School Memoirs

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Nancy Tuckerman were friends over seven decades. Nancy almost never talked to people writing books about Jackie. She made an exception for me because I was working with her former colleagues. She and I met for the first time at the Red Lion Inn on a cold day in February. She was wearing a plain brown sweater and hiding behind a newspaper. At first she was stiff with me. But at lunch the young waiter poured her a cold cup of coffee. When he stepped away, we both laughed. That was how we began a friendlier and franker conversation that lasted 10 years.

Phil Chalmers has spent more than a decade visiting high security prisons to interview young offenders, his mission is to attempt to answer the questions we all are asking. In Inside the Mind of a Teen Killer, Phil explores the reasons why teens kill; the warning signs we must be looking for; and offers a game plan to keep our homes, schools, and communities safe. This book may help save your life or the life of a child you love!

From the backyard hockey rink to the nail-biting suspense of draft days, Karl Subban shares tales of his family's unique hockey journey. Mixing personal stories with lessons he learned as a coach and principal - lessons about goal setting, perseverance, and accomplishment - How We Did It will allow other parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors to apply the same principles as they help the young people in their lives to identify, develop, and live their dreams.

In The Jump, one of America's great sports writers follows high school phenom Sebastian Telfair on his quest for NBA stardom - and exposes all that big-time sports in America has become, the good and the bad. Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James - all became NBA superstars without playing a day of college ball. In 2004, Coney Island's 5-foot-11 Telfair became the first small player ever to jump straight from high school to the NBA when he signed contracts with the Portland Trail Blazers and Adidas worth $25 million.

In 1933, as Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger hatched a daring and courageous plan: to smuggle her entire school out of Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler's hate-fuelled ideologies posed to her pupils. She knew that to protect them she had to get her pupils to the safety of England. But the safe haven that Anna struggled to create in a rundown manor house in Kent would test her to the limit.

From day one at Newbury Park High School, Brosnan made a promise: Give me your total commitment and I’ll give you a state championship in four years. He did them one better: Brosnan’s runners would take an unprecedented three consecutive national championships, smashing records, winning Division I scholarships, and representing their country in the Olympics. With expert insights and a deep love for the sport, Sean Brosnan’s Beyond Fast offers a riveting chronicle of that journey.

This is a story about my fourteenth year of life as a gay kid at an all-boys rugby-mad Catholic school in regional Queensland. It was a year in which I started to discover who I was, and deeply hated what was revealed. It was a year in which I had my first crush and first devastating heartbreak. It was a year of torment, bullying and betrayal - not just at the hands of my peers, but by adults who were meant to protect me.

Far from being a self-eulogising chronicle, K. Vasuki’s The School of Life is a blazingly honest account of her evolution from “an imperfect human into, not a perfect human, but a better version of herself.” Steadfast in her insistence that she is not positing any definitive, universally applicable solutions to the troubles of life, she offers us a glimpse into her inspiring life and career in the Indian Administrative Service, demanding throughout that we “keep questioning everything” she says. Unassuming as she is, she even downplays her monumental role in coordinating the ...

Shannon Reed did not want to be a teacher, but now, after twenty years of working with children from preschool to college, there’s nothing she’d rather be. “With an irresistible combination of compassion, humor, and engaged storytelling” (Shelf Awareness), her essays illuminate the highs and lows of a job located at the intersection of youth and wisdom.

Fred Sasakamoose, torn from his home at the age of seven, endured the horrors of residential school for a decade before becoming one of 120 players in the most elite hockey league in the world. He has been heralded as the first Indigenous player with Treaty status in the NHL. After twelve games, he returned home. When people tell Sasakamoose's story, this is usually where they end it. Sasakamoose's groundbreaking memoir sheds piercing light on Canadian history and Indigenous politics, and follows this man's journey to reclaim pride in a heritage that had been used against him.

