GOOD THINKING

About the Book

Despite the fact that you’re holding this book in your hands and reading these words, you may at the same time be thinking that you don’t really need any book to tell you how to think -- or even to try to teach you how to do it any better than you’re already doing it. Perhaps you’re even saying to yourself that thinking comes naturally, that you do it all the time, and that you don’t need to think about it. It’s a “no brainer.” Or, here’s another possibility: could it be that you know that thinking can be hard work, so why even bother wondering why you have this book in your hands? Surely the author of Good Thinking is about to save you all that mental trouble and tell you why you’re still reading these words; let him do the work! And so I will (but just this one time): if it is true -- as popular wisdom frequently reminds us -- that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” then the basic belief of this mindful self-improvement book is that what we familiarly call “good thinking” is what you accomplish when you put your mind to it; in short, if you “mind your mind,” you can, in fact, become the best possible thinker you can be. To help you improve your present ability as a thinker, Good Thinking is structured to give you both clarity in and practice with the key thinking skills and attitudes that produce everyday good thinking in our personal and professional lives. These skills and attitudes are explained, exemplified, and reinforced throughout the book’s fourteen manageable chapters with such empowering prompts as Mind Set, What Do You Think?, Reflections, and Assessing Your Thinking. Through structured activities, you will teach yourself how to get your mind to go from “Huh?” to “Hmm” to “Aha!” The subtitle of Good Thinking seeks to tell it as it can be – and will be – for you if you work with Good Thinking to stimulate your mind to think again! --Robert Eidelberg

About the Author

A former journalist, Robert Eidelberg served for nineteen and a half years as the chair of the English department of William Cullen Bryant High School in New York City and a total of 32 years as a secondary school English teacher in the New York City public school system. Upon “graduating” from Bryant High School, Mr. Eidelberg was an educational and editorial consultant and author for Amsco School Publications and a writing instructor at Audrey Cohen Metropolitan College of New York as well as at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. For the past 15 years, Mr. Eidelberg has been a college adjunct supervising undergraduate and graduate student teachers in secondary English education for both the State University of New York at New Paltz and the City University of New York, where he has specialized in teaching the culminating secondary English education practicum seminar at CUNY’s Hunter College campus. As a working author with a fondness for fictional characters and somewhat lengthy subtitles for his books, Mr. Eidelberg recently published a careers book on what it takes to become and remain an effective secondary school teacher and not burn out – SO YOU THINK YOU MIGHT LIKE TO TEACH: 23 Fictional Teachers (for Real!) Model How to Become and Remain a Successful Teacher. He is currently completing a self-help companion book to GOOD THINKING called PLAYING DETECTIVE: A Self-Improvement Approach to Becoming a More Mindful Thinker, Reader, and Writer By Solving Mysteries. Robert Eidelberg lives in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, with his life partner of 40 years and their 13-year-old part-hound, part-Doberman dog Marlowe, a very mindful mutt.