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Title: teacher-student disconnect
Review: I enjoyed this book and, as a high-school teacher, appreciated particularly its descriptions of the tensions and conflicts within the faculty at the Minnesota High School the author visited throughout the 1999-2000 school year. I liked especially the concise critique of the self-esteem movement and the descriptions of the faculty's struggle over the desirability or feasibility of setting high academic standards. The book focuses largely on the divide between the administration and faculty, who want to keep order and run things their way, and the lives and desires of their students, who bear the onus of dealing daily with the strictures and pressures they feel from teachers, administrators, parents, and peers. Interesting reading, and a different vantage point from most of the adults-revisit-high-school literature.
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