Teaching Stories - An Anthology on the Power of Learning and Literature

Informationen zum Autor ROBERT COLES is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize?winning Children of Crisis. A professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, he is also the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard. He lives in Massachusetts. Klappentext In this remarkable anthology, some of the world's greatest writers provide a master class on the transformative power of learning and literature. Culled from a course developed by Pulitzer Prize—winning author Robert Coles for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Teaching Stories is an invaluable collection in which novelists, essayists, and poets "render school life in all its complexity and variety.” Featuring writings by James Agee • Julia Alvarez • Charles Baxter • Raymond Carver • John Cheever • Anton Chekhov • Erik H. Erikson • Anna Freud • Thomas Hardy • Toni Morrison • Howard Nemerov • Flannery O'Connor • Tillie Olsen • Leo Tolstoy • Tobias Wolff • Richard Yates Ideal for educators and students of all ages, Teaching Stories will inspire anyone who loves great writing.Chapter 1 Gryphon Charles Baxter On Wednesday afternoon, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter—dazed and infrequent—sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see Mr. Hibler’s face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. “I’ll bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.” Carol sat at the desk in front of mine and was a bad person—when she thought no one was looking she would blow her nose on notebook paper, then crumple it up and throw it into the wastebasket—but at times of crisis she spoke the truth. I knew I’d lose the dime. “No deal,” I said. When Mr. Hibler stood us in formation at the door just prior to the final bell, he was almost incapable of speech. “I’m sorry, boys and girls,” he said. “I seem to be coming down with something.” “I hope you feel better tomorrow, Mr. Hibler,” Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brown-noser, said, and I heard Carol Peterson’s evil giggle. Then Mr. Hibler opened the door and we walked out to the buses, a clique of us starting noisily to hawk and laugh as soon as we thought we were a few feet beyond Mr. Hibler’s earshot. Since Five Oaks was a rural community, and in Michigan, the supply of substitute teachers was limited to the town’s unemployed community college graduates, a pool of about four mothers. These ladies fluttered, provided easeful class days, and nervously covered material we had mastered weeks earlier. Therefore it was a surprise when a woman we had never seen came into the class the next day, carrying a purple purse, a checkerboard lunchbox, and a few books. She put the books on one side of Mr. Hibler’s desk and the lunchbox on the other, next to the Voice of Music phonograph. Three of us in the back of the room were playing with Heever, the chameleon that lived in a terrarium and on one of the plastic drapes, when she walked in. She clapped her hands at us. “Little boys,” she said, “why are you bent over together like that?” She didn’t wait for us to answer. “Are you tormenting an animal? Put it back. Please sit down at your desks. I want no cabals this time of t...

Product details

• Authors: , Robert Coles, Trevor B Hall, Ernest Patterson
• Publisher: Modern Library PRH US
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.08.2004
• EAN: 9780812971699
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-7169-9
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 203 mm x 16 mm