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Not So Hot
For Everyone Who Went Through High School
Misleading, But Interesting At Times
Excellent -- Jennings delivers again

Telling Tales Out of School

Manufacturer: Alyson Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay & Lesbian History for High School & College Students
One Teacher in 10
One Teacher in 10: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their Stories
Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son

ASIN: 1555834183

Customer Reviews:

Not So Hot.......2007-06-05

After reading "Farm Boys", this book didn't compare. "Farm Boy's" was genuine and from the heart stories of growing up on a farm. "Telling Tales Out of School" I think was everyone's attempt to write. They all could have been stories for magazines, etc. They seemed to want to make their stories humorous, and/or then they all wanted to be radical homosexuals and save others. I don't need that. I just wanted to compare stories. I got nothing from it and scanned most of the stories after reading the first few. And I certainly did not care to read any of the stories from lesbians.

For Everyone Who Went Through High School.......2001-10-20

Regardless of your sexual orientation, even if you were just perceived as different or the oddball in the crowd, this book strikes a nerve. Everyone feels they had it bad until you read of other peoples journeys. I recommend this book to everyone. I don't look at it as depressing but it is comfort to know that as a small towm boy I was not the only one.

Misleading, But Interesting At Times.......2001-09-26

This book gives the impression that it has more to say. But it never really does. For some, it certainly will be a wonderful validation of a kindred type of experience. I grew a little bored with each individualized story that all to soon seemed to sound like the next. My purpose for choosing this book, was not fullfilled, I found it witty, even charming, poignant, but lacking.

Excellent -- Jennings delivers again.......1998-10-28

Telling Tales is an outstanding collection of moving stories about being gay in school. Kevin Jennings has proven himself as an editor with his earlier book, One Teacher in Ten, and he delivers again here. It is relevant to anyone interested in gay and lesbian studies and/or education.

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Magnificent
Felix is the one who knows the cause of things
Magical and Mesmerizing
A Mythic Story
Jewish American Gothic

Tales Out of School
Benjamin Taylor
Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0446672696

Customer Reviews:

Magnificent .......2007-06-10

Tales Out of School stays with you forever. The lyrical prose and perfect evocation of an era is magical and exquisite. To be honest the apparent ease in which this book is written is quite intimidating. Taylor is an author to be envied. Each time I return to this marvelously crafted novel I am impressed and whisked away.

Felix is the one who knows the cause of things.......2007-06-07

Benjamin Taylor's Tales Out of School combines a beautiful coming of age/coming out tale, reminiscent of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, with an intellectual bildungsroman, with an attentive historical novel about Jews in turn of the century Texas, with an almost Pynchonesque sub-plot about the early days of manned flight. It is a strange and wonderful concoction, and a novel I have returned to many times, enjoying it more with each reading.

Magical and Mesmerizing.......2007-06-04

Ben Taylor uses lyrical, mellifluous prose to describe the arc of a genteel and eccentric Jewish family in Galvaston Island at the turn of the century. This lovely novel is populated by a memorable cast of characters: precocious fourteen year-old Felix who is adrift and alternately besotted with Virgil's Aeneid and a thuggish classmate named Wick; his beautiful mother Lucy, who, rudderless and lonely after her husband dies in a hurricane and torn between her adopted religion and her Roman Catholic roots, turns to laudanum and madness; Leo, Lucy's bachelor brother-in-law, amateur ornithologist, and the spendthrift backer of a flying machine built by two local bicycle repairmen of questionable talent; Velma Truly and her companion, Etta Murph who provide an often comical moral center; Nathan Gernsbacher, an elderly rabbi who is having more than a little trouble keeping the faith; and, finally, Schmulowicz, the mysterious mute stranger from Russia who alters the lives of everyone. By turns erotic, humorous, and deeply sad, this novel resonates long after the reader has closed the book.

A Mythic Story.......2007-06-03

What odd and bewitching creatures the first airplanes must have been! Half bug, half angel; tinkered out of the most common materials -- wood, cloth and wire; both too frail and too heavy, it would seem, to leave the ground. Yet they flew.

Benjamin Taylor's debut novel is like that. The story of a wealthy Jewish family's decline in turn-of-the-century Galveston, Texas, it's also a mythic tale in which a spinster Latin tutor is a sibyl, a 14-year-old boy's curiosity about the father he lost in a hurricane is paralleled with Aneneas's journey to the underword, and the prophet Elijah arrives in the "Ellis Island of the West" in the guise of a mute elderly immigrant who gives puppet shows and spells out his every utterance on an "alphabet board."

