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Teaching
Is Not for Sissies
The
Cruelest Months:
A Teacher's Coming-of-Age Story
The hopes of any society are etched in the
faces of students in classes all across America. Donna Webster,
a newly graduated, white English teacher, could see these hopes
as she looked out at her classroom at Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Senior High School, a predominantly black inner city high school
in Jacksonville, Florida. From Yasmina's poetic letters about
unspeakable tragedy to Thomas' wasted potential to Rochelle's
feisty presence--Donna came to realize, as all |
teachers
do, that education is as much about learning as it is about
teaching. All of her first year lessons, those taught and those
learned, are chronicled in The Cruelest Months, and Donna's
Webster's baptism into the cruel world of teaching is a
testament to the power that one individual has in shaping this
world.
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Review
Real-life
teachers are not always as breathtakingly beautiful or musically
talented as those in Fox TV's Boston Public. Not every suave
instructor is scandalously involved with the popular
cheerleader, or embroiled in an arduous legal struggle with the
school board. In Dorothy Fletcher's The Cruelest Months,
schoolteacher Donna Webster-white, optimistic and
nervous-is sent to an inner-city black school where her
initiation into the cruel world of teaching reveals her power to
shape the world.
Webster discovers through her academic
journey that education is not for the faint of heart. From
Yasmina's poetry of unspeakable tragedy, to AIDS-stricken
Rochelle, who dies a week before her seventeenth birthday,
Webster realizes that education is as much about learning as it
is about teaching.
Only an educator with extensive teaching experience like
Fletcher's could so accurately depict the condition of America's
public schools, where violence and disrespectful behavior
abound, and where money and moral support from parents are
lacking. Still, Fletcher's thirty
years with the Jacksonville, Florida, school system has shown
her that minimal pay and the lack of appreciation have not
discouraged a few passionate and caring individuals who have
ventured in the noble profession of molding young minds.
A recent review of
The Cruelest Months was written by Danita Sain Stokes in
the April, 2004, edition of Women's Digest Magazine.
You can read it at
www.womensdigest.net.
Another
review, by www.Jacksonville.com
Community Columnist Kay Day can be viewed here.
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Where
To Buy
The
Cruelest Months can be purchased at:
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