The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood, and The Intellectual Lives of Children.
Engel applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School, and reported the following:
Page 99 plants you right in the middle of one particular classroom in Tennessee. A little girl named Destiny is struggling to figure out what she is supposed to do, and she is struggling to follow the rules. She is a haunting little girl, in a somewhat haunting situation. By the end of the page, there’s a glimmer of hope for her.Learn more about American Kindergarten at the University of Chicago Press website.
More broadly I think page 99 offers a feel for what it’s like to read the whole book, which tells the story of specific students and their teachers, figuring things out together in their classrooms.The passage about Destiny gives you a good sense of how the book is put together, and what the book is about: stories about five year olds, their teachers, and the schools in which they all spend their days. However, that particular description is heart wrenching. Many other parts of the book are uplifting, funny, or simply offer you a close-up look at the world of kindergarten. Some sections of the book describe developmental research that challenges what teachers are doing.
I embarked on this project with what felt to me like an urgent question: after 45 years of developmental research, teaching children, working with teachers, writing about schools, and as a mother and grandmother, what would I think if I travelled around the country and took stock of our schools? What would I find that was the same everywhere, and what kinds of differences would I see? I had a hunch that the popular narratives about how terrible our education system were wrong, and was equally dissatisfied with the too-granular view of schools one gets from reading education research. I needed to see for myself. I’m so glad I stuck with it. I learned more from this project than almost any other research I’ve undertaken. I discovered what really seems to make the difference between classrooms where children flourish and classrooms where kids and teachers seem to be dragging their way through the day, and it wasn’t what I expected. The visits gave me a chance to see where developmental science shines a light on what is happening, and where we have allowed the research and our school practices to rumble along on totally separate tracks. Page 99 hints at all of that, so I guess the test is pretty good.
--Marshal Zeringue
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