Taylor ("Into the Open: Reflections on Genius and Modernity") uses dark elements -- syphilis, drowning, laudanum addiction, madness, bankruptcy, suicide -- as ribs on which to stretch a fabric of reverie, youthful hope, homoeroticism, and comedy. It's an unlikely contraption, too clever by half. We can hear it creak as it rols down the runway.

Yet it flies.

The lifting force, and the glue that holds things together, is Taylor's style. He can soar in a paragraph from vernacular to poetry; he can sum up a character in a few sentences of dialogue, whether it's the venerable Rabbi Gernsbacher flirting with heresy or two young aeronauts, Peter Munger and Albert Roache, cobbling together a flying machine with what remains of the Mehmel fortune.

"Gerson and Liselotte Mehmel had brought their Europe with them to America," the novel's magisterial narrative voice tells us -- a raw country that for these highly cultured people was a last recourse, "good for making money, that was all."

They made the money brewing "the finest beer in Texas." Their son Aharon, married to a New Orleans beauty, Lucy Pumphrey, built a mansion despite the misgivings of the family banker, who had seen "the angel of luck" dance through the wainscoting of his office when he financed the brewery but saw "a different angel, a dark one" hover behind the younger Mehmel. In Taylor's Galveston, even bankers are mystics.

When "Tales out of School" opens, it is 1907. Aharon is dead, victim of high water and venereal disease. His widow, torn between her native Catholic and adopted Jewish faiths, is hooked on patent medicines and losing her mind. His bachelor brother, Leo, studies birds and squanders his inheritance on the airplane project. Gernsbacher is "tired of being a rabbi." The brewery is sinking fast.

The only person on his way up seems to be Aharon's son Felix, who is studying the classics with tutor Etta Murph and her lover Velma Truley. He picks up knowledge of a profaner sort from Wick Frawley, a kid from across the tracks who unearths Aharon's old medical records while cleaning a doctor's office and initiates Felix into sex.

Still, it takes the mysterious Yankel Schmulowicz and his magical puppets to give the novel's propeller a twirl.

The creature coughs and trembles. Such a heaviness of learning to bear on its wings! Such a flimsy construct of fantasy to hold together with nothing more than a few tens of thousands of well-chosen words! One might as well impose European order on Texas, as the Mehmels, Gernsbacher and others try to do in vain.

Yet it flies.

-- Mark Harris, The Los Angeles Times

Jewish American Gothic.......2007-06-01

In the language of Hollywood:Isaac Singer meets Tennessee Williams, but this beautiful, sultry, intelligent novel is anything but glib. The heart-breaking story of this family of prosperous German Jews in Texas in the 1900s is told through the eyes of Felix, who is fourteen, bookish, lonely, and left more or less to fend for himself as his family, having rotted from the inside out, disintigrates. During the course of the summer, Felix discovers his sexual identity as well as his capacity for compassion. These characters come fully alive on the page. His mother is especially memorable, and the story has enough twists and turns to be full of surprise. This is a book in which I got completely immersed, and one I won't forget. Highly recommended.

Bringing Out Their Best: Values Education and Character Development through Traditional Tales

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Bringing Out Their Best: Values Education and Character Development through Traditional Tales
Norma J. Livo
Manufacturer: Libraries Unlimited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1563089343

Book Description

Here are more than 60 tales that exemplify, support, and promote the strong values and character traits that we wish to instill in our youth today. They also support the character education that is being mandated in state after state throughout the country. Grouped into 12 sections based on specific values, such as love, perserverance, fairness, and cooperation (with a separate chapter on dealing with bullies), these tales have been passed down through the ages in diverse cultures and traditions from all over the world--from Japan and India to Greece, Scotland, Africa, and the Americas. There are folktales, fables, Zen Buddhist tales, stories from the Judeo Christian Bible--even true historic tales. At the end of each section, educator and storyteller Norma Livo offers activity ideas and suggestions for discussions pertinent to specific stories and values. In addition, there is an appendix of general activity ideas that can be used in character education.

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Tales Out of School
David Silver
Manufacturer: Master Point Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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A Study in Silver: A Second Collection of Bridge Stories (Sin)
Bridge the Silver Way: A Third Collection of Bridge Stories
Guide to Better Duplicate Bridge (Master Bridge Series)

ASIN: 0969846126

Book Description

Move over Victor Mollo and David Bird! Fans of the Hideous Hog the Abbot and the Rabbi will find a new hero among the halls of Mohican College ( the last of the community colleges to be established). is a collection of humorous bridge stories from the witty and satirical pen of David Silver. It will delight readers with the adventures of his alter ego the hapless Professor Silver as he struggles towards his own version of excellence despite a malevolent and incompetent administration and a D-grade student body. And as with Mollo and Bird Silver's selection of fascinating bridge hands makes his stories even more enjoyable.

