ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Troublemakers

How long does it take to read Troublemakers?

Carla Shalaby

Troublemakers by Carla Shalaby takes about 4 hours to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours

A weekend read

First published 2017. 218 pages, about 59,950 words.

8 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 6 hours 40 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 30 minutes

The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children--Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus--Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem. From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight--for educators and parents alike--into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age. Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands--despite good intentions--work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society"--

Subjects: Classroom management, Education (Elementary), Behavior disorders in children, Problem children, School discipline, Inclusive education

Books like this

Popular books of similar length