside

Publisher:Createspace

ISBN:13:978-0615455839:   10:0615455832


Title: As for Me and My House—Education Is Important

Author:Rose Marie Whiteside

Publisher:Createspace

ISBN:13:978-0615455839:   10:0615455832

Click Here To Purchase As For Me And My House: Education Is Important

In some parlor games, one is asked first to identify three principal sources of pleasure and second to name three things for which the participant is most grateful. I answer the first question with love, education, and creation; the second, with health, education, and capacity.

The common item, education, is the subject of Rose Marie Whiteside's new book, As for Me and My House—Education Is Important, an eminently readable and well intentioned discussion of the challenges facing modern education in the United States (a name that I find more agreeable than "America" to those who live in other North and South American countries).

Having clearly identified with arguably superfluous support the fact that education in the United States, particularly the public and pre-college varieties, is currently in a deplorable condition and getting worse, Ms. Whiteside offers an array of solutions that range from the obvious to the provocatively controversial.

The author's central solution lies in the establishment and nourishing of a kind of triumvirate involving parents, teachers, and students. Progress can best be made by each constituency understanding its role and responsibilities in the educational process and, perhaps most importantly by mutual communication between and among the groups. Because the student is receiving orders/instruction from both parents and teachers, Ms. Whiteside correctly notes the importance of coordination and consistency between these two sources of authority.

One of the most valuable aspects of the book is Ms. Whiteside's view of how teachers, parents, and students can benefit from an expansion of their traditional roles. Parents should provide for augmented interactions with children at home and teachers should encourage the involvement of mentors and other outside community resources in the educational process.

The reader does not need to search between the lines of the book to discover the author's philosophical and political inclinations. Racial balancing in the classroom and its attendant transportation costs, the super sensitivity to church/state separation in public education, the disciplinary strictures placed upon teachers and administrators by an increasingly ravenous plaintiffs bar, and the expensive indulgences granted to immigrating students who adamantly cling to their native languages are all decried by an articulate author longing in substantial measure for the "good old days."

Among the areas that could have benefited from a more thorough exploration are the "hot" topics of when and where sex education should be introduced and pursued and the balancing needed to satisfy both a student's need for privacy and a school's need for security. Also, whereas in the "good old days," parents were respected by children as superior sources for learning of all kinds, today's pre-teen techie is somewhat contemptuous of a parent who is still marveling at the wonders of carbon paper. The author hints at this problem with a late discussion of video games at home, but I would have liked more on how parents should cope with staggering advances in technology, texting, and social media, which may be alien to parents but which totally engulf their children.

In the very good chapters on bullying, a reference to its particular application to children with non-traditional sexual orientations would not have been amiss.

Given its subject matter, a certain dryness of style is inevitable. Nevertheless, I would have preferred more of "If it takes a village to raise a child, then you’re doing something wrong" and a bit less of "Until America wakes up and smells the coffee. . . Also, greater editorial attention should be paid in places to noun/pronoun agreement and subject/verb agreement.

Taking advice from communication experts cited by Ms. Whiteside herself, I would sandwich my pros and cons about the book by saying that it deals intelligently with a subject of vital concern to this country, and that, although it sometimes belabors the obvious at the expense of the more immediately relevant, it is, on balance, a valuable resource for parents, teachers, and students to use in their important struggle against the dark.


Click Here To Purchase As For Me And My House: Education Is Important