Showing titles in Educators

From the author of international bestsellers A Circle of Children and Lovey comes an inspiring true story of a gifted teacher's determination to understand the ‘rotten' city kid everyone has given up on. Sitting quiet and withdrawn at a battered school desk, Luke had the looks of a shy angel - and a past that special needs teacher Mary MacCracken could barely believe. Already Luke had been picked up 24 times by the police. He'd set over a dozen major fires, and had a staggering record of thefts.

In The Making of Her, Clarissa Farr shares the wealth of her extensive experience to explore key questions facing parents, teachers, business leaders and managers everywhere. What contributes to the success of women? How can we inspire confidence, and nurture excellence in children - girls especially - that will equip them for adult life? Drawing on her time as high mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School, one of the most successful schools of the country, Clarissa reflects on her experience of working as a key figure in the UK’s education system.

Growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, Stanley Andrisse began making poor decisions at a very young age. He started selling dope and was arrested for the first time at 14 years old. By his early 20s, hewas in front of a judge facing 20 years to life on drug-trafficking charges. In prison, while challenged with a strong desire for self-renewal, he faced an environment that was not conducive for transformative change. From poor institutional structure and policies to individual institutionalized thinking and behaviors, he battled on a daily basis to retain and maintain his humanity.

Born into a clan of transitional characters, dyed-in-the-wool interculturalist Johannes Chudoba invites listeners to recognize the life lessons of the pre- and postwar generations. Following a frenzy of high-intensity challenges in conflict and transition countries for three decades, Chudoba stepped back and slowed down to spend time with his mother in the final months of her life, and to capture the essence of intergenerational learning in his family.

Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers.

Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.

A memoir of race, inequality and the power of literature told through the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student who was jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta. As a young English teacher keen to make a difference in the world, Michelle Kuo took a job at a tough school in the Mississippi Delta, sharing books and poetry with a young African American teenager named Patrick and his classmates. For the first time, these kids began to engage with ideas and dreams beyond their town....

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.

After more than thirty years in the classroom, award-winning teacher Phillip Done decided that it was time to retire. But a teacher’s job is never truly finished, and he set out to write the greatest lesson of his career: a book for educators and parents that would pass along everything he learned about working with kids. From the first-day-of-school jitters to the last day’s tears, Done writes about the teacher’s craft, classrooms and curriculums, the challenges of the profession, and the reason all teachers do it—the children.

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.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

Tony Wagner is an eminent education specialist: He has taught at every grade level from high school through graduate school; worked at Harvard; done significant work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and speaks across the country and all over the world. But before he found his success, Wagner was kicked out of middle school, expelled from high school, and dropped out of two colleges. Learning by Heart is his powerful account of his years as a student and teacher.

Vince Copley was born on a government mission into poverty in 1936. By the time he was 15, five of his family had died. But at a home for Aboriginal boys, he befriended future leaders Charlie Perkins, John Moriarty and Gordon Briscoe. They were friendships that would last a lifetime. In The Wonder of Little Things, Copley tells his story with humour, humility and wisdom. Written with his friend Lea McInerney over many cups of tea, it is an Australian classic in the making, a plain-speaking account of hardship, courage and optimism told without self-pity or big-noting.

Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, All Day recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and an actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths.

August, 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne. In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust choked, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he’s been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a clever lad - gifted at maths and languages - and for a time he hoped for a different life. Many hoped.

As a historian Asa Briggs was a pioneer, who ventured into previously unexplored areas of study: labour history, urban history, local history, northern history, the history of cities, the history of the book, the history of communications, and so on. He seemed interested in everything; no detail was too trivial, no subject tedious; they were all “fascinating”. His main field of study was Victorian history, a field which he helped to establish and cultivate. This is his life story, told for the first time.

This book is about the personal odyssey of becoming a dancer, teacher, and educator. With a few biographical elements, it represents a lifelong reflection of transformations from the innate gift to the fulfillment as an artist with the focus on self-education. As an artist, I take on a cosmopolitan approach to art by dissolving stigmas, national identities, borders, and walls from my experiences of the Soviet Union in the Cold War Era, through Canadian immigration, Danish society, and finally the American emergence, all through the eyes of a ballet teacher and artist.

In 1960, six years before Marty Ross-Dolen was born, her maternal grandparents were killed in an airline disaster involving the collision of two commercial jets over New York City. They were traveling from Columbus, Ohio, to seek placement for their family’s iconic magazine, Highlights for Children, on the newsstands. Their daughter—Marty’s mother—was fourteen years old at the time. This genre-bending memoir tells Marty’s story of being raised by a mother in protracted mourning.

The Criminal Class is based on the true-life experiences of an everyday teacher who makes the precarious career transition to an Education Officer in the prison system. Dealing with both the law enforcers and the law breakers, but not bound by any normal allegiances, he finds himself having to thread the rocky path of an outsider on the inside.

Ever wondered what it’s like to be a supply teacher? This is the book for you! Artist and illustrator Guy Newmountain, a time-served teacher at the chalk-face for 25 years and a familiar sight to thousands of pupils across the spectrum from nursery to sixth form, tells a succession of school-related anecdotes with a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour. Some are hysterically funny and a few sad; others heart-stopping and deadly serious…