Showing titles in Educators

From the autumn harvest festival to the summer sports day, the academic year is a non-stop frenzy of planning, preparation and potential chaos, whichever side of the school gates you find yourself. But now Britain’s best-loved teachers and podcast hosts Lee and Adam Parkinson are here to make it all that little bit easier as they share the hilarious trials, tribulations and tomfoolery going on inside our primary schools.

Here is the gritty, powerful story of Thomas Sowell's life-long education in the school of hard knocks, a journey that took him from Harlem to the Marines, the Ivy League, and a career as a controversial writer, teacher, and economist in government and private industry. It is also the story of the dramatically changing times in which this personal odyssey took place.

At 22, Dan Brown came to the Bronx's P.S. 85 as an eager, fresh-faced teacher. Unbeknownst to him, his assigned class, 4-217, was the designated "dumping ground" for all fourth-grade problem cases, and his students would prove to be more challenging than he could ever anticipate. Intent on being a caring, dedicated teacher but confronted with unruly children, absent parents, and a failing administration, Dan was pushed to the limit time and again: he found himself screaming with rage, punching his fist through a blackboard out of sheer frustration, often just wanting to give up and walk away.

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.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.

In 1202, a 32-year-old Italian finished one of the most influential books of all time, which introduced modern arithmetic to Western Europe. Devised in India in the 7th and 8th centuries and brought to North Africa by Muslim traders, the Hindu-Arabic system helped transform the West into the dominant force in science, technology, and commerce, leaving behind Muslim cultures which had long known it but had failed to see its potential.

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.

You're in at 7 a.m.; there until 7 p.m. and marking into the late hours. You've got one student who's a full-time carer, another who's pregnant and a third who's just joined a gang. You haven't got enough textbooks to go around, and one of the parents just called you an 'extremist'. You've just gone through a devastating heartbreak, and you have to teach Romeo and Juliet to 30 hormonal 14-year-olds. Welcome to life as a teacher.

In The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband, who was just 50. Reflecting with gratitude on the exquisite beauty of her married life that was, grappling with the subsequent void, and feeling a reenergized devotion to her two teenage sons, Alexander channels her poetic sensibilities into a rich, lucid prose that describes a very personal and yet universal quest for meaning, understanding, and acceptance.

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.

Paper Belt on Fire is the unlikely account of how two outsiders with no experience in finance—a charter school principal and defrocked philosopher—start a venture capital fund to short the higher education bubble. Against the contempt of the education establishment, they discover, mentor, and back the leading lights in the next generation of dropout innovators and in the end make their investors millions. Can such a madcap strategy help renew American creativity? This story is the behind-the-scenes romp of one team that threw educational authorities into a panic.

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.

Over 20 years ago, the students in first-year teacher Erin Gruwell’s high school class in Long Beach, California, were labeled “unteachable” - but she saw past that. Instead of treating them as scores on a test, she understood that each of them had a unique story to tell. Inspired by books like Anne Frank’s diary, her students began writing their own diaries, eventually dubbing themselves the Freedom Writers. Together, they co-authored The Freedom Writers Diary, which launched a movement that remains incredibly relevant and impactful today.

I started making a list in my diary entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About”. Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran". I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined. - From Things I Have Been Silent About.

Nick Smith charts his journey from trainee teacher through to inspiring head across his near thirty-year career, with fascinating insights into the educational system along the way. The catalogue of incidents ranges from the embarrassing to the ridiculous, hilarious to the heart-breaking, and together they illustrate the daily grind of life at the whiteboard face in UK schools. Head Trauma is more than an amusing look at the trials of teacherdom—it's a call to arms for parents, teachers and pupils alike.

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.

In this book I express my feelings I had during my teenage years as a teen with autism. Watching other kids go through puberty and begin interacting with the opposite sex in different ways than I knew or understood was very frustrating. It is my goal that this book helps you prepare other children for the teenagers years and puberty. Puberty is tough to deal with for anyone. Throwing Autism into the mix only made things more confusing. I needed more clarity on what was going on with my body. I sought out answers on my own because no one talked to me about it in ways I understood.

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.

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.

In The Assistant Principal 50, award-winning, four-time principal Baruti Kafele presents reflective questions that encompass the breadth and depth of the assistant principalship—from finding your leadership lane to thriving and being an asset to your principal.