What Went Right
Product details
- ISBN 9781475834130
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 161 x 237mm
- Publication Date: 24 May 2017
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In What Went Right: Lessons from Both Sides of the Teacher’s Desk co-authors Roberta Israeloff and George McDermott resume a conversation they began in 1967—when she was in eleventh grade at Syosset (N.Y.) High School and he was her English teacher.
In 2014, after finding each other on Facebook, they began an email correspondence—as contemporaries, rather than student and teacher—and quickly discovered that neither had ever stopped thinking about that school and the many ways it influenced them.
As they shared their impressions of how and why public education has changed since then, they realized that a single academic year can have a deeper and longer-lasting impact than they had ever imagined.
Personal and probing, evocative and wide-ranging, the letters that compose this book ask and attempt to answer some timeless—and timely—questions: What makes a teacher or a class memorable? How can the teacher-student relationship be supported and strengthened? What does being “educated” truly mean? And, perhaps most important, what role can free public education play in sustaining our democracy?
Roberta Israeloff directs the Squire Family Foundation, an educational advocacy foundation that champions the inclusion of philosophy in the public school curriculum, and that helped launch both PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) and the National High School Ethics Bowl. A teacher and editor, she has also authored or co-authored over a dozen books, including four volumes of personal non-fiction, and scores of short stories, essays and articles appearing in national publications.
George McDermott has taught students in all junior- and senior-high grades; in rural, suburban and inner-city settings; and in central, charter, and neighborhood schools. He has also spent decades as a speechwriter and ghostwriter, helping business executives, research scientists, economists, physicians and designers communicate accurately and effectively—and sound as articulate as they are talented in areas other than communication.
