Getting to the Why

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A book review of Getting to the Why: A Practical Guide to Helping Students and Children Learn from Their Mistakes Using Character Remediation by Rick Rubel

A book review of Getting to the Why: A Practical Guide to Helping Students and Children Learn from Their Mistakes Using Character Remediation by Rick Rubel

Stars: ***

Mascot Books (2021)
Academic Development/Parenting
176 pages

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links.

Summary: One of our main responsibilities as adults is to teach our young people to do the right thing when we are not around. This requires moral development. A combination of external discipline, self-understanding, and moral maturity should lead to self-discipline, and ultimately, moral development.

An important way to help young people develop their character is to help them learn from their mistakes. There are many ways to do this, but I believe in the power of the question. Sometimes, the questions we ask young people are more important that the statements we tell them. If we ask our students and children the right questions, we can help them get to their “why.”

Through the questioning outlined in my Character Remediation Program, young people should be able to answer three important questions when asked about their mistakes:

“Why did you do it?” “Why is it wrong?” and “if you knew it was wrong, why did you do it?” Getting to the Why serves as a guide to asking those questions to help young people discover their own truth and reasons, thereby improving their character and moral development

Getting to the Why

This book explains the authors process for remediation with students he works with. This is done after the student is caught cheating or fighting or otherwise getting in trouble.

The book is designed for educators AND parents. After the whole process and examples are gone over, the author talks directly to the parents. How parents can use this process with their own kids is explained.

I’ve never seen anything like this before. If you cheat, you get a detention or a zero or maybe redo the whole test. But this process, although it can take a bit longer, gets to the root of the issue.

It’s called Getting to the Why because the goal of the remediation is to get to the student/child to understand WHY they did what they did.

The book has smooth pages with parts of colour. There are charts and tables. The book teaches a person (designed for kids but adults could do it too) to identify which of the common virtues they possess in the proper amount or are deficient in or have an excess of. Virtues such as: Pride, Wisdom, Curiosity, Spirituality, Open-Mindedness, Loyalty, Emotional Intelligence, Love, Self-Control, Honesty and more.

An important thing I read in the book is this:

“Our character drives our action, but then our actions come back and shape our character. We become honest by doing honest things. We become courageous by doing courageous things. Unfortunately, it works the other way, as well. We can become dishonest by doing dishonest things. WE can form positive and negative habits depending on our decisions that are driven by our character.”

Getting to the Why by Rick Rubel

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About Kathleen

I've been a nonfiction lover for as long as I can remember. I love children's nonfiction as well and love to share my knowledge and the books I gained them from, with the world. I wish more people would give nonfiction a chance.