Showing titles in Educators

Red Means Go is the amazing story of a young woman, Joanne Balducci from Bayside, Queens. The oldest among her four siblings, all boys except her, she learns at an early age to handle responsibility and be a strong leader against all odds and ill will.

There is a lot more to the story than just the light bulb, and there is a lot more to the invention of the light bulb than just Thomas Edison. One thing is for sure - he is still remembered as one of the greatest inventors of all time and perhaps the greatest that America has ever produced. In truth, Edison was a man who invented a lot of things while bringing about incredible advancements in many other things. With the stock ticker, the telegraph, the light bulb, and the motion picture, he may not have invented them, but he improved on them beyond any recognition.

Bringing Montessori to America traces in engrossing detail one of the most fascinating partnerships in the history of American education - that between Maria Montessori and S. S. McClure, from their first meeting in 1910 until their final acrimonious dispute in 1915.

In a book that’s both accessible and enlightening, Rebecca Friedrichs recounts her 30-year odyssey as an elementary school teacher who comes face to face with the forces dividing and corrupting our schools and culture - state and national teachers’ unions. An exciting true story that features real-life testimonies of teachers, parents, and kids as well as political and social commentary, Rebecca’s journey leads her to the realization that the only hope for America’s schools and families is returning authority to parents and teachers while lessening the grip of state and national unions.

What are you going to do for the rest of your life? For David Lawrence, Jr., a brilliant newspaper editor and publisher with a distinguished, three-decade-long journalism career who retired in 1999 at the age of 56, the answer in his words was to dedicate his life to a "[N]ewly energized purposefulness: that every child have a real chance to succeed."

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. ...

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.