5 comments about The Girls in the Back of the Class.

1. I'm also an English teacher who have been teaching teen-agers for 10 years. Teaching teenagers is hard work, very stressful, depressed by themselves and the surrounding of them. I don't have such energy of love to my students as Louanne Johnson. But I can feel her pain in heart because I myself love my students. They are devils and angels at the same time. If they were devils, I could ignore them. If they were angels, I could just smile, do nothing, and just ignore them. But they are irresistable.

   I agree with Hal, her master teacher. He said to her, "Teenagers are supposed to be ungrateful little brutes. They're supposed to trample your tender feelings, break your heart. It's their job." He is always right. I wish he would be with me!!!




2. This should be required reading for every education major. I teach in an urban school; Ms. Johnson had something some of my young colleagues who quit teaching after a year do not have--resolve, persistance, and determination. There are no "bad" kids, there are kids who do "bad" things or come from "bad" environments, but as Ms. Johnson writes, it is possible to save the kids by giving a lot of ourselves.



3. I had the wonderful chance of reading this book. This book made me laugh and cry and jump in suspense. Ms. Johnson is a wonderful teacher who deserves awards beyong awards. The book taught me to see other parts of education. I really enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to anyone who is going into the education field



4. What a wonderful book, for teachers, students, parents, anyone who might need to be reminded of how much we have to give, if we just "will". The author shows her love for her students in every passage, and it was well written, witty, and a wonderful read.
   
   Highly recommended as an entertaining, and insightful, book on teaching children who need love desperately.



5. I've worked in high schools for the past several years, and now am trying to get a job as a teacher. This book will be on my shelf to assist me with dealing with my class. Her methods are great! Too many teachers are so uptight that they are the cause of their own classroom problems. This author shows that great results can be had with compassion, a sprinkle of humor and a true love of her students.

No comments about Views From My Schoolroom Window: The Diary of Schoolteacher Mary Laurentine Martin.

1 comments about Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams, His First Life, 1838-1862 (Biography of Henry Adams).

1. This book is not an ordinary biography. The author's extraordinary talent and insight bring forth the living principle that is Henry Adams. It will draw the attentive reader into Adams' world and one will come face to face with an original genius. And I would like to paraphrase Schopenhauer's definition that genius is the capacity to bring forth some light into this world of ignorance and darkness.
   
   We experience the catastrophe of the American Civil War through the mind of Adams. We are given the usual dates and events, but at a deeper level we encounter "the inside narrative:" the petty bickering, plotting, blundering and revenge. On the other side we see skill and diplomacy; acts of kindness and compassion. It rises to the level of something Shakespearean, and leaves a strong impression of powerful collective forces to be reckoned with. So the book is not merely about individuals and events at a particular time in the past. It delves deeply into the great mystery of human nature.
   
   Another thing I can say is that Dr. Chalfant's conversational style is so pleasant to read that I frequently get pulled into it and have trouble putting the book down. Something someone once wrote about Robert Burton comes to mind. "While reading this book, one feels as if he is in the company of a good friend."

1 comments about Matters of Conscience: Conversations With Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion.

1. This is a book of primarily local and regional interest. For those who are unaware, Sterling McMurrin was a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City during the 50's, 60's, 70' and 80's. Sterling was considered one of the most scholarly and capable professors at the University and held a variety of important academic positions. In fact, during the John F. Kennedy Presidential administration, Sterling was United States Commissioner of Education (the position that was the forerunner of the cabinet level post, Secretary of Education).

   Those who do not live in the Mormon culture in Utah may not be able to appreciate large segments of the book. Sterling describes his years teaching Mormon Seminary in the Church Educational System and his subsequent history in the church. The most fascinating part of the book for me was when Sterling ran afoul of church leaders Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee for honestly informing them he did not believe in the most basic Mormon teachings. The subsequent story of him *almost* being brought to trial in a church court and being excommunicated is very interesting and entertaining. Apparently, than church President David O McKay personally intervened and prevented this from occurring. McMurrin met personally with McKay and the details of their conversation are highly interesting. It also furnishes an important insight as to why the LDS Church failed to open the priesthood to African Americans until 1978. (McKay favored doing it, but many people underneath him did not)

   After finishing the book, I was proud. I am proud that the University of Utah had such a distinguished professor for so many years. I am proud that the Mormon culture of which I am a part is capable of producing free-thinkers and intellectuals like McMurrin. Sterling McMurrin died in 1996. However, he left behind a legacy of fearless intellectual freedom and inquiry that will long prevail at the University of Utah.

No comments about The Angel of Happy Hollow: The Story Of Mary Elizabeth "Toddy" Collins.

5 comments about Hamlet's Dresser: A Memoir.

