Making the Grade at a Top American High School

There are more and more books coming out each year that try and uncover what it means to be a public high school student today. Edward Humes does this beautifully, but he takes a different route. He goes into the heart of one of the nation’s top schools, Whitney High, located in Cerritos, California. This is not your typical school. Whites are among the minority, and Asian-Americans make up for over 70 percent of the students. There is an admissions process. Unheard of, at least by me, until I read this book. Every student is expected to not only go to college, but to a top college. Where drop-out rates, drugs, and sex are running high in many of the schools in the country, Whitney doesn’t have this problem.

The problem is pressure. Not the pressure to keep passing grades. Not to date the right guy. Not to win the state championship in football. But, the pressure to succeed. Parents, teachers, and students are driven by this force. Humes uncovers something that is almost unheard in America: a sound educational system.

Not that Whitney doesn’t have some of the same problems that face other schools in the country, they just deal with them better. They put education back where it belongs. The top spot on the students’ priority lists.

Humes also deals with issues that plague the country. Should we take standardized tests as the only way to know how well a school is doing? Shouldn’t we be looking at what students learn inside of classrooms? Should schools follow the route of Whitney, forcing students to succeed? All questions that education policy-makers should be asking.

Humes reports what life is like in a community where its members are driven to succeed. This is a must-read for anyone interested in making education in America a top priority.

Every now and then a person comes along that inspires more than just a close-knit group of people around, they inspire the world, or at least a part of it. This person was Morrie.

I was surprised to see that this book was copyrighted in 1997. Nine years have gone by, and I haven’t read this book until now. Mitch Albom, with his usual simplistic-styled writing (probably because of his journalism background) tells a story about his old college professor that will make you think long and deep about life itself. If nothing else, after reading this book, you will want to reevaluate your life and how you view and interact with the world.

William Faulkner once said, “The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” Albom proves Faulkner right, even if this isn’t fiction. He paints a visual image of his own “heart in conflict with itself” by listening to his “coach” and looking at the world in this new and vivid way.

This book should be read by everyone. It’s relatively short (I finished it in a little over two hours). So, take an afternoon with a few extra hours and enjoy yourself, possibly seeing truths that you may have never seen before.

Dan Brown. He’s the guy that finally got me interested in reading again. I picked up his The Da Vinci Code in the late summer after a two month break from reading any novels. He’s a thrill writer. He’s the kind of writer that makes you remember what reading is all about. Sheer pleasure.

I actually like this novel better than The Da Vinci Code. Although, that may be because it’s a little fresher on my mind. The book itself almost got a little long-winded with the plot twists in the end, but it was well worth it.

One of the things that I’ve been wanting to explore lately is religion. So, I’ve been teetering away at Dan Brown novels. Obviously not the best source, considering it is fiction. However, Brown has definitely peaked my interest. The one thing I learned from this novel that I’ve wanted to explore the most is different pathways to religion. Science, touted as anti-religious, is seen as another pathway to God in this novel. And why not? Can’t God be reached in more ways than a what a particular church tells us? Brown asks this question through his fiction.

Whether you’re interested in religion or science or neither one, this novel is still a worthwile read. Brown is captivating as always. There’s plenty of plot twists, so prepare yourself to not know what’s going to happen, which is, essentially, what books are about—flipping the page to find out how a journey unfolds.