Educators Books

Although this is a children's book, this is a great book for people of all ages. It shows how there is no one insignificant in this world and that everyone has a purpose. As Patches reflects on the accomplishments of his variety of animal friends, he wonders about his purpose. Katie reminds him of how very special he is. It is one of those encouraging stories that one never tires of hearing and can be read over and over. A child will be entertained, and those who are older will be reminded of how valuable they are and that they do have a purpose. It is also beautifully illustrated. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Pastors are often the first to hear about a variety of family issues. Over the years a number of families have shared their concerns over a son or daughter who is struggling in school. And when the problem is the system itself, it's hard to know where to turn for assistance and direction.

Dr. Jenkins offers insight and hope to parents in such circumstances. He explains how the systemn works and doesn't work for kids who are not performing well in school. And he offers families another model for seeking help.

I found the book to be extrememly helpful and encouraging.

Well, not really. Though we sometimes wish to return to childhood and have all its privileges, we forget about the difficulties children have to confront in their day-to-day life. And they are as stressing to children as our problems are to us.

Korczak is a man who understood and loved children till his death (for more information about his life, read my review on Ghetto Diary). In this book he alerts adults to children's lack of power when confronting the world. How to deal with day-to-day fears, novelties, anxieties, and oppressing teachers?

The book reminds me of a famous quote by Pablo Picasso: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." It is our responsibility to let children grow up in a healthy creative environment, and this can be done only by respecting and understanding children's feelings. This is what this book teaches us.

I picked this off a bookstore shelf a couple of weeks ago, and I'm VERY glad I did. "When Things Get Back to Normal" is a small-sized paperback, consisting of the journal the author kept for a year following her husband's unexpected death. It's not a book *about* death and grieving; it's a book (a striking, beautiful, gut-level one) that expresses how one person was *hit* by it, and how things looked through her eyes as she came to grips with what happened and eventually began to pick up her life again.

I (age 29) lost my mom (age 55) equally suddenly, thee months ago, and I've had a hard time finding a book that spoke to me on the level I needed. The grief "handbooks" weren't doing it for me; I was put off by eminently qualified counselors and academics softly reassuring me about the "normal" steps of grieving. I headed into my mourning with an open mind, receptive to whatever my heart and head wanted to give me, so their reassurances rang hollow. Nor were flowery and poetic books giving me what I needed. I just wanted to read something, in a person's real voice, that resonated with the way I felt -- cheated, desperate, wounded. I found it in this little gem.

This book is private, sometimes raw and painful, and other times intimate and adoring, even funny. The journal-entry format makes it perfect for bite-size reading (and if you've just lost a loved one you may only be able to handle one of these perfect, painful little bites at a time). It is clearly written not by a counselor, but by a wife longing for her husband, in real-time and in her own voice. Anyone who has lost an intimate relative will recognize the adoration and longing she feels for him, and probably the occasional anger and resentment too. I know I saw my relationship with my mom in dozens of places in this book. She misses his little quirks, re-lives their old times and re-visits their future plans, left meaningless without him to share them. She records the everyday shocks and little losses, the downs of personal torment and the gradual little ups of healing, the larger meanings and philosophical questions of life after losing a loved one.

In the Afterword, Dohaney, a writer by profession, explains that that notebook she wrote these pages in was a gift from a friend just after her husband's death. She started keeping the journal just for herself, and only several years later did friends in the business convince her to publish it. Probably *because* it wasn't written with the eventual book in mind, her writing is the best of the first-person accounts I've seen.

I've finished the book now, but I think I've only progressed in my own mourning about as far as her half-way point. I have a sense I'll be re-reading this again and again as I go, feeling familiarity with more and more of it each time. I don't yet identify with the end of the book, where she starts to feel ready to live the rest of her life without her husband. I'm still stuck on the pain of the loss (recent mourners can relate, I'm sure) and somehow it makes me nervous/uneasy to think I'll ever be "over" the loss to that degree. But I'm willing to go along for the ride because everything she's said so far has resonated so deeply for me.

From my perspective, this book should be on the reading list of anyone who has lost a lover, spouse, or close loved one.

This masterpiece is a thoughtful collection of Maida's letters, her evolution and inspirations that made her the success that she was...a ahead of her time.

Compiled and edited by Ana M. Martinez Aleman (Assistant Professor of Education in the Higher Education Program at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College) and Kristen A. Renn (Assistant Professor in the Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education Program at Michigan State University) , Women In Higher Education: An Encyclopedia is an impressive, 635-page social and historical survey women's colleges, female professors, demographic trends connected to race and gender in higher education, and much more. An exhaustively researched collection of essays by a wide variety of learned contributors, Women In Higher Education offers a solid baseline of information and facts from which to build a better future for women everywhere looking to pursue a degree. Organized into sections specifically addressing "Historical and Cultural Contexts"; "Gender Theory and the Academy"; "Feminism in the Academy"; "Women in Curriculum"; "Women and Higher Education Policy"; "Women Students"; "Women Faculty"; "Women Administrators"; and "Women Employees", Women In Higher Education is additionally enhanced with two appendices ("Women's Studies Research Resources" and "Colleges Identifying Themselves as Women's Colleges"); an extensive bibliography, and a comprehensive index. Women In Higher Education is an essential, seminal, indispensable contribution to both Education Studies and Women's Studies reference collections.

