Category Archives: Books

Here s a list of books written for teachers that are worth reading. Enjoy!

Teacher Sarah Wu and her “Fed Up With Lunch” Campaign

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Those of us who work in public schools have long been aware that school lunches are, shall we say, less than appetizing. I’m sure the cafeteria personnel do the best they can with the resources they are given, but the truth is none of us eats a school-prepared lunch unless we are incredibly desperate. And I, for one, was almost never that desperate. But one educator who became determined to do what she could to call attention to the school lunch problem was Sarah Wu, teacher and a speech pathologist working at Haugan Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois.

One day, Sarah didn’t have enough time before going to work to pack her own lunch. After purchasing a lunch from her school’s cafeteria, she was shocked to see what was being served to the students. To spotlight the problem, every school day during 2010, the determined educator bought a cafeteria lunch, took it back to her classroom, snapped a photo of it, and wrote about it on her online blog. Sarah posted her observations on Fedupwithlunch.com using the pseudonym Mrs. Q. She kept her identity a closely-guarded secret because she was afraid she might get fired if school officials knew she was the one behind the blog. Eventually, her blog attracted thousands of readers, many of whom shared her concern about the quality of school lunches. In 2011, Sarah published a book about her project. The book was entitled “Fed Up with Lunch: The School Lunch Project: How One Anonymous Teacher Survived a Year of School Lunches” (Chronicle, $22.95).

Sarah’s year-long school lunch project was completed years ago, but she continues to write blog posts about food policy, school issues, and personal health. Occasionally she still posts photos and observations of the lunches served each day at her school. To learn more about this gutsy chalkboard champion, read this story published in 2011 in the Chicago Tribune: School Lunch Blogger “Mrs. Q”.

Marzell’s Books Added to Collections of Prestigious University Libraries

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I’m always so flattered whenever I learn that one of my books has been added to the collection of yet another prestigious university library. Today I discovered that my first book, Chalkboard Champions (2012), was recently added to the collection of the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. The volume had previously been added to the libraries of Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota; the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; the State University of New York in Oswego, New York; Hunter College in New York, New York; Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey; Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts; and the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. It is also part of the collection of the Library of Congress.

Chalkboard Heroes (2015) has been added to the collections of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California; Chadron State University in Chadron, Nebraska; the University of Sourthern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and the University of Chicago Library in Chicago, Illinois.

Many thanks to all these university libraries for honoring my work!

 

Chalkboard Champions and Hurricane Harvey: Wading into Rising Waters

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As empathetic Americans look for ways to help fellow citizens forced to cope with the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, Texas teachers are undoubtedly wondering what they can do to help ease the distress of their precious kids when they return to the classroom.

As usual when I hear news stories about storm damage, I am reminded of a book I read which tells the tale of a remarkable teacher who opened a school for New Orleans evacuees following Hurricane Katrina.

When surging flood waters from Hurricane Katrina forced thousands of families to flee from their homes, New Orleans residents had their minds more on survival than on whether their children would be missing school. But when a group of evacuee parents who landed in New Iberia, Louisiana, realized they would not be returning to their homes any time soon, they knew they had to find a strategy to help their children cope with their enforced and unexpected exile. They pooled their financial resources and hired a fellow refugee, teacher Paul Reynaud, to establish a one-room school for their children in an abandoned office building. The story furnishes valuable lessons for dealing with this latest example of nature’s fury.

The book is entitled Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember.The author of this intriguing true story is journalist Michael Tisserand, and the volume was published in 2007 by Harcourt. You can find the book on amazon.com at the following link:

For other intriguing stories about remarkable teachers in America’s sometimes turbulent history, check out my book Chalkboard Champions. You will find it on the web site for Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Teacher Dolores Huerta: The Champion of the Migrant Farmworker

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thLike many people who have heard of farm labor leader and civil rights advocate Cesar Chavez, I have also heard of his right-hand woman, Dolores Huerta, vice president of the United Farm Workers Union. But did you know that she was also an elementary school teacher?

Raised in Stockton, California, Dolores graduated in 1955 with an AA and her teaching credentials from the College of the Pacific. After graduation, she accepted a teaching position in a rural Stockton elementary school. She had been teaching for only a short time when she realized she wanted to devote her talent and energy to migrant farm workers and their families. “I couldn’t stand seeing farm worker children come to class hungry and in need of shoes,” she once explained. “I thought I could do more by organizing their parents than by trying to teach their hungry children.” After one year, she resigned from her teaching position, determined to launch a campaign that would fight the numerous economic injustices faced by migrant agricultural workers.

Joining forces with the legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez, Dolores organized a large-scale strike against the commercial grape growers of the San Joaquin Valley, an effort which raised national awareness of the abysmal treatment of America’s agricultural workers, and she negotiated the contracts which led to their improved working conditions. The rest, as they say, is history.

Although there are several fairly good juvenile biographies of this extraordinary woman, there is no definitive adult biography about her. The closest thing to it is A Dolores Huerta Reader edited by Mario T. Garcia. This book includes an informative biographical introduction by the editor, articles and book excerpts written about Dolores, her own writings and transcripts of her speeches, and a recent interview with Mario Garcia. You can find A Dolores Huerta Reader on amazon.com I have also included a chapter about this remarkable teacher in my second book, Chalkboard Heroes: Twelve courageous Teachers and their Deeds of Valor.

Should you read Harper Lee’s new novel?

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Like almost every other Language Arts teacher in America, I have been eagerly awaiting the release of Harper Lee’s new novel, a freshly-discovered sequel to her Pulitzer-prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird. The release of the new book, Go Set a Watchman, comes amid controversy about the portrayal of the character Atticus Finch, long revered as a noble and humane man who, in his quiet and unassuming way, fights for justice thfor the African American community in Jim Crow South, despite the perils of such a stance. Critics of the new book assert that Atticus is not so noble in Lee’s second book.

Here’s what I think. To Kill a Mockingbird fits the definition of a bildungsroman; that is, a novel that describes and interprets the process of growing up as experienced by the main character, who is almost always a child. In Mockingbird, the child is six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, known affectionately as Scout, the daughter of Atticus Finch. Now, most people would concede that one of the most universal experiences when growing up is recognizing that parents are not perfect. Scout, who clearly and unabashedly idolizes her father, is not confronted with this fact of life until, in Watchman, she returns to her home town on vacation as a twenty-six-year-old New York City dweller. The novel is not really about how Atticus changes; it’s about how Jean Louise changes. How she continues the process of growing up. In this way, the novel is an unusual kind of bildingsroman in that it describes and interprets the process of growing up as experienced by an adult character.

This new book is not likely to win the author another Pulitzer prize, but it does masterfully turn characters that might, upon close examination, appear to be somewhat flat into more round characters. By that I mean less one-dimensional and more multi-dimensional. More human. And Lee does make an attempt to explain the Southern perspective regarding the Civil War, and although I can’t say I understood that explanation very well, I can say that the discussion is very timely when considering the recent debates over what it really means to fly a Confederate flag over government buildings in the Deep South. And, considering the revelations about Atticus presented in this new book, the novel adds to the ongoing conversation about the blight of racism, in both overt and subtle forms.

Read Go Set a Watchman. You’ll find much to think about. After all, isn’t that one of the primary functions of literature?