102 books match the query 'Teachers' and 4 start with b

cover of Bamboo Son: A Hmong Refugee’s Search for Identity and the American Dream

Bamboo Son

A Hmong Refugee’s Search for Identity and the American Dream

Pao Lor

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2026

Pao Lor’s stirring journey of self-discovery and belonging in his new home—America.

“In Hmong, the word bamboo or ntsuag has two meanings. It refers to the bamboo plant, which has many significant cultural and practical uses in Hmong life. The word also means orphan. Therefore, bamboo son, in Hmong, means tub ntsuag or orphan son. To survive and succeed as a Hmong orphan, like bamboo, one must be resilient and adaptable, bend without breaking, and stand tall against enormous odds.”

In this follow-up to his acclaimed memoir, Modern Jungles, Pao Lor picks up his story as a young Hmong immigrant building a new life in a new home and shares the narrative of his ensuing journey into adulthood. Lor emerged from war and tragedies in the jungles of Laos and refugee camps of Thailand in the 1970s to pursue a vision of the American dream in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the 1980s. The distance between his humble beginnings and that dream life was littered with challenges as well as possibilities.

Lor’s transformation from an insecure but determined high school student to a husband, father, teacher, administrator, and author is marked by triumph and defeat, trauma and joy, and always hope and optimism. As he navigates school, first loves, family relationships, and a career, Lor must contend with language barriers, discrimination, and his own inner demons stemming from feelings of inferiority. Threads of his identity—Hmong, American, and Wisconsinite—intersect and occasionally come into conflict.

Lor’s search for belonging comes full circle when he travels to Laos and Thailand with his wife, Maya, in 2022. Seeing his birthplace for the first time in forty-five years, he revisits the isolated mountain villages where he spent his early childhood; the places where his parents and sister died as the family fled the region in the violent aftermath of the Vietnam War; and the two refugee camps where Pao and his siblings lived before being relocated to the United States when he was seven. As he reexamines these memories and reconciles his past, Lor finds peace and the freedom to move forward with his soul renewed.

Lor’s story is an uplifting journey of resilience, adaptation, love, and forgiveness, inspiring readers to reflect on the meaning and accessibility of the American dream.
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cover of Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching

Bitter Milk

Women and Teaching

Madeleine R. Grumet

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988

The text is arranged in a pattern that mirrors Grumet's argument that women who teach make this passage between the so-called public and private worlds daily and that is also what we teach children to do. The chapters go back and forth between the experience of domesticity and the experience of teaching, between being with one's own children and being with the children of others, between being the child of one's own mother and the teacher of another mother's child, between feeling and form, family and colleagues.

The first and last chapters address the familial relations that fall under the category of reproduction, a frame designed to emphasize the relations of reproduction and their importance to educational theory. The chapters closest to this margin are those that address women's work in schools, and the juxtaposition is chosen to accentuate the dialectical relation of our public and private meanings. The middle chapters are the ones most directly concerned with curriculum, that provisional ground that Grumet is naming as our mediating space, the place where we can heal. The fundamental argument of this text is that knowledge evolves in human relationships.
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cover of Blaming Teachers: Professionalization Policies and the Failure of Reform in American History

Blaming Teachers

Professionalization Policies and the Failure of Reform in American History

Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2021 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

Historically, Americans of all stripes have concurred that teachers were essential to the success of the public schools and nation. However, they have also concurred that public school teachers were to blame for the failures of the schools and identified professionalization as a panacea.
 
In Blaming Teachers, Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz reveals that historical professionalization reforms subverted public school teachers’ professional legitimacy. Superficially, professionalism connotes authority, expertise, and status. Professionalization for teachers never unfolded this way; rather, it was a policy process fueled by blame where others identified teachers’ shortcomings. Policymakers, school leaders, and others understood professionalization measures for teachers as efficient ways to bolster the growing bureaucratic order of the public schools through regulation and standardization. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of municipal public school systems and reaching into the 1980s, Blaming Teachers traces the history of professionalization policies and the discourses of blame that sustained them.
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cover of Buckeye Schoolmaster: A Chronicle of Midwestern Rural Life, 1853–1865

Buckeye Schoolmaster

A Chronicle of Midwestern Rural Life, 1853–1865

J. Merton England

University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

The journals and diaries of John M. Roberts provide an intimate view of the life and dthoughts of a young schoolmaster, miller, itenerant bookseller, and farmer in centreal Ohio in a time of rising sectional crisis and Civil War.

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