The scholar-teachers who provide their personal narratives in this collection describe their struggles to overcome against obstacles in society and in the bureaucracy that is higher education. Issues such as racism and sexism are addressed in ways that are usually not discussed, for example, racism as evidenced in student evaluations and sexism evidenced in addressing female faculty who have Ph.D.'s as Miss and Mrs. These stories are both dark and uplifting, showing remarking resilience in showing how women who believe in themselves and in the importance of sharing their insights with students can get beyond the European American standards to enrich higher education and their communities with their contributions.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, the field of feminist composition began to expand rapidly as women writers and teachers explored the possibilities of autobiographical literary criticism and the relationship between feminist theory, gender studies, and writing pedagogy. Numerous books appeared concerning these subjects including The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism, a collaborative work by Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphey Zauhar; Cynthia L. Caywood's and Gillian R. Overing's Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity; and Feminine Principles and Women's Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric, written by Janet Emig and Louise Wetherbee Phelps. In reaction and response to the issues raised in these works, Women / Writing / Teaching, using a new approach-that of autobiographical writing-enters the conversation concerning feminist pedagogical practices. This style of delivery, as editor Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, Professor of English and Coordinator of the Composition Program at the State University of New York, New Paltz, indicates "prompts us to lay 'claim' to our lives (to use Patricia Hampi's term); to connect past and present; to reflect on and to re-envision our experiences; and to authorize and to shape our complex identities as feminist writing teachers" (3).

As a woman, a writer, a first year composition teacher, and a feminist, I approached Women / Writing / Teaching with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Used to the sterile, proscribed language of English academia, I expected, from both the book's title and its classification under feminist theory, to delve into a dense, untenable mass of postmodern jargon; however, I discovered a wonderfully rich, full-bodied collection of autobiographical essays that explore the complexity of women's lives and their multiple identities as wives, daughters, mothers, writers, women, teachers, and professionals as well as their development of authority. The poignant and at times heart-wrenching personal narratives, written by some of the most prominent researchers and authors within the field of feminist composition studies (such as Lynn Z. Bloom, Ann V. Dean, Min-Zhan Lu, Adrienne Rich, and Nancy Sommers), forced me to examine not only my own various roles but also my own sense of voice. Coached (and coerced) by the academy to write according to a particular standard of style and delivery, I was first shocked and then liberated by the use of the personal "I"; however, upon reflection, I realized, with some measure of sorrow, that I had no idea how to even begin to express my own sense of self, which effectively had been erased from my writing. As I continued to read the essays in Women / Writing / Teaching and simultaneously to explore my own feelings toward the construction of my multiple identities and their influence on my writing and teaching styles, I found a new sense of purpose, a desire to emulate the vision of feminist composition pedagogy illustrated within these narratives.

Heralded by Marilyn Shapiro for its expression of "true love and excitement about the teaching of writing," Women / Writing / Teaching explores the ways in which women teachers forge connections between themselves and their students, between the private and public spheres, between the personal and academic, between the classroom and the world outside, and finally among past, present, and future. In addition, this collection of essays addresses numerous issues of growing concern among female scholars in the field of composition studies and includes a comprehensive bibliography dedicated to the study of feminist composition and autobiographical writing. In addition, despite the absence of an index, the text, divided into three sections entitled "Silence and Words, "Authority and Authorship," and "Visions of Embodied Teaching," respectively, is accessible and easy to navigate.

Directed toward women writers and instructors of writing, the collection presents a feminist vision of writing instruction that incorporates the past and present experiences of female writers and encourages the inclusion of their multiple identities as women, as teachers, as writers, as members of specific classes and ethnicities, and as participants in particular cultures. By crossing the boundaries of these identities and by intertwining the elements of writing and teaching, the authors in this anthology introduce a pedagogical approach that recognizes, as Schmidt indicates in the introduction to the work, the "need to merge autobiographical reflection, contemplations of the writing life, and critical examination of our pedagogical practices in order to more fully comprehend our complex lives and struggles as feminist writing teachers in the academy" (3). These essays advocate a breaking of the silence, the emergence from decades of female oppression in an effort to establish women as figures of power and authority within the professions of writing and writing instruction.

The moving self explorations, the incredible stories of suppression and subjugation, the empowering narratives of female success and authoritative identity development interwoven with humor, grief, pain, and exhilaration illuminate the essential power that women have to create and re-create themselves within their writing and their classrooms. In addition, these personal narratives illustrate the ways in which the diversity of individuals and their experiences can enhance the writing process and bring new vision to their students. Thus, the power of Women / Writing / Teaching lies in its ability to stimulate personal exploration and growth, an experience that no female writer or teacher should miss.

Thank you for several things - thanks for the clear picture of the cover of the book. It allowed me to make sure I was purchasing the right edition, as the teacher was very specific about which one to buy. Thank you also for the competitive price and the quick shiping.

We homeschool. It's great for what it is: a relatively inexpensive, exercise-based vocabulary-building workbook. It is not a spelling book. It's a lot of bang for the buck, and I must say I'm happy enough that I'm not looking for any more bang. My 4th grader can do it with relative ease and occasional challenges, and her vocab words creep into her daily life. I imagine it would be a great supplement for a kid in school because it's very focused and not a huge commitment time-wise. We are Christians, and I have never been offended by their reading selections (I believe all of them are non-fiction) or their sentences or their word usage. Completely satisfied.