This is the story of one woman's journey to find herself. Armed with nothing but a love of food and the words of the 20th-century food writer M.F.K. Fisher, she travels from France to Italy, then the Congo, and back again. Along the way, she goes to pastry school in Paris, eats the most perfect apricots over the Tuscan hills, watches a family of gorillas grazing deep in the Congolese brush, has her heart broken one last time on a bridge in Lyon, and, ultimately, finds a path to life and joy.

Jonathan Starr is not your traditional do-gooder, and in 2009, when he decided to found Abaarso, a secondary school in Somaliland, the choice seemed crazy to even his closest friends. Why, they wondered, would he turn down a life of relative luxury to relocate to an armed compound in a breakaway region of the world's number one failed state? To achieve his mission, Starr would have to overcome profound cultural differences, broken promises, and threats to his safety and that of his staff.

John Amos Comenius, a 17th-century theologian and reformer, had so great an influence on Western schooling that he has been called the father of modern education. To this day he remains one of the most influential and fascinating thinkers in the history of education. In this concise introduction to the work of Comenius, Dr. David Smith sketches some of Comenius's central ideas, pointing to several important themes that summarize Comenius's tireless work for educational reform. Listeners will discover that amongst the literally hundreds of works Comenius wrote in Czech and Latin, many of which are lost to us today, he created one of the world's most successful children's books; suggested that learning should resemble gardening; and proposed that joy, piety, and harmony are central to the education of children.

Brendan James Murray has been a secondary school teacher for more than 10 years. In that time, he has seen hundreds of kids move through his classes - troubled, brilliant, funny, passionate, struggling: every single one brings unique qualities or circumstances into school with them, every day. In this astonishing powerful portrait of a single school year, Brendan James Murray shows the ups and downs of school for teachers and students.

Welcome to “Horror Day” High School.Meet the Class of ‘67: it’s a typical teenage crowd—with a European, 7’0, 110-lb. albino “vampire” who sucks the juice out of oranges through a straw, a hairy wolf-boy who howls over tests, the Hulk-in-football pads, a pink lollipop-Valentine girl, a Brainiac, a Halloween Goth-witch, a Christmas surfer girl, and a guy with green skin—and hair. It’s really “Holiday High School” in Las Vegas. These are the memoirs of “the Dirt Devils,” the weird-and-wild-ones who “did it their way” enroute to graduation before the fame, ...

Lillian Lincoln Lambert rose from humble beginnings as a poor farm girl in the segregated South to become the first Black woman to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School and, later, the founder of a $20 million maintenance company with 1,200 employees. In The Road to Someplace Better, she shares an inspiring personal journey that took her from dead-end jobs in New York City and Washington, D.C., to the ivory tower and the world of entrepreneurship.

Every day when Dr. Carson went to work as a surgeon, he had to make life-and-death decisions. For that reason, and because so many of the people and families he worked with had suddenly been forced to reconsider what's really important in life, he's spent a lot of his own time searching for perspective.

This story is set in Melbourne, Australia's second largest city. The population was about half of of the 5 million it is now. It was before the days of desktop computers, Internet and mobile phones. Televisions were black and white, there were plenty of Holdens and Volkswagen beetles on the road and some milk deliveries were still done by horse and cart. It is based on my school experiences. There is drama, humour, quirkiness, strange stories and surprises. And the amazing thing to remember is that they come from the memory of real experiences. The saying truth is stranger than fiction ...

Growing up and living in Kibera, Kenya, Abdul Kassim was well aware of the disproportionate number of challenges faced by women due to the extreme gender inequalities that persist in the slums. After being raised by his aunts, his mother, and his grandmother, and having a daughter himself, he felt that he needed to make a difference. In 2002, Abdul started a soccer team for girls called Girls Soccer in Kibera (GSK), with the hope of fostering a supportive community and providing emotional and mental support for the young women in the town.

Cameron: "Deep inside, you know that whoever gets up in your face gets there because he knows you're nothing, and he knows that you know it too."