Teachers Under Siege


Book Description

Tales from Sandfly is the experiences of Rusty Danforth, who comes to to start life over. "Adopted" by the locals of Sandfly, a nearby town where, while using the pub/city hall as his base, he becomes familiar with the "unique" lifestyle found only here. In chapters often funny, sometimes poignant, and almost always unusual he describes his new life. He meets the country songwriter who was abducted by aliens, the bartender and former gymnast who became an unwitting porn star, and the voodoo lady who split time between making baskets at the Piggly Wiggly and hexing people. He tells of customs and celebrations found only in Savannah, like the Tacky Light Tour, in which a trolley filled with "over served" tourists search for the most disgusting display of Christmas excess and have their pictures made for use as cards afterwards; Tybee's Beach Bum, the world's largest municipally sanctioned drunken water fight; and The Isle of Hope Patriot's Parade, which featured among others, a giant crab, midgets demanding union rates, and "The Scud Stud," astride an Iraqi rocket impacting into a bevy of "I Dream of Jeanie" look-alikes. Throughout, Danforth takes the reader along for misadventures, such as learning about dangers of drinking and karaoke by ending up in traction; being trapped under the bed of his best friend and wife on their wedding night; and the value of knowing interrogation resistance when arrested for dancing the tango in the street at three in the morning. The thread binding the chapters is the story of a man in a time of loss and uncertainty, who, through the help of good friends, a bit of luck, and maybe the help of the Lord, finds happiness and love that he never dreamed possible before coming to the small town of Sandlfy




Public Education Under Siege


Book Description

Public Education Under Siege argues for a democratic and egalitarian alternative to the test-driven, market-oriented core of current education reform. These short, jargon-free essays cover public policy, teacher unions, economic inequality, race, language diversity, parent involvement, and leadership.




Education under siege


Book Description

At a time when education is considered crucial to a country’s economic success, recent UK governments have insisted their reforms are the only way to make England’s system world class. Yet pupils are tested rather than educated, teachers bullied rather than trusted and parents cast as winners or losers in a gamble for school places. Education under siege considers the English education system as it is and as it might be. In a highly accessible style, Peter Mortimore, an author with wide experience of the education sector, both in the UK and abroad, identifies the current system’s strengths and weaknesses. He concludes that England has some of the best teachers in the world but one of the most muddled systems. Challenging the government’s view that there is no alternative, he proposes radical changes to help all schools become good schools. They include a system of schools receiving a fair balance of pupils who learn easily and those who do not, ensuring a more even spread of effective teachers, as well as banning league tables, outlawing selection, opening up faith schools and integrating private schools into the state system. In the final chapter, he asks readers who share his concerns to demand that the politicians alter course. The book will appeal to parents, education students and teachers, as well as everyone interested in the future education of our children.




Under Siege!


Book Description

Meet Lucy McRae and two other young people, Willie Lord and Frederick Grant, all survivors of the Civil War's Battle for Vicksburg. In 1863, Union troops intend to silence the cannons guarding the Mississippi River at Vicksburg – even if they have to take the city by siege. To hasten surrender, they are shelling Vicksburg night and day. Terrified townspeople, including Lucy and Willie, take shelter in caves – enduring heat, snakes, and near suffocation. On the Union side, twelve-year-old Frederick Grant has come to visit his father, General Ulysses S. Grant, only to find himself in the midst of battle, experiencing firsthand the horrors of war. "Living in a cave under the ground for six weeks . . . I do not think a child could have passed through what I did and have forgotten it." – Lucy McRae, age 10, 1863 Period photographs, engravings, and maps extend this dramatic story as award-winning author Andrea Warren re-creates one of the most important Civil War battles through the eyes of ordinary townspeople, officers and enlisted men from both sides, and, above all, three brave children who were there.




Childhood Under Siege


Book Description

Computer game designers craft techniques to titillate children with sex and violence, while social media developers infiltrate and shape children's social and emotional worlds to compel them to spend more and more monetizable time online. America's schools are being transformed into profit centers while children are subjected to increasingly regimented teaching that thwarts curiosity and creativity, numbing the joy of learning. And children's chronic health problems, from asthma to cancer, autism, and birth defects, steadily escalate as thousands of new industrial chemicals are dumped into their environments. Nelson Mandela once sagely remarked that "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way it treats its children." The problem today, as Joel Bakan reveals, is that business interests have made protecting children extremely difficult.




Local Democracy Under Siege


Book Description

2007 Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) Book Award Complete List of Authors:Dorothy Holland, Donald M. Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, and Enrique G. Murillo, Jr. What is the state of democracy at the turn of the twenty-first century? To answer this question, seven scholars lived for a year in five North Carolina communities. They observed public meetings of all sorts, had informal and formal interviews with people, and listened as people conversed with each other at bus stops and barbershops, soccer games and workplaces. Their collaborative ethnography allows us to understand how diverse members of a community not just the elite think about and experience “politics” in ways that include much more than merely voting. This book illustrates how the social and economic changes of the last three decades have made some new routes to active democratic participation possible while making others more difficult. Local Democracy Under Siege suggests how we can account for the current limitations of U.S. democracy and how remedies can be created that ensure more meaningful participation by a greater range of people. Complete List of Authors (pictured) From Left to Right, bottom row: Enrique Murillo, Jr., Thaddeus Guldbrandsen, Marla Frederick-McGlathery. Top row: Dorothy Holland, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, and Don Nonini.




The Tower Under Siege


Book Description

In The Tower under Siege Brian Lewis, Christine Massey, and Richard Smith explore these important themes and issues from the varying perspectives of students, teachers, policy makers, and administrators. They describe the opportunities, changes, and policies developing in western universities and governments in response to the education revolution. While most studies of the education revolution tend to be highly polemical, ; The Tower under Siege occupies a middle space, identifying issues and policy processes used to manage change and create more opportunities for education.; The Tower under Siege will be of great interest to anyone concerned with, excited about, or worried by the expanding role of technology in higher education: teachers, researchers, students, parents, policy makers, and administrators.




Education Still Under Siege


Book Description




Education Under Siege


Book Description

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




The Memory Hole


Book Description

The U.S. history curriculum is under attack. Politicians, political analysts, and ideologues seek to wipe clean the slate of the American past and replace it with one of their own invention. The basis for this new narrative comes from political beliefs of the present, rather than any systematic examination of the past. These anti-historians campaign to insert their version of American history into the nation’s classrooms, hoping to begin a process that will forever transform our understanding of America’s past. The Memory Hole examines five central topics in the US history curriculum, showing how anti-historians of both the left and right seek to distort these topics and insert a refashioned story in America’s classrooms. Ignoring facts, refashioning other facts and pretending that there are no rules in the telling of history, these re-interpreters of the past place the minds of America’s young people in danger. The beleaguered hero of this book is the discipline of History, and The Memory Hole shows how the history curriculum should adhere to history’s habits of mind that require complex, sophisticated and subtle thinking about the past. History and social studies teachers, students of history and all those who care about the deep and enduring value of history will value this book and its conclusions.