Books about Tinkering from Amazon.com

For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices.

In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to "reinvent" schooling?

Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.

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Price: $19.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This highly regarded text helps developmental writing students strengthen their writing skills and understand some of the stylistic choices available to them in written English. Simply put, sentence combining involves putting short, choppy sentences together to make more interesting, readable ones. In the process, students learn the importance of sentence variety in improving syntax. Students are able to explore a variety of ways to say something in writing and learn that there is not a single "right" way to express their point. SENTENCE COMBINING features an accessible and humorous writing style, along with innovative and thoroughly tested exercises which not only allow students to flex their creative muscles, but also offer them insights into current topics and issues. New to this edition are two end-of-text appendices on sentence combining, the writing process and sentence and paragraph strategies..
Price: $43.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A bewitching look at nonnative species in American ecosystems, by the heir apparent to McKibben and Quammen Mosquitoes in Hawaii, sea lampreys in the Great Lakes, mountain goats in the Olympic Mountains of Washington State—not one of these species is native to the environment in which it now flourishes. Kim Todd's Tinkering with Eden is a lyrical, brilliantly written history of the introduction of exotic species into the United Sates, and how the well-meaning endeavors of scientists, explorers, and biologists have resulted in ecological catastrophe. Todd's assured voice will haunt her readers, and the stories she tells—such as the druggist who brought starlings to America because he wanted the landscape to feature every bird mentioned by Shakespeare—will forever change how we see our increasingly afflicted landscape and its unanticipated inhabitants..
Price: $9.39 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century Of Public School Reform, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. A valued contribution to the national discussion about education reforms on both the federal, state, and local levels..
Price: $31.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the first decades after mass production, between 1913 and 1939, middle-class Americans not only bought cars but also enthusiastically redesigned them. By examining the ways Americans creatively adapted their automobiles, Tinkering takes a fresh look at automotive design from the bottom up, as a process that included manufacturers, engineers, advice experts, and consumers in various guises.

Franz argues that automobile ownership opened new possibilities for ingenuity among consumers even as large corporations came to control innovation. Franz weaves together a variety of sources, from serial fiction to corporate documents, to explore tinkering as a form of authority in a culture that valued ingenuity. Women drivers represented one group of consumers who used tinkering to advance their claim to social autonomy. Some canny drivers moved beyond modifying their individual cars to become independent inventors, patenting and selling automotive accessories for a burgeoning national market of automotive accessories. Earl S. Tupper was one such tinkerer who went on to invent Tupperware.

These savvy tinkerers worked in a changing landscape of invention shaped increasingly by automotive giants. By the 1930s, Ford and General Motors worked to change the popular discourse of ingenuity and used the world's fairs of the Depression as a stage to promote a hierarchy of innovation. Franz not only demonstrates the entrepreneurial spirit of American consumers but she engages larger historical questions about gender, consumption and ingenuity while charting the impact corporate expansion on tinkering during the first half of the twentieth century.

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Price: $27.92 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is an article from Conscience, published by Catholics for a Free Choice on December 22, 2003. The length of the article is 3375 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Tinkering with god: just how moral is conservative catholic morality? a more humane medicine needs a liberal catholic bioethics based on natural law.
Author: James F. Drane
Publication:Conscience (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 22, 2003
Publisher: Catholics for a Free Choice
Volume: 24 Issue: 4 Page: 19(4)

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]