Reviews for The Developmental Course of Gender Differentiation: Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Evaluating Constructs and Pathways

The average rating for The Developmental Course of Gender Differentiation: Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Evaluating Constructs and Pathways based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-28 00:00:00 WREN MASSEY This book gave me a long list of titles that I would either like to read for the first time--Tillie Olson's Tell Me a Riddle, William Carlos Williams's Paterson; or titles that I would like to revisit--The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Brothers Karamazov… Still, there were times reading this book when I felt as acutely from the wrong side of the tracks as I ever have. Coles is doubtless a wonderful teacher and doctor, but his is a rarified world indeed, full of Harvard students on their way to illustrious careers in medicine or finance, students who are more than willing to write extensive heartfelt reflections on the books he assigns. They reflect on the struggle to live conscientiously as they tread the path of noblesse oblige toward their future riches. Yet there's a cynical part of me that suspects some of them will have become high class cads by now--managers of hedge funds or some such form of legalized theft. And I have to confess that as a high school English teacher, I felt a certain amount of envy--something not usually high on my list of vices, but boy did this book stimulate THAT latent talent. Coles not only gets to meet and talk extensively with William Carlos Williams and Enrico Fermi (in Fermi's dying days), but his students--whom I've already bad-mouthed, probably unfairly--actually want to read literature and write about it. In my much more common experience of teaching high school English, where I'm dying for students to engage in literature the way Coles's students have, I find myself instead worn down by years of, "How long does it have to be?" and "Do you want us to double-space?" I'm sure Coles would be saddened to read this response to his work, especially since I agree with his belief in the power of literature to inform the conscience. But I had to overcome a lot of resentment to get there! My apologies, professor. Perhaps I should take your class!

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-09 00:00:00 Dirk Poppe Robert Coles's parents programmed him, in a sense, to be a lover and teller of stories, not necessarily of his own, as in a writer of fiction, but of others. They did not attempt any particular brand of brainwashing; they simply, to he and his brother's consternation and embarrassment, sat there in the middle of the living room each evening reading the classics to one another. As a consequence, Coles has spent his life not only reading short stories and novels, but in teaching their stories to students as well as collecting and telling the stories of his patients and students. Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist on the faculty at Harvard medical School. In The Call of Stories, he reflects on the experiences he has had telling those many stories, and the lessons he and his students have learned from them. He begins by crediting two physicians for directing him to the importance of patients' stories. One of his first psychiatric mentors admonished him: “The people who come to see us bring us their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. They hope we know how to interpret their stories correctly. We have to remember that what we hear is their story.” Because Coles had an interest both in medicine and in writing, he got himself introduced to the pre-eminent writer-physician of his age, William Carlos Williams, who worked in the day as a physician in Paterson, New Jersey, and spent his evenings writing poetry that helped a generation of poets develop a new direction. As Robert Coles was accompanying him on his house calls to patients one day, Williams made the comment: “Their story, yours, mine --- it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.” From these powerful influences, his parents and his early physician mentors, Coles himself moved on to the using of stories to teach students, first in the medical school, but eventually in almost all of the graduate schools at Harvard University. In The Call of Stories, he describes those experiences, what his students told him, and what he learned in the process. And he describes his experiences, not in an academic way, but through the voices and stories of his favorite authors as well as those of his mentors, his friends, and his students. The Call of Stories, thus, ends up not only being about stories, but is itself a collection of wonderful stories well told by a master storyteller. So what did Robert Coles learn from a lifetime of reading and teaching stories. He came to understand that stories can provide a compass to people, and students in particular, who find themselves struggling with the moral challenges of life. He learned: ----“Novels and stories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisers---offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we might make soundings...there can be a moment of recognition, of serious pause, of tough, self-scrutiny.” ----“...the wonderful mimetic power a novel or a story can have---its capacity to work its way well into one's thinking life, yes, but also one's reveries or idle thoughts, even one's moods and dreams...So it goes, the immediacy that a story can possess, as it connects so persuasively with human experience...a person's moral conduct responding to the moral imagination of writers and the moral imperative of fellow human beings in need.” ----and that stories do not provide “... 'solutions' or 'resolutions' but a broadening and even heightening of our struggles---with new protagonists and antagonists introduced, with new sources of concern or apprehension or hope, as one's mental life accommodates itself to a series of arrivals: guests who have a way of staying, but not necessarily staying put.” Late in the book Coles asks where the impulse to tell stories might come from, and asserts that it comes from a man standing there confronting the world around him and asking”How shall I comprehend the life that is in me and around me. To do so, stories were constructed---and told, and remembered, and handed down over time, over the generations. “