1. This memoir is incredibly heart felt, sensitive and beautiful. Interspersed with Shakespeare's words, and Smith's experiences sharing them with New York City's oldest people, as well as his experience with Shakespeare on stage is a pained and moving life.
   This is a remarkable book for anyone who identifies with the social/communal feel of life in the theatre, or artists for that matter. As well, anybody who knows the outside of an easy going life, alienation, deep guilt, a stilted family life, and the strain and sublime beauty of mental retardation.
   I feel thankful after reading this. Smith illuminates the simple beauty of a daily train ride into the city, the warmth and intensity of being an off stage dresser, the joy of being with young actors and artists, and the sweetness of giving to older folks, and finding out that they need vitality and art as much as anyone. Great for actors and theatre lovers!



2. Mr. Smith's relationship with his sister so reminds me of Tom and Laura in "The Glass Menagerie" -- it has that kind of sensitivity and heartbreak about it. In an age where a lot of memoirs seem so sensational and motivated by a kind of "tell all," Smith takes his time, patiently weaving his inner with his outer life, seamlessly moving from past to present. His compassion for the stories of others (and for Shakespeare's stories) gives him the compassion to tell his own. I found his story -- the way he finds consolation in Shakespeare and in the theatre and the way he gives back -- very touching. I loved when he was offered a non-speaking role in "Richard II" at Stratford in his youth, he jumps at it, saying that after all, he didn't want to say lines, he wanted to hear them! As I finished the book, I felt so glad this man was out there in Connecticut -- his sweet soul a sort of tonic. While everyone else is busy talking, this man, even in writing, seems to be listening.



3. I was born and raised in Stratford, CT., and I wanted to read the book because of the author's association with Stratford. But I found I loved the book for other reasons also, his honesty about himself and his family and his ability to let the reader understand how he overcame the difficulties in his life. I have passed it on to family members to read.



4. I have just finished reading Bob Smith's extraordinary memoir, and what a wonderful read it was. Very, very impressive. His story of growing up a solitary, lonely boy with a severely mentally and physically handicapped younger sister tugs at the heartstrings and makes for some harrowing reading, particularly the passages that describe his sister, Carolyn, as a young girl. I enjoyed his writing style, particularly the way he wove situation appropriate Shakespearean passages into the narrative. I also liked his passages describing his interactions with the senior citizens he taught Shakespeare to. One thing I was dissatisfied with, though, was why it took him four decades to reconcile with his sister. I did not feel that Smith spent enough time explaining or justifying why he left it so long, given that his guilt over the "abandonment" of his sister was so intense. I think he should have spent more time explaining this. However, that is a minor quibble. As a memoir, it is absolutely marvellous, evocative and gripping from page one. Highly, highly recommended.



5. Hamlet's Dresser: A Memoir by Bob Smith
   
   `Zoe died.' Just those two simple words. And from there on you are hooked. The sentence is up there with `Jesus wept' as one you are not going to forget in a long while. Maybe more so since at least we know who Jesus is. Who's Zoe? How did she die? Why begin a book with what would appear to be The End - and which certainly was for Zoe?
   
   These are the opening two words from Bob Smith's memoir Hamlet's Dresser. Born in 1941 in New England into what would now be called a dysfunctional family - and aren't all families dysfunctional in different ways and to differing degrees - he was christened Robert, called Bobby as a child, a name he hated, and had to wait until he was an adult before he finished with plain `Bob'.
   
   In 1944 his sister Carolyn was born and it is she who, together with Shakespeare, is at the centre of this book. Which coupling is fitting for, as Bob Smith points out, Shakespeare is full of ghosts and memory. Carolyn is also the person to whom the book is dedicated: For Carolyn Wells Smith.
   
   Carolyn was born severely retarded. As she grew she had the body of a 21 year old woman, but the mind of a two-year old child - a child who was not potty trained. Bobby was drafted in to help. `Wipe her good Bobby!' was a phrase which stayed in his head all his life. As their mother retreated more and more to a sick bed and a pathological obsession with cleaning everything in the house sometimes several times a day, Bobby was drafted in to help here too.
   
   `When I was four, my father joined the army - "to be a man," my mother said. She thought he'd abandoned her, and for a while he probably did. He went away because everybody cried all the time.'
   
   For a short time the family followed him to Florida, where he was taking basic training, staying with relatives. It was here that a small miracle happened: `Carolyn looked up at me. I was by her crib making faces. Suddenly she stopped crying and just looked at me for a long, long time. I was amazed and a little afraid. I never saw her look at anyone, she never did! She was looking at me. And not crying! Then it happened .... My sister smiled at me.'
   
