Reading Review

    It is often said that education is in serious need of reform, yet despite these calls, I have never heard people offer viable ways to go about said reform. Brian Crosby’s book Smart Kids, Bad Schools, 38 Ways to Save America’s Future, however, offers those viable options which we’ve been looking ages for. These suggestions are things that I honestly think that people should have thought up years ago—things like extending our school year and our school day.

    When I was in the library looking at my options for a book I knew I would be writing a review on, I picked this book simply because it shorter in length than my other options (another sign of our failing school system—a lack of aspiration to read challenging material, or maybe it’s just senior year talking). Honestly, I was not expecting much out of the book—I thought it would have been written by some dried up college professor who has no idea what working within America’s elementary and secondary education system is like, and was simply giving advice just for the sake of having his opinion out there. I was—needless to say—surprised, when I found this book full of witty cynicism regarding the system in which Crosby has taught for the last twenty years as a National Board Certified English teacher. Having that kind of experience in teaching made him, in my opinion, one of the best people to get advice on how to improve the education system from.

    As I said earlier, Crosby’s suggestions on how to improve our nation’s education system are simple and common sense—things we should have thought of ages ago. I think that’s what I found most interesting about his book—it got me thinking of other ways to improve our education institutions, but only from a student’s perspective. It was strange, because I haven’t read a book in a long time that made me think like that. In some ways, I was more inspired to become a teacher by reading it, yet at the same time, was made a little more nervous because of some of the major cracks I found out about in our school systems—like how new teachers generally are sent to ‘bad’ schools. It seemed unfair to me that most schools, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, don’t have an equal new teacher/more experienced teacher ratio. I really want to become a good teacher, but it seems logical that in order to do that, new teachers must see the way more experienced teachers run their classes—and for a longer period of time than the few months in their four years of study that they are required to spend student teaching. I watched my sister go through her college study in order to become a teacher, and hardly any of it was spent actually observing teaching methods. It was learning facts in classes, learning theories on how to teach, rather than actually seeing it in action.

    We as a nation are falling behind of other countries around the world, and I honestly believe that was Brian Crosby’s inspiration to write this book—as a plea to government (and to the people of our nation as well) to see what may happen if we continue educating our children the way we do now. It seems like to me that most people don’t read commentaries on topics such as education—most just complain, and offer no real way to fix the problem at hand. It was really nice to see someone actually stand up and offer tweaks to the system that would do a 180 on education as we know it today. It is necessary for the preservation of our country, that our children are educated just as well—if not better—than countries around the world. As a country, we have always held a standard of excellence in America—in every field—but lately, government has been focused on the ‘bigger’ problems in our world, letting some domestic issues slip—education being among those domestic issues. Crosby’s book is a good way to get us thinking again about things that should really matter to us—our future as a successful country.