Word: herndon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their sakes, every Teacher Ames in the country should be made to read How to Survive in Your Native Land, a quietly radical book about the public schools in America. Its author, James Herndon, is a junior high school teacher describing his loose and open-ended classes in San Francisco, where his students choose how to spend their time in school. Herndon is not one of those new jargon-spouting teachers hell-bent on encouraging their youngsters' creativity with some or other technique they were exposed to, but never understood, in graduate school. Those teachers mistake novelty for innovation...
...SURVIVE IN YOUR NATIVE LAND by James Herndon. 192 pages...
...only work in order to change things, you will simply go nuts. I am an authority on it. The book is mostly about kites and dogs and lizards and salamanders and magic." That is James Herndon, reformed globetrotter turned public school teacher, describing his newest book and confronting in characteristic stance the lugubrious subject of U.S. public education. Everything Herndon observes takes place in the "Spanish Main" intermediate school in "Tierra Firma," a thinly disguised middle-class suburb of San Francisco, where Herndon has taught for years. He appears to have tried every kind of pedagogical method, from applying...
Basically Herndon is in desperate agreement with John Holt, George Dennison, Jonathan Kozol, Edgar Friedenburg, Charles Silberman & Co. that U.S. schools are too foolishly over-administered to successfully nurture either reading and writing or the ability to cope humanely with the complex choices of modern life. But unlike most apocalyptic critics, Herndon sees no easy solution. He proceeds, moreover, by meandering parable rather than polemic, and uses a ruefully genial tone of voice that might have come from Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. As a result, he is just about the only education reformer alive whose writing could...
...Ford's chameleon-like moods, one element is constant: his blunt-spoken manner. The standout example is a statement given to Booton Herndon, author of an adulatory biography. During one luncheon interview, Ford announced that he had written "a whatchamacallem ?a preface" and handed it to Herndon, who published it as a passage in the book. Its text: "I'm not interested in this damn book. I'm only cooperating because I've been asked to. I don't care if anybody reads it or not. [Signed] Henry Ford...