   Thrown out of the house soon after because the relatives could not take the crying either, the husband handed over a bag of oranges. `A few days before he'd asked my mother when she would be taking the baboon out of his house? Over a lifetime she's repeated the cruel words a thousand times and always as if they'd been said only last week.'
   
   After eighteen years of intensive and wearing family care - by this damaged but somehow heroic family - their parents decide Carolyn must go into a permanent home to be looked after. Six weeks later Bobby goes to visit her.
   
   `Inside I asked a friendly nurse for directions. As I went up the iron stairs and down the long white hall I could hear my sister. She was saying my name over and over. She knew very few words - car, go to bed, Bobby. Even now in my old red house by the river all these years later I can hear her voice, her young lost voice, singsong - "Bobby ... Bobby ... Bobby."
   
   Carolyn is one thread of this story. There are others. One is the growing up of a very bright, very gifted, very lonely boy who one day decides he will no longer conform to a school regime of testing to see that what has been `taught' has also been `learned'. He begins to follow his own solitary path taking off early on Saturdays to visit the Museum of Modern Art on 5th Avenue. There is also the influence of his relatives and in particular his maternal grandmother Nana.
   
   But the most important influence is Shakespeare. It starts when he is in fifth grade, not yet into his teens. He does his homework every day at a beautifully furnished little gray stone local library. One day he gets soaked in a downpour and the librarian makes him take off his shoes and socks to dry them and she then gives him some rough paper towels to soak up the worst of the rain. While engaged in this task he notices a little stained glass portrait in the window. `It's the image of a bald fat man with a silly pointed beard and a cockyamamy moustache that curves up goofy at the corners.' Who is it he asks.
   By answer, when he's dry enough to sit at table and start his arithmetic homework the librarian puts a little book at his elbow. `Stamped in gold on the dark blue cover was the same pudgy face as the window. Along the side in bright gold letters, "William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice."
   `I opened it. Antonio. "In sooth I know not why I am so sad." I read it again. Ten simple monosyllabic words and of course I couldn't know what sooth meant, but it's hardly necessary ... I think that the more confused you are inside, the more you need to trust a thing outside of yourself. I was desperate to lean against something bigger than me and it was clear that William Shakespeare understood what it's like to ache and not know why... Poetry became a beautiful place to hide from my life and from my parents, a place I knew they would never follow me to.'
   
   That first oblique introduction by a sensitive empathetic librarian was to spark a lifelong passion, one that was to lead on to a job at sixteen as Hamlet's Dresser at the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford USA; to meeting such luminaries as Katharine Hepburn, Bert Lahr (the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz), Jessica Tandy, Jimmy Cagney and others; to becoming an actor himself for a short spell - long enough, however, to know that acting was not for him but that directing was, so that there is a list of more than a dozen groups, companies and festivals where he has directed Shakespeare plays; and, finally, and memorably, to teach Shakespeare to actors, guilds and adult life-long learning classes, where Zoe and lots of other old-timers make an appearance.
   
   All these threads are woven together, chapter after chapter, in a quite extraordinary way, interspersed with and moved along by short extracts - sometimes no more than a phrase - from the Bard's plays and sonnets.
   The first part of this review may have made Hamlet's Dresser sound like the latest in a long line of what have been dubbed `misery memoirs'. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book is an enormously uplifting experience, an emotional roller-coaster, by turns heart-wrenching, absorbing, engaging, exhilarating and always life-affirming.
   
   Most readers will have had the not uncommon experience of wanting a book never to end but for me this is the first time on completing a book that I have ever turned straight back to the beginning to start the whole experience again. Immediately.
   
   A warning. One line I do remember schooldays: `If you have tears prepare to shed them now.' Julius Caesar.
   DF

No comments about It Can Be Done: The Billy Henderson Story... A Georgia Football Legend.

No comments about The Life of Learning.

No comments about Butterfly Song -- A Woman's Journey Back Into Life.

1 comments about Detours: From Classrooms to a Guatemalan Coffee Farm.

1. Would that we all experienced a wise and witty philosopher-professor such as this gifted writer! A. Gray Thompson's life-wanderings took him from elementary to university classrooms, from a principal's office to a jewelry-making shed, from California to Wisconsin to Mexico to Central America to ... with lots of Detours and experiences along the way. He developed a "philosophy for children" program that's described in such a way that every teacher (and parent) can try it out. He also developed a worn-down coffee farm into a teaching tool for his indigenous Maya neighbors, while creating a botanic garden-wonder which I'm eager to visit some day.

   Rich anecdotes of a curious observer and experimenter fill each chapter. All that's missing is a chance to sit with the author and hear him tell these experiences while sipping some of his coffee - but heck, make your own coffee, settle down in your own home, and let this brilliant fellow share his wisdom with a heavy dose of humor. These are marvelous ramblings indeed!