The Battle for Room 314

The Battle for Room 314 PDF Author: Ed Boland
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 145556060X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
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 idealism, Ed Boland left a twenty-year career as a non-profit executive to teach in a tough New York City public high school. But his hopes quickly collided headlong with the appalling reality of his students' lives and a hobbled education system unable to help them. Freddy runs a drug ring for his incarcerated brother; Nee-cole is homeschooled on the subway by her brilliant homeless mother; Byron's Ivy League dream is dashed because he is undocumented. In the end, Boland isn't hoisted on his students' shoulders and no one passes AP anything. This is no urban fairy tale of at-risk kids saved by a Hollywood hero, but a searing indictment of schools that claim to be progressive but still fail their students. Told with compassion, humor, and a keen eye, Boland's story is sure to ignite debate about the future of American education and attempts to reform it.

The Battle for Room 314

The Battle for Room 314 PDF Author: Ed Boland
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 145556060X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 idealism, Ed Boland left a twenty-year career as a non-profit executive to teach in a tough New York City public high school. But his hopes quickly collided headlong with the appalling reality of his students' lives and a hobbled education system unable to help them. Freddy runs a drug ring for his incarcerated brother; Nee-cole is homeschooled on the subway by her brilliant homeless mother; Byron's Ivy League dream is dashed because he is undocumented. In the end, Boland isn't hoisted on his students' shoulders and no one passes AP anything. This is no urban fairy tale of at-risk kids saved by a Hollywood hero, but a searing indictment of schools that claim to be progressive but still fail their students. Told with compassion, humor, and a keen eye, Boland's story is sure to ignite debate about the future of American education and attempts to reform it.

Memoirs of a Shop Teacher (Color Version)

Memoirs of a Shop Teacher (Color Version) PDF Author: Stanley Sipka
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 9781982253004
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The book is about me and my interaction with students, faculty, and everyone else. I want to move through my life from birth to the present. The 85 years of life have been eventful, and I am grateful for those who helped me arrive at this point in life. I want to convey the events that guided me through my early years, grade, high school, Army, marriage, college, teaching, and retirement. Each day was a learning experience. The goal was to make teaching more rewarding to the students. Many assignments that are included were not present when I started in 1965. My work during the summers helped me understand the innovations - NC (numerical control), CNC (computer numerical control), EDM (electric discharge machining). That learning helped me convey that knowledge to the students. Included are jobs made by the students that were designed to provide similar experiences found in the machining industry. There are stories about students and teachers that filled my days as a teacher. Lastly, there are assignments a person can try. My only comment is, "don't do the last two because they are difficult." That was a favorite comment to get students to work the difficult problems.

Teacher Man

Teacher Man PDF Author: Frank McCourt
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743243773
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Teacher Man" shows McCourt developing his ability to tell a great story as, five days a week, five periods per day, he works to gain the attention and respect of unruly, hormonally charged or indifferent adolescents.

Colors of the Mountain

Colors of the Mountain PDF Author: Da Chen
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1400075947
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
"I was born in southern China in 1962, in the tiny town of Yellow Stone. They called it the Year of Great Starvation." In 1962, as millions of Chinese citizens were gripped by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards enforced a brutal regime of communism, a boy was born to a poor family in southern China. This family—the Chens—had once been respected landlords in the village of Yellow Stone, but now they were among the least fortunate families in the country, despised for their "capitalist" past. Grandpa Chen couldn't leave the house for fear of being beaten to death; the children were spit upon in the street; and their father was regularly hauled off to labor camps, leaving the family of eight without a breadwinner. Da Chen, the youngest child, seemed destined for a life of poverty, shame, and hunger. But winning humor and an indomitable spirit can be found in the most unexpected places. Colors of the Mountain is a story of triumph, a memoir of a boyhood full of spunk, mischief, and love. The young Da Chen is part Horatio Alger, part Holden Caul-field; he befriends a gang of young hoodlums as well as the elegant, elderly Chinese Baptist woman who teaches him English and opens the door to a new life. Chen's remarkable story is full of unforgettable scenes of rural Chinese life: feasting on oysters and fried peanuts on New Year's Day, studying alongside classmates who wear red armbands and quote Mao, and playing and working in the peaceful rice fields near his village. Da Chen's story is both captivating and endearing, filled with the universal human quality that distinguishes the very best memoirs. It proves once again that the concerns of childhood transcend time and place.

The Home Place

The Home Place PDF Author: J. Drew Lanham
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571318755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

The Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months

The Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months PDF Author: Susan Paul
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674002371
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Contains primary source material.

