Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (Stephen Brookfield)

Stephen Brookfield is inspiring and dynamic in his approach to teaching. In this volume he dissects what it means to be critically reflective: to question your assumptions, uncover your biases, empower your students, and open your mind to different ways of understanding your own teaching. There are a lot of specific techniques in here that can be very useful. I particularly like what he calls the Critical Incident Report (though the name seriously needs to be changed), which invites students to reflect on their own experiences in the classroom. Through this report, not only do students become more reflective themselves, but teachers get vital feedback on how their practices are experienced from the other side of the desk. Not everything in this volume works for me, and Brookfield does tend to ramble on, but overall it is quite variable.

The Rook (Daniel O'Malley)

The tag line reads, "On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service," which is a pretty good indication as to the subject of the book. There's a super-secret organization in England (with counterparts in a few anglo-centric areas of the world) dedicated to using people with supernatural powers to fight problems generated by other entities with supernatural powers. The special conceit of this story is that it centers on one member of the organization, the Rook of the title (most of the organizational structure is inspired by chess, for unclear reasons) who starts the story by coming to standing in the rain surrounded by unconscious bodies, and she has no memory of her past self whatsoever. She finds a set of extremely chatty letters left for her by her former self and uses them to orient herself, identify the enemy who took her memory, and pretty much generally save the day. The story is fun enough, and I was never really tempted to abandon it, but belief just wouldn't suspend very well. The superpowers were an inexplicable mishmosh - this one can shape any metal with his fingers like putty, that one seems compelled to twist his otherwise-human body into pretzel shapes, this one oozes various toxic chemicals at will from his pores - they seemed arbitrary and nonsensical. I also had trouble with a really super-secret organization having such poor security, so that someone with no memory and just a few poorly-organized notes to go on could fake her way in without anyone suspecting she was a mole. Too may things seemed to happen just for the plot. To take an example from early in the story, no-memory girl is offered a choice by her former self: open one safe-deposit box at the bank and learn what she needs to know to function in the life she's stepped into, or open a different one and get everything she needs to start a new life elsewhere in the world. It apparently never occurs to her that she could open both before deciding. As I said, pleasant enough, but not much "there" there.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachel Joyce)

This is a charming, gentle, life-affirming book, though there is a lot of dark material there.  Harold and Maureen are living in a cold, empty marriage in a cold, empty house, when Harold gets a letter saying that an old friend is facing death on the other side of England, and it shakes him. He heads out to mail her a letter of sympathy, but simply keeps walking, heading north to be with her in her last days. His walk takes on mythic dimensions, and helps him and Maureen work separately on the issues that keep them apart. The big reveal toward the end is not actually much of a surprise, but it all fits together. I found it moving and engaging, and felt that I got to know the characters well.

The Other Wes Moore (Wes Moore)

This is a memoir and a biography, telling the stories of two men named Wes Moore.  Both were black, both lived in the same neighborhood in Baltimore at the same time, both grew up in single-mother households, both had scrapes with the law at an early age, both struggled in school. Their lives diverged wildly, though; the Wes Moore who authored this book became a military man, a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, a happily married man, and a nationally-known speaker, while the other Wes Moore will live out his life in prison for murder. What happened? How did the author's life get turned around and set back on track, while the other kept spiraling further and further down a dark path? The book offers many possibilities: one father abandoned his boy while the other died unexpectedly, one mother was never able to complete college while the other was a college graduate, one dropped out of failing inner-city schools while the other was able to attend private and military schools. Ultimately, though, there are no clear answers. This book is a thoughtful look at the questions, opening our eyes to the complexity of the situation and the difficulty of finding the answers. Highly recommended.