Meet Some of My Favorite Teachers

There’s something about stores filled with perfectly pristine 64 crayon sets, lunch boxes packing trendy pop culture logos and decoration, and shelves filled with folders in every color imaginable. A whole year ahead yet to be written.

After summer with its beach reads, steamy reads, hot reads (you get the idea) I’m thinking about what the perfect titles are for this short, interseason period that mostly involves shopping for pencils and socks. Not the books about how to study, how to get organized, or how to pack a healthy lunch, but stories that are just as enjoyable as the ones we read on a beach towel sipping a cold adult beverage.

If summer invokes surf and sand, what “says” school? For many of us it is teachers. The ones who taught us cool things and made us feel welcome in the world of learning. Or the one or two less than inspiring ones we have worked hard to forget.

If the signs of a new school year have you remembering … here are a few of my favorite titles featuring teachers. Mostly the great ones.

Spare Parts. Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream by Josh Davis. The easy description: a story of four high schoolers from the wrong side of Phoenix who built a robot, entered it in a national competition and won. What it’s really about is poverty, low expectations, and the epic struggle experienced by undocumented students in the U.S. You will love these students and the teachers who set the spark.

Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam. This autobiography was made into a movie you might recognize, October Sky. A look at the hardscrabble America in late 1950’s coal country, dreams inspired by the new race for space and the educator who turned those dreams into possibility.

The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy. If you loved the marshy, isolated atmosphere of “Where The Crawdads Sing” you might try this novel set on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. The story of Conroy’s year in a two-room schoolhouse teaching impoverished students with almost no awareness of the world beyond their island. Yes, this is the same writer of The Great Santini and Prince of Tides.

Wonder by RJ Palacio. August Pullman is an ordinary 10-year-old boy, Ordinary except for his jarring facial anomalies. Homeschooled all his life, Auggie heads to public school for fifth grade where we meet Mr. Browne, the English teacher whose class we all wish we could have been in.

Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom. For all of us who never forgot a teacher who changed us – and wonder what was yet to learn from them. This was a very popular book when it was released in 1997 and definitely worth a re-read.

Escalante: The Best Teacher in America by Jay Matthews . In 1963, Jaime Escalante was one of the last Bolivian emigrees to enter the United States legally. A teacher in his native country, he spent the next 10 years scaling the hurdles of educational bureaucracy until, at age 43, he won a teaching position at Garfield High School in the barrio of East Los Angeles. If you’ve seen Stand and Deliver you know some of the rest of the story. This biography will take you deeper.

Off to read,

Julie