The Ultimate Teacher Appreciation Gift Book

The Ultimate Teacher Appreciation Gift Book PDF Author:
Publisher: Ulysses Press
ISBN: 1646040260
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
Give every amazing teacher a gift they’ll treasure forever with a book filled with fun prompts that kids can fill out, personalize, and color to say thank you for a wonderful school year. Every one-of-a-kind teacher deserves a one-of-a-kind gift! The Ultimate Teacher Appreciation Gift Book gives kids of all ages the chance to record memories from the school year, draw, color, and create unique appreciation pages. Kids can give their favorite teacher the entire book to show their gratitude or tear out the individual, perforated pages to include one or many with a special thank you gift. Inside, students are prompted to write notes and stories about what made their year so special, like: My favorite memory from this year was definitely. . . The funniest thing you said was. . . I will miss these three things most about our class. . . These are five things I’ll remember about you. . . You are such a special teacher because. . . For the holidays, end of school, Teacher Appreciation Week, or just because, give teachers a personalized book they can treasure forever and that tells them exactly what kind of difference they made in their students’ lives.

Little Failure

Little Failure PDF Author: Gary Shteyngart
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679643753
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The New Yorker • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • The Atlantic • Newsday • Salon • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • Esquire (UK) • GQ (UK) After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor wrote his first novel, Lenin and His Magical Goose, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page. In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler” on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly. As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being. Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world. Praise for Little Failure “Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”—The New York Times Book Review “A memoir for the ages . . . brilliant and unflinching.”—Mary Karr “Dazzling . . . a rich, nuanced memoir . . . It’s an immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is, unambivalently, a success.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR “Literary gold . . . bruisingly funny.”—Vogue “A giant success.”—Entertainment Weekly

WildFlowers

WildFlowers PDF Author: Judy Fitch
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 149181375X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
As a senior high school teacher, I fell in love with my students every single year. My stories will make you laugh, cry, and cringe at the reality of the lives of our wildflowers. Kids are kids, however, these kids needed me more than your average child of priviledge. Most parents love their children, however, a mother at the age of fourteen, I believe, cannot offer what a mother at the age of thirty can offer. For many, violence and poverty were their facts of life. Many came to school for food, hugs, love, and support. My priceless experiences in the 'slammer' proved to be the most rewarding of all. Each day I thought how the situations in which these kids found themselves, was more often than not, the result of faulty parenting. Growing up was not about T-ball, picnics, vacations, and college. Growing up for some wildflowers was all about survival. My career involved love, baby showers, funerals, talent shows, proms, and courtroom appearances. I believe everyone is given a gift. My gift was the uncanny ability to communicate with at-risk teenagers. I spoke their language. I understood that there were reasons, not excuses, for their problems. These wildflowers were born into this world just as sweet and innocent as every other child. Their surroundings dictated and directed their futures. For years, I went to bed worrying about them and I awoke wondering what would happen each and every day to my wildflowers. They loved me because I loved them. If reading my book helps just one teacher to help make a difference in just one wildflower's life, my promise to my father to write this book will have made it all worth while.

Fresh Off the Boat

Fresh Off the Boat PDF Author: Eddie Huang
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 067964489X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
NOW AN ORIGINAL SERIES ON ABC • “Just may be the best new comedy of [the year] . . . based on restaurateur Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same name . . . [a] classic fresh-out-of-water comedy.”—People “Bawdy and frequently hilarious . . . a surprisingly sophisticated memoir about race and assimilation in America . . . as much James Baldwin and Jay-Z as Amy Tan . . . rowdy [and] vital . . . It’s a book about fitting in by not fitting in at all.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS Assimilating ain’t easy. Eddie Huang was raised by a wild family of FOB (“fresh off the boat”) immigrants—his father a cocksure restaurateur with a dark past back in Taiwan, his mother a fierce protector and constant threat. Young Eddie tried his hand at everything mainstream America threw his way, from white Jesus to macaroni and cheese, but finally found his home as leader of a rainbow coalition of lost boys up to no good: skate punks, dealers, hip-hop junkies, and sneaker freaks. This is the story of a Chinese-American kid in a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac blazing his way through America’s deviant subcultures, trying to find himself, ten thousand miles from his legacy and anchored only by his conflicted love for his family and his passion for food. Funny, moving, and stylistically inventive, Fresh Off the Boat is more than a radical reimagining of the immigrant memoir—it’s the exhilarating story of every American outsider who finds his destiny in the margins. Praise for Fresh Off the Boat “Brash and funny . . . outrageous, courageous, moving, ironic and true.”—New York Times Book Review “Mercilessly funny and provocative, Fresh Off the Boat is also a serious piece of work. Eddie Huang is hunting nothing less than Big Game here. He does everything with style.”—Anthony Bourdain “Uproariously funny . . . emotionally honest.”—Chicago Tribune “Huang is a fearless raconteur. [His] writing is at once hilarious and provocative; his incisive wit pulls through like a perfect plate of dan dan noodles.”—Interview “Although writing a memoir is an audacious act for a thirty-year-old, it is not nearly as audacious as some of the things Huang did and survived even earlier. . . . Whatever he ends up doing, you can be sure it won’t look or sound like anything that’s come before. A single, kinetic passage from Fresh Off the Boat . . . is all you need to get that straight.”—Bookforum