Showing titles in Educators

This audiobook is about what it is like to grow up with Aspergers Syndrome and not knowing it until you are 17. I talk about all the ups and downs that have happened in my life. All the problems in school, with bullies, and trying to find my way in a world that is not designed for people on the spectrum. You will get to hear in my words everything that has happened to me. From my first memories, to being hospitalized, to getting a job, and having a girlfriend.

Hailed by Oprah as a "warrior woman for our times", reviled by teachers unions as the enemy, Michelle Rhee, outgoing chancellor of Washington DC, public schools, has become the controversial face of school reform. She has appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and is currently featured as a hero in the documentary Waiting for Superman. This is the story of her journey from good-girl daughter of Korean immigrants to tough-minded political game-changer.

This beautifully written biography charts the life of Dr. Cynthia J. MacKay, a wife, a mother, a surgeon, and a lifelong activist campaigning against the cruel, painful, damaging invasive corrective eye surgery LASIK. It is written with modesty. It is engaging, witty, and sometimes painful to listen to as it describes the discrimination, smear campaigns, and brutal conduct of her peers and others who have tried to ruin her in their own act of self-preservation. Cynthia battles through it all, with dignity, determination, and an abundance of wit, humor and humility.

Growing up, Reid was confused and disturbed by the different opportunities his best friend received. The gap widened as Reid's classes enabled him to pursue an elite college degree across the country studying educational opportunity and teaching. Then, Reid became a teacher at an under-resourced South Carolina high school where efforts to serve the incredible students were stymied by internal segregation and administrative ambivalence. After Reid assigned students a project to create a positive change, they pushed him to figure out how he, too, could make a bigger difference.

This is the extraordinary, behind-the-scenes tale of how Woodstock went from a pipe dream to the most iconic rock concert of all time. Elliot Tiber, then known as Eliyahu Teichberg, was a budding painter in the 1960s. He also happened to be head of his local chamber of commerce - and owner of the yearly permit to hold summer music concerts. The rest, as they say, is history.

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.

In 1967, when Jo Ivester was 10 years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of a clinic that served the poor population for miles around. But ultimately it was not Ivester’s father but her mother - a stay-at-home mother of four who became a high school English teacher when the family moved to the South - who made the most enduring mark on the town.

To glimpse America’s future, one needs to look no further than its college campuses. Of those institutions, none holds more clout than Yale University, the hallowed “cradle of presidents”. In Sex and God at Yale, recent graduate Nathan Harden undresses perversity among the Ivy and ideology gone wild as the upper echelon of academia is mired in nothing less than a full-fledged moral crisis.

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.

Still Waters in a Storm is an after-school program held in a small room in Bushwick, Brooklyn; it is a place for kids to practice reading and writing in English, Spanish, and Latin. For the students, many living in constant fear of deportation, Still Waters is a refuge. For Stephen Haff, a former public-school teacher, it is the sanctuary he built following a breakdown caused by bipolar depression. At Still Waters, all agreed that there would only be one rule: “Everyone listens to everyone.” And this has unlocked spectacular potential.

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled "verbal terrorist", who began trying, in her words, to "ruin him". Hate mail, online postings, and public accusations of plagiarism and sexual misconduct were her weapons of choice, and as with more conventional terrorist weapons, proved remarkably difficult to combat.

Christy Engel Wilson began her educational journey working in youth camps and has since taught every grade from kindergarten to eighth. Her 25 years of work in professional development, student management, and instruction with English Language Learners has helped establish her as a primary advocate for high-risk students and school leaders promoting equity and restorative justice.

After escaping war-torn France, where 18 members of her family were murdered in the Holocaust, Gisèle Huff arrived in the US with her mother. It was 1947, and they had $400 to their name. Gisèle quickly found her footing in America, eventually earning a PhD at Columbia University, running for Congress, and launching a spectacular career in K–12 education.

Speaking My Soul is the honest story of linguist John R. Rickford's life from his early years as the youngest of ten children in Guyana to his status as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, of the transformation of his identity from colored or mixed race in Guyana to black in the USA, and of his work championing Black Talk and its speakers. In this engaging memoir, Rickford recalls landmark events for his racial identity.

From a document in storage, passed down through the family, this story tells about the life of the early Michigan pioneer who, as Treasurer of Hillsdale College, lived through a very important era.

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.

Frederick Stewart, born in Buchan, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, was the first headmaster of the Hong Kong Government Central School for Boys (now Queen's College) and second inspector of schools. His consistent policy was to educate pupils in Western knowledge while preserving their Chinese identity, and he insisted on equal time for Chinese and English studies. By the end of his life, Stewart’s intimate knowledge of Hong Kong was considered unequaled among non-Chinese in Hong Kong at the 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.

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.

Over her twenty-five-year career, English teacher Carol Atherton has taught generations of students texts that will be familiar to many of us from our own schooldays. But while the staples of exam syllabuses and reading lists remain largely unchanged, their significance – and their relevance - evolves with each class as they encounter them for the first time. Each chapter of Reading Lessons invites us to take a fresh look at these novels, plays and poems, revealing how they have shaped our beliefs, our values, and how we interact as a society.