Craig A. Nevitt

You have likely heard the adage, "Everyone makes mistakes." But what you might not have heard is that there are some predictable reasons why we make these mistakes. Knowing why we make mistakes can help us make fewer mistakes and ensure that when we do make mistakes they’ll be more of the more useful variety. In Risk. Fail. Rise. teachers will learn how to address their own teaching mistakes, model with their own mistake-making, and improve their response to others' mistakes.

It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson—college professor, stalled writer—has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn’t seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s re-appeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart.