It doesn’t take a genius but it might take an inspiring teacher to turn a student’s world around for the better. This is the premise behind a new book, “It Doesn’t Take a Genius: Five Truths to Inspire Success in Every Student,” written by award-winning educators Randall McCutcheon and Tommie Lindsey. McCutcheon, who has also written a series of prep guides for the SAT and ACT exams, will speak at Village Books on Thursday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m. He will talk about how parents can help their children improve their writing, reading and speaking skills’to score better on tests but also to become more articulate. Both McCutcheon and Lindsey believe that all children are talented and all are at risk. The challenge, for parents and teachers, is finding out what those special talents are and motivating the child to develop them. In “It Doesn’t Take a Genius,” the authors explain the innovative strategies they used to inspire all types of students’those from underprivileged backgrounds and those who were apathetic about learning or going to college. They have organized their ideas into five “truths” or principles for transforming students into successful adults, based on their decades of experience teaching in public and private schools. “Most books [on the subject] will have sort of a generalization about how you should believe in students, but they don’t give any examples,” McCutcheon said in a recent interview with the Palisadian-Post. “This book is about filling in the gaps.” The idea for the book was actually inspired by a comment from one of Lindsey’s students, Pierre Clark, who, in the award-winning PBS documentary “Accidental Hero: Room 408,” was asked why he quit the football team to join the forensics team. “Pierre replied, ‘I saw how many forensics kids were going to college, which was about 100 percent, and I saw how many football players were going to college, which was about 15 percent. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out.'” Lindsey and McCutcheon don’t pretend to be geniuses either, but they believe that teachers can change the lives of children” one child at a time.” They met in the early 1990s and found that they shared a passion for coaching high school speech and debate teams and had similar approaches to engaging students. When Lindsey won the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant in 2004 for his creativity, he and McCutcheon had the financial means to write their book. “When we wrote down our philosophies and what we believed in, it was almost exactly the same,” said McCutcheon who taught high school English, speech, debate and journalism for 27 years. He retired from teaching four years ago. McCutcheon believes that what might be missing from some classrooms today is the joy in learning. “I don’t know why learning can’t be fun,” he said, referring to the way poetry is often taught in a dull, uninspiring way. He said teachers can “trick students into liking poetry” by allowing them to work with poems that appeal to them and giving them stimulating assignments that help them understand the connections between two works. While the forensics team was, in many cases, the vehicle the authors used to engage their students, McCutcheon said that extracurricular activities like forensics, Model UN and science club do not receive adequate funding in many schools or may not be available to students. “Too much of learning is about breadth, not depth,” he said. “Students don’t have much emphasis on speaking, but without learning how to speak effectively, you’re not able to do a lot of things in your life.” He believes that parents often have to help their children develop reading, writing and speaking skills in other ways. That’s why the authors have incorporated practical, concrete examples of activities parents can suggest or use to help motivate and challenge their children. In addition to the authors’ individual humorous and moving accounts about how they inspired certain students, they asked their former students to write about what got them excited about learning. These segments, appropriately called “When They Get It,” clearly reflect the authors’ five “truths” and offer an inside-look into the perspectives of high school students’what they fear and what makes them tick. “It all started with an e-mail I got from a former student and [2004] National Book Award [in Fiction] finalist,” said McCutcheon, who had e-mailed Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum to congratulate her on being a finalist for “Madeleine Is Sleeping.” “She sent me back an e-mail telling me how I had changed her life.” In “It Doesn’t Take a Genius,” Bynum writes that McCutcheon “taught Shakespeare and Dickinson and Eliot with the same urgency and passion with which I loved Jim Carroll and Lester Bangs’so that I learned to love all of these writers in the same breath.” McCutcheon cannot emphasize how important and yet challenging the teacher’s role is today, with students relying more than ever on the Internet as a research tool and being tempted to watch a reality television show instead of reading a book. “The innocent eye has become jaded,” he said, referring to the social pressures and self-esteem issues that children face. “Many teachers are not able to relate to students too well because they didn’t grow up with those problems. “If you’re walking into a school as a young teacher, you want to find out in a subtle way who’s the best teacher at the school, and that teacher becomes your friend,” he said. “Then you find the teachers who are most effective and sit in on their classes. You become a student of being a teacher.” McCutcheon, who is “semi-retired,” currently resides in New Mexico. He writes books and works for the Department of Defense, giving speeches internationally.
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