Showing titles in Educators

Christina Asquith presents a moving firsthand account of her year teaching in one of Philadelphia’s worst schools. Told with striking humor and honesty, her story begins when the School District of Philadelphia, in desperate need of 1,500 new teachers, instituted a policy of hiring "emergency certified" instructors. Asquith, then a 25-year-old reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined their untrained ranks. More challenging than her classroom in the crime-infested neighborhood known as "the Badlands" are the trials she faced outside.

In 1952, Beryl Gilroy moved from British Guiana to London. Her new life wasn't what she had expected - but her belief in the power of education resulted in a revolutionary career. Inspiring and unflinching, Gilroy's memoir Black Teacher is a rediscovered classic: not only a rare firsthand insight into the Windrush generation but a testament to how one extraordinary woman's dignity, ambition and spirit transcended her era.

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....

Growing up and living in Kibera, Kenya, Abdul Kassim was well aware of the disproportionate number of challenges faced by women due to the extreme gender inequalities that persist in the slums. After being raised by his aunts, his mother, and his grandmother, and having a daughter himself, he felt that he needed to make a difference. In 2002, Abdul started a soccer team for girls called Girls Soccer in Kibera (GSK), with the hope of fostering a supportive community and providing emotional and mental support for the young women in the town.

Teaching is among the most admirable professions. However, today’s teachers face unprecedented challenges – from limited funding to book banning. In classrooms across the world, teachers demonstrate resilience and ingenuity as they dedicate their lives to improving those of future generations. Featuring a range of first-hand accounts, James Patterson explores the creative and noble work of teachers across America.

Before Jeffrey Boakye was a Black teacher, he was a Black student. Which means he has spent a lifetime navigating places of learning that are white by default. Since training to teach, he has often been the only Black teacher at school. At times seen as a role model, at others a source of curiosity, Boakye’s is a journey of exploration—from the outside looking in. In the groundbreaking I Heard What You Said, he recounts how it feels to be on the margins of the British education system.

A dramatic and remarkable narrative of an extraordinary teacher's determination, from the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers The Tiger's Child and One Child. Torey Hayden faced six emotionally troubled kids no other teacher could handle - three recent arrivals from battle-torn Northern Ireland, badly traumatized by the horrors of war; an eleven-year-old boy, who only knew life inside an institution; an excitable girl, aggressive and sexually precocious at the age of eight; and seven-year-old Leslie, perhaps the most hopeless of all, unresponsive and unable to speak.

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.

Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school's headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near end of a skein of magnanimous despots who...created enduring schools through their own individual energies, maintained them under their own absolute rule, and left them forever imprinted with their own personalities."

The journey of an entrepreneurial Orthodox Jewish American-Israeli woman who founded an educational organization and ran an inner-city charter school. Nicki Salfer built a business working with special-needs children while overcoming personal struggle, and explains her amazing story in a fresh and relatable memoir.

Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery - in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms - continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.

The Simple Faith of Mr. Rogers focuses on Mr. Rogers' spiritual legacy, but it is much more than that. It shows us a man who, to paraphrase the words of St. Francis of Assisi, "preached the gospel at all times; when necessary he used words".

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.

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.

They were called the Class from Hell - 34 inner-city sophomores she inherited from a teacher who'd been "pushed over the edge". She was told "those kids have tasted blood. They're dangerous." But Louanne Johnson had a different idea. Where the school system saw 34 unreachable kids, she saw young men and women with intelligence and dreams.

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its first Assessment Report. By then, award-winning urban planner Wendy Sarkissian had been singing the climate blues for years. Her colleagues dismiss her fears, so she abandons urban life for a solitary retreat to reconsider her professional and activist directions. With no bush skills, this terrified novice confronts many challenges during her harsh, year-long adventure in the Australian outback. As weeks pass, however, she discovers wellsprings of courage.

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman—as Virginia Woolf suggested when, in A Room of One's Own, she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens. This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image.

Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.

In The Power of a Plant, globally acclaimed teacher and self-proclaimed CEO (Chief Eternal Optimist) Stephen Ritz shows you how, in one of the nation's poorest communities, his students thrive in school and in life by growing, cooking, eating, and sharing the bounty of their green classroom.

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.