Thoughtful and entertaining tales of how students influenced and changed one teacher’s perspective on life.
How a teacher learned to live a better life through interaction with her students.
Co-founder, executive director and language arts teacher for the Ron Clark Academy, Bearden shares the important life lessons she learned from teaching for three decades. Grouped into 17 categories—including tenacity, bonding, generosity, creativity and love, the author brings readers into her classroom and into the lives of the students she taught, using real-life examples to deliver the overarching message that adults often have as much to learn from their students as vice versa. Having designed the academy to emphasize "passion, creativity, and rigor in the classroom," where "the halls are filled with the sounds of the students' happiness—the music of laughing, singing, hands clapping, and drums beating in celebration," Bearden's stories are full of the magic and playfulness that can occur when a teacher strives to connect with each individual pupil. She transformed her classroom into a Chinese restaurant to teach students about gerunds, had her scholars become Grammar Police and hand out citations for comma splices, run-on sentences and faulty parallelism, and built an entire lesson centered on fishing, just so one particular student would be engaged. Humorous and sensitive, Bearden's narratives bring to life the many issues inherent in public school teaching—e.g., how to engage and interact with students who come from broken homes, who feel invisible, who are shy or who believe that they are worthless. Thousands of superintendents, administrators and teachers have visited the academy to learn these techniques, and Bearden provides helpful "class notes," which summarize each lesson, and "homework" so parents and teachers can use the lessons she learned in their own situations.
Thoughtful and entertaining tales of how students influenced and changed one teacher’s perspective on life.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8770-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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