But sometimes what can make or break your learning community are the intangibles--the relationships, identity, and connections that make up its culture. Authors Fisher, Frey, and Pumpian believe that no school improvement effort will be effective unless school culture is addressed. They identify five pillars that are critical to building a culture of achievement:1. Welcome: Imagine if all staff members in your school considered it their job to make every student, parent, and visitor feel noticed, welcomed, and valued.2. Do no harm: Your school rules should be tools for teaching students to become the moral and ethical citizens you expect them to be.3. Choice words: When the language students hear helps them tell a story about themselves that is one of possibility and potential, students perform in ways that are consistent with that belief.4. It's never too late to learn: Can you push students to go beyond the minimum needed to get by, to discover what they are capable of achieving?5. Best school in the universe: Is your school the best place to teach and learn? The best place to work?Drawing on their years of experience in the classroom, the authors explain how these pillars support good teaching and learning. In addition, they provide 19 action research tools that will help you create a culture of achievement, so that your school or classroom is the best it can be. After reading this book, you'll see why culture makes the difference between a school that enables success for all students and a school that merely houses those students during the school day.

    It comprises myriad smaller archives, in which Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artefacts, assortments of images, texts and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized and analyzed by their author. In them, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy.This unique book, produced in association with the Benjamin Archive, delves into these archives. They include carefully laid-out manuscripts; photographs of a home with luxurious furniture, arcades, Russian toys; picture postcards from Tuscany and the Balearics; meticulous and unconventional registers, card indexes and catalogs; notebooks, in which every single square centimeter is covered; a collation of his son's first words and sentences; riddles and enigmatic Sibyls. Everything here is subtly interlinked with everything else.Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin's Archive leads right into the core of his work, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.

    Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's vision of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denominator and drifting toward chaos brought its author international fame and has remained one of the influential books of the 20th century.

    There are many positive ways in which the Internet has contributed to the world, but as a society we are less aware of the Internet’s deeply negative effects on our psychology, economy, and culture. In The Internet Is Not the Answer, Andrew Keen, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, traces the technological and economic history of the internet from its founding in the 1960s through the rise of the big data companies to the increasing attempts to monetize almost every human activity, and investigates how the internet is reconfiguring our world—often at great cost. In this sharp, witty narrative, informed by the work of other writers, academics, and reporters, as well as his own wide-ranging research and interviews, Keen shows us the tech world, warts and all, and investigates what we can do to make sure the choices we make about the reconfiguring of our society do not lead to unpleasant unforeseen aftershocks.

    Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It’s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today’s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.

    But today, much of the world is as religious as ever. This volume challenges the belief that the modern world is increasingly secular, showing instead that modernization more often strengthens religion. Seven leading cultural observers examine several regions and several religions and explain the resurgence of religion in world politics. Peter L. Berger opens with a global overview. The other six writers deal with particular aspects of the religious scene: George Weigel, with Roman Catholicism;David Martin, with the evangelical Protestant upsurge not only in the Western world but also in Latin America, Africa, the Pacific rim, China, and Eastern Europe; Jonathan Sacks, with Jews and politics in the modern world; Abdullahi A. An-Na'im, with political Islam in national politics and international relations; Grace Davie, with Europe as perhaps the exception to the desecularization thesis; and Tu Weiming, with religion in the People's Republic of China.

    Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Half of a Yellow Sun. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel that was written by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It was first published in 2006 by Knopf/Anchor and tells the story of two sisters Olanna and Kainene during the Biafran War. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun takes place in Nigeria during the Nigerian-Biafran War in 1967-1970. The effect of the war is shown through the dynamic relationships of five peoples lives ranging from high ranking political figures, a professor, a British citizen, and a houseboy. After the British left Nigeria and stopped ruling, conflicts arose over what government would rule over the land. The land split and the Nigeria-Biafra war started. The lives of the main characters drastically changed and were torn apart by the war and decisions in their personal life. The book jumps between events that took place during the early 1960s and the late 1960s, when the war was on. In the early 1960s, the main characters are introduced: Ugwu, a 13 year old village boy who moves in with Odenigbo, to work as his houseboy. Odenigbo frequently entertains intellectuals to discuss the political turmoil in Nigeria. Life changes for Ugwu when Odenigbos girlfriend, Olanna, moves in with them. Ugwu forms a strong bond with both of them, and is extremely loyal. Olanna has a twin sister, Kainene, who is a woman with a dry sense of humour, tired by the pompous company she is forced to keep. Her lover Richard is an Englishman come to Nigeria to study the art. Jumping four years ahead, trouble is brewing between the Hausa and the Igbo people and hundreds of people die in the massacres, including Olanna's beloved auntie and uncle. A new republic is crea...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=1859812

