Tell Me Tuesday

 Happy Fat Tuesday! What are you reading today?

Tell Me Tuesday

Hello! What is everybody reading this week?

Mrs. Baldacci

Another book about teaching. This one is from 2004 and is by a woman who left her work as a journalist to be an intern with Teachers for Chicago. She spends a year in a seventh grade classroom and a second grade classroom. These inner city teaching stories are all the same: kids from the poorest homes in the roughest neighborhoods and the teachers who fight for them day after day. Hope and hopelessness all at once.

School Reform

Finished this recently. I've been on an education reading kick. Rhee is a brave woman who doesn't have many supporters from within the teachers' unions. When I returned this, the librarian (also a high school teacher) actually growled and pointed to Rhee's face. I think merit pay makes a lot of sense, and I don't believe any school district should have to pass its worst teachers from school to school because they can't simply fire them. Kids deserve the best teachers they can possibly get, and teachers should be rewarded for excellence.

Tell Me Tuesday

I'm enjoying my third read-aloud of The Hobbit. I read it to each of my girls when they were quite little, and now am reading it to Maria (11 years) and her homeschool buddy. We will finish it by early December, just in time to see the movie. What are you all reading?

Corked

Was browsing in the travel section of my library and spotted this memoir. It is a real, not just a feel-good, book about a young woman's trip through French wine country with her father. Borel is tough and funny and very aware that her only doorway into really understanding her father is probably through the thing he knows best and loves best: wine. But he is aging and difficult and hasn't always been there for her. It is not as easy trip; they are not always pretty people. But I was rooting for both of them. The book hits a few of my favorite reading genres at once: travel, food/wine, biography, family drama. So glad I happened upon it.

Tell Me Tuesday

So. I stopped reading. Then I started again. How 'bout you? What are you reading?