A Mind at a Time: America's Top Learning Expert Shows How Every Child Can Succeed by Mel Levine Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of A Mind at a Time: America's Top Learning Expert Shows How Every Child Can Succeed
Book Review: My Best Advice
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is a must read for educators and students alike. And I mean ALL educators and students. You will be grateful for the information and advice. I am. And, I must say, I am also grateful for the advice of a previous reviewer who recommended that, after I read Mel Levine's great "A Mind at a Time", I also read Norman Thomas Remick's "West Point: Thomas Jefferson: Character Leadership Education". It WAS an education. This is my best advice.Book Review: Overly anecdotal, barely scientific.
Summary: 2 Stars
In his book, Dr. Mel Levine expands on concepts of assessment to outline some different ways in which students' performance might be evaluated in school. He calls testing a "necessary evil" and that "any test format...will discriminate unfairly against certain kinds of minds". Dr. Levine states as a given that "an essay test, a standardized multiple-choice examination, or an oral quiz might be fair to one student and discriminatory against the child seated next to her". (p. 329) It is unfortunate for the reader that Dr. Levine makes his assertion without elaboration or explanation. He would have done well to offer some enlightenment here.
Dr. Levine outlines on pages 269-270 his recommendations for any child undergoing examination for his or her problems in school. Incredibly, Dr. Levine does so on the page of his book immediately after his case to dissuade parents and educators from "wasting their time" in attempts to diagnose the causes of such a child's difficulties. This struck me as unbecoming for a clinician and medical doctor such as the author; one would think diagnosis is crucial in ascertaining the best practices in treating and educating children with difficulties. Dr. Levine asserts "since you can never prove with certainty that any cause was the cause, you should skip the whys and instead devote sensitive thinking to describing and understanding your child's neurodevelopmental status and the best way to care for the profile." (p. 268) My confusion, then, is how the child's profile can be constructed without at least some investigation into the causes. As a man of science, Dr. Levine should concern himself with the causes of a child's difficulties, not only for his own enlightenment but for the education of parents, teachers and clinicians as well.
Dr. Levine states that dyslexia is an "unhelpful label" (p. 132) and that tests for language dysfunction are often "culturally biased" (p. 144); these claims create frustration when we are left to take the doctor at his word. Unfortunately for the reader, Dr. Levine once again puts forth assertions for which he provides neither evidence nor example. However, elaboration is deemed unnecessary by Dr. Levine, and as a result he often fails to convince.
Book Review: Rambling; lacking citations; some good ideas nevertheless
Summary: 3 Stars
Let me be clear that I'm reviewing the book, not the doctor. I ordered this book because I'd heard Dr. Levine speak on television. He's affable and convincing. He makes a powerful case for the need to respect different learning styles and incorporate every adult involved in a child's education in developing a tailor-made plan. The problem is that the case he makes is less powerful here in print, where he never drops a citation or gives credit or offers anything but anecdote to bolster his claims. That could be fine, but it wasn't the scholarly discourse I was hoping for. And he sometimes runs long in the speaking. Dr. Levine may be a whizbang at communicating with kids and extremely sensitive to the needs of an individual, but it seems he's a little less astute at judging the attention of a remote audience--or this one, anyway. I found it brutally hard to finish this book. Now that I have, I plan to use it the way I believe that it should have been written: piecemeal, as I find I have need. This is a manual, not a story, and I believe it would have benefited from a more streamlined presentation.Book Review: Rich with Personal Case Studies to Demonstrate His Points
Summary: 4 Stars
I didn't get what I wanted out of this book because I am not the intended audience--My daughter is only four years old and is ahead of the curve in every subject I test her on. Dr. Levine writes for an audience whose children are mostly in high school even though he will review their histories all the way back to pre-school in many of his case histories. That being said, I found this book rich with real-life case studies of children with learning difficulties. He has examples from the boys and girls that he has personally worked with to illustrate several points that he makes. I find those specific case studies to be the best part of his book. They support some of his theories and assertions. His arguments become weaker when he refers to other people's research--like when he said that research has shown that high school children can learn a second language better than pre-school children and therefore he recommends that children with verbal deficiencies should postpone studying a second language until the 11th grade. This skirts over the differences between pre-school language learning vs. high school language learning and ignores that there is a different kind of language learning going on at age 4 and at age 16. At age four you can't memorize as much information or learn as quickly as can a 16 year old, but the four year old can easily learn native syntax and pronunciation which the 16 year old may never learn. Anyway, this book offers a lot to parents and teachers of high school children who have learning difficulties but perhaps is less relevant for those outside of that audience.Book Review: Significant, enlightening, and a good read too
Summary: 5 Stars
Other reviewers have discussed the pros and cons of Dr. Levine's theories in depth, so I won't go into those; in the field of cognitive psychology, I'm an interested (and, I think, fairly well-read) amateur rather than a professional. That said, I feel that this is an important book for both parents and educators. The child's "job" of learning how to function in the world, and mastering the many tasks set for him/her by the educational system, isn't an easy one. The human mind is complex and multifaceted, but our schools tend to think of "intelligence" as a narrowly defined set of skills, and anyone who doesn't do well in those must be either stupid or lazy. (Levine notes that the moral implications of such judgments, e.g., that a student "doesn't try hard enough" or is "unmotivated," can be devastating to a child, and are often grossly unfair.) The irony is that -- as Levine points out -- the abilities that enable a child to succeed in school aren't necessarily those that conduce to success in later life; so, by rewarding performance only in certain areas, we doom many children to a low opinion of their abilities and ignore a wide spectrum of human potential.
Although the subject isn't exactly lightweight, I found the book appealing and highly readable. Dr. Levine clearly has great respect and affection for his young subjects, so his anecdotes are engaging and (often) amusing. I was especially tickled when he urged a young client not to let his teachers "catch him doing something right" because from then on they'd hold it against him. In school, I was a "divergent thinker" to the max: if a subject interested me, I'd do a brilliant job, but if not I'd blow it off. So my occasional successes turned into threats: "See how well you can do if you just TRY hard enough." Trying hard had nothing to do with it! (When I got into college and graduate school, where I could study the subjects that interested me, my GPA soared.)
Although Levine's work is often compared with Howard Gardner's, in fact they're complementary. Levine deals with cognitive skills (such as learning to filter stimuli), while Gardner deals with innate abilities or faculties in various subject areas (such as affinity for music). A child's learning difficulties could result from either one -- for example, problems with math might mean that the child can't focus on details, or has little math ability -- or they could be caused by something totally unrelated to intelligence, such as eye problems. As Levine memorably points out, every child's mind is different, and "one size fits all" solutions rarely address the real problem.