Showing titles in Educators

In her memoir Read or Die, Russell documents her daily battle as a middle school teacher in Tucson, Arizona, fighting against predetermined trajectories of less-than beliefs with an arsenal of hard covers and tattered pages. A talented and caring teacher, Russell offers a moving portrayal that combines rich autobiographical details with firsthand insight into the world of education. Read or Die is not only a compelling story, but it also offers revealing and meaningful insights into education in America from a seasoned insider.

The Education of a Lifetime is a compelling memoir by former Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat. Khayat speaks about his childhood days in Moss Point, Mississippi, the state's segregationist policies that prevented his SEC-champion baseball team from playing in the College World Series, and the sadness of experiencing his father's arrest and guilty plea. These seemingly disparate events worked to prepare him to battle the vestiges of racial strife that continued to haunt the university's culture as he accepted the honor of becoming the university's 15th chancellor.

In Gift of Gratitude, author Claire E. Hallinan shares her gratitude for the gifts that she was given by her past: the ability to think of all experiences as positive, the strengths that she determined to be resilient, and the future that she believed to be hopeful through her unique learning experiences. It is these gifts that she is able to share in her very own classroom as a teacher today.

I traveled from Washington to California when I was 18 years old to receive missionary training. What I found when I arrived here was a handsome young man that wanted to date me. He was John Hargrove, a brilliant student of the Bible. We saw each other daily and fell in love. Two and a half months later, we married and stayed together for 58 years until he passed away. The best thing he gave me were five wonderful children. This is his story.

The inspiration for the NBC TV series "Rise," starring Josh Radnor, Auli'i Cravalho, and Rosie Perez — the incredible and true story of an extraordinary drama teacher who has changed the lives of thousands of students and inspired a town. By the author of The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino. ...

The English Governess at the Siamese Court, written in 1870, vividly recounts the experiences of one Anna Harriette Leonowens as governess for the sixty-plus children of King Mongkut of Siam, and translator and scribe for the King himself. Bright, young, and energetic, Leonowens was well-suited to her role and her writings convey a heartfelt interest in the lives, legends, and languages of Siam's rich and poor.

In this insightfully honest and moving memoir about the realities of teaching in an inner-city school, Ed Boland "smashes the dangerous myth of the hero-teacher [and] shows us how high the stakes are for our most vulnerable students" (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black). In a fit of...

In John Hunter’s classroom, students fearlessly tackle global problems and discover surprising solutions by playing his groundbreaking World Peace Game. These kids - from high school all the way down to fourth grade, in schools both well funded and underresourced - take on the roles of politicians, tribal leaders, diplomats, bankers, and military commanders. Through battles and negotiations, standoffs and summits, they strive to resolve dozens of complex, seemingly intractable real-world challenges.

A. L. Rowse proclaimed himself a genius and raged against the slightest criticism from fellow scholars; he was a Marxist who despised the 'Idiot People'; he could be generous and affectionate yet hurled insults at his friends; he inveighed against Puritanism but was himself in many ways a...

Preeti was barely six years old when doctors diagnosed her deteriorating vision as a condition due to optic atrophy. Those were difficult days but with the support and encouragement of her parents she learnt to get the best out of her disability. She looked for possibilities, focused on every positive she could dream of, always playing her best shot at facing challenges and failures with dignity and without shame.

Imagine finding out that you had been brainwashed into believing you were helping people, but you were actually hurting them. For years, Nehemiah Flynt provided therapeutic foster care without realizing the harm he was helping the government inflict on innocent children and families. By the grace of God, the blinders fell off and he began to see the wickedness of "the system."

In his first nine years as a teacher, Brendan Halpin goes from wide-eyed idealist to cynical, heartbroken idealist. Unique among teaching memoirs, Losing My Faculties is not the story of a heroic teacher who transforms the lives of his hardbitten students; rather, it's the inspirational and often unpretty truth about people who choose to get up ridiculously early day after day and year after year to go stand in front of teenagers.

In Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a character wakes up in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." Shanker was condemned by many when he shut down the New York City school system in the bitter strikes of 1967 and 1968, and he was denounced for stirring up animosity between Black parents and Jewish teachers. Later, however, he built alliances with Blacks, and at the time of his death in 1997, such figures as Bill Clinton celebrated Shanker for being an educational reformer.

This world of ours has changed, if you haven't noticed.

The way we communicate, consume, shop, swap, and date has all changed - we have all changed - because of the Internet. But perhaps it has changed one man most of all. This is the true rags-to-riches, recluse-to-extrovert, fat-to-skinny ShoeMoney Story. Penned with the same irreverence for authority and grammar as his widely read blog, Shoemoney.com, Nothing's Changed but My Change chronicles the journey from a difficult childhood as the fat "dumb" kid to a grown-up place of prominence.

The story of the teacher who changed Brad's life. Originally published in Parade Magazine...

Kaufman's Hill opens with a prosaic neighborhood scene: The author and some other young boys are playing by the creek, one of their usual stomping grounds. But it soon becomes clear that much more is going on; the boy-narrator is struggling to find his way in a middle-class Catholic neighborhood dominated by bullies, the Creelys, who often terrify him.

An explosive new look at the pressures on today's teachers and the pitfalls of school reform, Confessions of a Bad Teacher presents a passionate appeal to save public schools, before it's too late. When John Owens left a lucrative job to teach English at a public school in New York City's South Bronx, he thought he could do some good. Faced with a flood of struggling students, Owens devised ingenious ways to engage every last one. But as his students began to thrive under his tutelage, Owens found himself increasingly mired in a broken educational system.

The United States is known as a world leader in innovation, boasting brilliant thinkers and trendsetting companies, but that status is at grave risk. American children are well outside the top-ten international student rankings in reading, science, and math; those rankings—not to mention the...

Among Schoolchildren illuminates a year in the life of a fifth-grade teacher struggling to make a positive difference in the lives of her students. In Holyoke, Massachuetts, Christine Zajac toils far from the limelight. Her story, and that of her students is heart-warming and inspiring as she helps them to become full-scale human beings. We find that some are brilliant, that others are troubled, and that Ms. Zajac never gives up.

Donald Thornton was a ditchdigger who wanted more for his six daughters. "I love you better than I love life," he assured his children. "But I'm not always gonna be around to look after you, and no man's gonna come along and offer to take care of you, because you ain't light-skinned. That's why you gotta be able to look after yourselves. And for that you gotta be smart."