Showing titles in Educators

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.

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.

When 13-year-old Vidal Chastanet told photographer Brandon Stanton that his principal, Ms. Lopez, was the person who most influenced his life, it was the pebble that started a whirlwind for Nadia Lopez and her small, new public school in one of Brooklyn's most wretched communities. The posting on Stanton's wildly popular site, Humans of New York ( HONY), went megaviral. Lopez - not long before on the verge of quitting - found herself in the national spotlight and headed for a meeting with Obama as well as the beneficiary of a million-dollar IndieGoGo campaign.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Radical is this fearless advocate's incisive, intensely personal call-to-arms. Rhee combines the story of her own extraordinary experience with dozens of compelling examples from schools she's worked in and studied-from students from unspeakable home lives who have thrived in the classroom to teachers whose radical methods have produced unprecedented leaps in achievement. Radical chronicles Rhee's awakening to the potential of every child, her rage at the special interests blocking badly-needed change, and her recognition that it will take a grassroots movement to create outstanding public schools.

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."

Die italienische Ärztin Maria Montessori wurde durch ihre Erfahrungen in Kindergärten zu einer wegweisenden Pädagogin...

From best-selling author and teacher Mary Maccracken comes the engaging and inspiring story of five troubled children she fought to bring back from the brink. Joey is the class clown but alone proves to be an intensely dark seven-year old who still can't read. Eric is a kindergartener left withdrawn and speechless by the horrors he's witnessed at home. Alice appears to be the model fifth-year child but secretly scores zero on every maths test.

We all have a lot to learn from the diary of a teacher named Esmé Raji Codell, an educator who has struggled to maintain individuality in the face of bureaucracy and whose defiant stand against mediocrity will reverberate in companies as well as classrooms everywhere.

We all know what is wrong with today’s schools - or do we? Tracy Kidder spent a year in a fifth grade class in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The teacher is excellent, but something else is very wrong. Kidder skillfully presents the problems and leaves the listener to ponder the solutions.

Jonathan Starr is not your traditional do-gooder, and in 2009, when he decided to found Abaarso, a secondary school in Somaliland, the choice seemed crazy to even his closest friends. Why, they wondered, would he turn down a life of relative luxury to relocate to an armed compound in a breakaway region of the world's number one failed state? To achieve his mission, Starr would have to overcome profound cultural differences, broken promises, and threats to his safety and that of his staff.

The Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Ways to Increase Your Happiness shows how you can change your mindset and increase your happiness. What if a few new habits could increase your happiness? What if you could increase your happiness with a few simple steps? Imagine waking up in the morning feeling happy and ready to take on the day.

Trouble is a Gift is the story of a recovered alcoholic who humbly asked for help in finding a purpose and meaning in his life, whose prayer was answered, and who then turned his dream into a reality devoted to the care and treatment of millions of sick and suffering addicts and alcoholics. James S. Cusack, alcoholic, caregiver, and astute businessman, recounts his inner struggles and self-doubt, the stages of his recovery from alcohol addiction, and the moment of clarity when his mission came to light and he saw how, with the help of God and a Twelve-Step program, he could fulfill his purpose.

The inspirational and colourful memoir of Michael Volpe, the general manager of Opera Holland Park. The son of Italian immigrants, he and his brothers were raised by his mother on a council estate in West London before he attended Woolverstone Hall, a prestigious state boarding school designed to give bright inner-city boys the opportunity of a public school education.

Born 1706 in Boston, Benjamin Franklin was the 15th of his father's 17 children. He went to school as a child with the intent of becoming a minister, as his father, Josiah, intended. However, that idea was dropped after Franklin showed a keen interest in reading and writing. He was apprenticed to his brother, James, at a young age, but after fighting with his brother he quit the job and moved to Philadelphia, where he worked for a man named Samuel Keimer.

John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally-protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5 million-copy bestseller, From Slavery to Freedom. And he was, and remains, an active participant. Intimate, at times revelatory, Mirror to America chronicles Franklin's life and this nation's racial transformation in the 20th century.