Customer Reviews

Why Fly That Way?: Linking Community and Academic Achievement

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Sooner or later, every teacher encounters the class from hell. This book is Ms. Greeley's account of the year it happened to her.

The story is told in a fast-paced and engaging style, and it is a great read as a tale of academic adventure. But it is also the story of a group of middle school students who learned deep and surprising lessons, and the reader learns along with them: the intangibles at the core of a really good education that no test will ever be able to measure, the difference between a "values education" that teaches *about* values, and one that provides a hands-on engagement with lived values learned in real time.

Above all, it provides a model, concrete and down to earth rather than airily utopian, of how the pious adult slogan of "no child left behind" can take on flesh and bone; how the determination to leave none of the others behind can become the real social cement that binds a classroom of students to each other, and to the enterprise of learning. This book flies in the face of the current conventional wisdoms that make education a matter of pouring a sufficient quantity of sufficiently standardized facts into the inert heads of students. But it is presented with such freshness and clarity, so free of educatorese or political cant, so focused on walking, talking, breathing children, that even the most ardent proponents of schools as efficient knowledge factories are likely to find themselves disarmed.

Kathy Greeley narrates her year-long journey with a group of "typical" eighth graders in Cambridge, MA. This group had a six-year span in reading levels (and presumably math, too, but her job was Engligh/history/language arts). Coming with the "social-emotional learning" focus and Coalition of Essential Schools tenents, she crafted a marvelous experience for these kids--one well worth reading.

She shows what a very bright, dedicated, and resourceful teacher can do.

She clearly is above-the-norm.

It appears that her classroom was pre-MCAS, which is the standardized testing that takes place throughout Massachusetts at the end of the eighth grade. Therefore, her evidence of growth is limited to her description, which is moving and compelling. The biggest gap in the social-emotional learning "camp," however, is the lack of documentation of superior growth on standardized measures. This reflects the fractious divide in American education, unfortunately, between the "conservative" back-to-basics and Let's-test-'em crowd and the more "liberal" multiple-intelligences and learn-better-when-you-work-well-together group. Could we not ask the conservatives and liberals to show multiple outcomes to the good work they both do? Greeley cannot be faulted for this problem, obviously, and her work deserves serious thought.

It appears from the back of the book that Ms. Greeley is still teaching. Good for her! Good luck!

The book may have been fine if I would have even received it. However, I am yet to receive this purchase and my final paper over this book was due 3 days ago...I am never purchasing on amazon again.