    Carey's lively thought, lucid style, and profound scholarship propel the reader through a wide and varied intellectual landscape, particularly as these issues have affected Modern American thought. As entertaining as it is enlightening, Communication as Culture is certain to become a classic in its field.

    It could not anticipate what was to come after, neither could it grasp what had happened in literary theory in the light of where it was to lead.

    Once-powerful newspapers have lost their clout or been purchased by owners with particular agendas. Algorithms select which stories we see. The Internet allows consequential revelations, closely guarded secrets, and dangerous misinformation to spread at the speed of a click.In Breaking News, Alan Rusbridger demonstrates how these decisive shifts have occurred, and what they mean for the future of democracy. In the twenty years he spent editing The Guardian, Rusbridger managed the transformation of the progressive British daily into the most visited serious English-language newspaper site in the world. He oversaw an extraordinary run of world-shaking scoops, including the exposure of phone hacking by London tabloids, the Wikileaks release of U.S.diplomatic cables, and later the revelation of Edward Snowden's National Security Agency files. At the same time, Rusbridger helped The Guardian become a pioneer in Internet journalism, stressing free access and robust interactions with readers. Here, Rusbridger vividly observes the media's transformation from close range while also offering a vital assessment of the risks and rewards of practicing journalism in a high-impact, high-stress time.

    His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world. Rapaille’s breakthrough notion is that we acquire a silent system of Codes as we grow up within our culture. These Codes—the Culture Code—are what make us American, or German, or French, and they invisibly shape how we behave in our personal lives, even when we are completely unaware of our motives. What’s more, we can learn to crack the Codes that guide our actions and achieve new understanding of why we do the things we do. Rapaille has used the Culture Code to help Chrysler build the PT Cruiser—the most successful American car launch in recent memory. He has used it to help Procter & Gamble design its advertising campaign for Folger’s coffee – one of the longest-lasting and most successful campaigns in the annals of advertising. He has used it to help companies as diverse as GE, AT&T, Boeing, Honda, Kellogg, and L’Oréal improve their bottom line at home and overseas. And now, in The Culture Code, he uses it to reveal why Americans act distinctly like Americans, and what makes us different from the world around us. In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes. Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.

    It is both witness and tribute to the late theory of mind—the so-called structural theory, with its stress on aggression, indeed the death drive, as the pitiless adversary of eros.Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929. In it he states his views on the broad question of man's place in the world, a place Freud defines in terms of ceaseless conflict between the individual's quest for freedom and society's demand for conformity.Freud's theme is that what works for civilization doesn't necessarily work for man. Man, by nature aggressive and egotistical, seeks self-satisfaction. But culture inhibits his instinctual drives. The result is a pervasive and familiar guilt.Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey.Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.

    The reality of being poor brings out a survival mentality, and turns attention away from opportunities taken for granted by everyone else. If you work with people from poverty, some understanding of how different their world is from yours will be invaluable. Whether you're an educator--or a social, health, or legal services professional--this breakthrough book gives you practical, real-world support and guidance to improve your effectiveness in working with people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Since 1995 A Framework for Understanding Poverty has guided hundreds of thousands of educators and other professionals through the pitfalls and barriers faced by all classes, especially the poor. Carefully researched and packed with charts, tables, and questionnaires, Framework not only documents the facts of poverty, it provides practical yet compassionate strategies for addressing its impact on people's lives.

    Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.