Tales Out of School: Implementing Organizational Change in the Elementary Grades

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Tales Out of School: Implementing Organizational Change in the Elementary Grades
Leila Aline Sussmann
Manufacturer: Temple Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Look Out, Earth-Below! (Fairy School)
Gail Herman
Manufacturer: Skylark
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Fairy Cloud Parade (Fairy School)
The Best Book Ever! (Fairy School)
When Wishes Come True (Fairy School)
Hide and Peep (Fairy School)
Tooth Fairy Travels (Fairy School)

ASIN: 0553487078
Release Date: 2000-03-07

Book Description

Belinda's parents take her to Earth-Below for an exciting vacation--and they let her bring Dorrie! The fairy friends have so much fun taking in all the sights and having adventures that they almost forget the most important fairy rule--don't let Big People see you. But what harm could two little fairies do in big old Earth-Below? Plenty!

It's a Jungle Out There: Mascot Tales from Texas High Schools

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It's a Jungle Out There: Mascot Tales from Texas High Schools
Rob Sledge
Manufacturer: State House Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Tales Out of School: Contemporary Writers on Their Student Years

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Re-experiencing school

Tales Out of School: Contemporary Writers on Their Student Years

Manufacturer: Beacon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Sherman Alexie, David Sedaris, and fifteen other writers on their recent experiences in American classrooms
Tales Out of School is a luminous collection of diverse and passionate life stories—on-the-ground testimonies of sitting in an American classroom today. Sherman Alexie writes of the "sweet, almost innocent choices that Indian boys [are] forced to make" in school. Stuart Dybek tells his own story of highly instructive Catholic grade-school field trips to the county jail and the stockyards, and David Sedaris narrates a horribly funny account of life underground as a gay eighth grader.

These and other writers contribute original essays that tease out the powerful, flawed, wildly diverse experience of school in America. A book for teachers wanting to understand, parents needing to make decisions, and anyone who's sat in a classroom and can't ever forget it.

"Give this book an A+. . . . Unlike many books about American education, Tales Out of School avoids the temptation to pigeonhole our system. There are no rights or wrongs here. Only truths." —Vineyard Gazette

Customer Reviews:

Re-experiencing school.......2001-03-01

In her smart Introduction Dr. Susan Richards Shreve says, "I have had a half a century of an uneasy alliance with school." She tells about that alliance from a variety of angles, beginning with herself as "a bad student, a very bad student, and finally a good one." She's an English professor, a mother of four children, am impassioned advocate and an able observer and memoirist. Her son, Porter Shreve, has his great own story to tell - as the bedeviled (and bedeviling) 'scholarship kid' at the school that employed his dad.

There are 16 additional pieces in this somewhat uneven collection. All of the contributors are Americans; academics and/or professional writers. More than a few grew up poor and felt ostracized - and talk about that experience. The domestic debate regarding public versus private schools continues, with varying success, in several of these pieces. (Nina Revoyr, Francesca Delbanco, others). In some of the stories, memories are likely fresh because the writer is only a decade or so away from the actual experience. The remembered pain and turmoil of adolescence combines is here. Sherman Alexie's young life was under a long shadow: poverty, alcoholism, and an awful disconnect. Alexie's account - of Indian cruelty to Indians - is powerfully bitter. (He reports having asked a bulimic female classmate to "Give me your lunch if you're just going to throw up." ) Immigrant experience, feelings of being an outsider for other reasons - and the ever-present threat of bullying and ostracism are here, too. Learning disabilities, sex, death, vandalism, parents, good and bad teachers - all present. Class conflict and political tension, too. Teachers have enormous powers - to annoy and to hurt, but also to love and redeem. Michael Patrick MacDonald's "Fight the Power" offers an astonishing picture of violence in to-be-integrated South Boston that slyly compares it to Belfast. Jeff Richards' essay "LD" talks about family, learning disabilities, persistence and love - with honesty and passion. David Haynes writes, straightforwardly and well, about teaching - in the dark, really, at first, and by default. He says blithely but not flippantly that he had neglected to choose a profession, so he began to teach.

Class clown David Sedaris ("I Like Guys") does not fail to deliver - in one of the liveliest of the stories.

Definitely worth reading.

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Tales Out of School
Glenna Sloan
Manufacturer: Heinemann
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 032500627X

Book Description

Glenna Davis Sloan has seen and done it all in education, and her book shows, by example, why sensitive and compassionate teaching is just as crucial as ever in making the schoolroom a safe, inviting place for learners of all ages. Whether you read her crisp, delicious vignettes in bits and snatches or devour them all at once, Sloan's stories, from both sides of the teacher's desk, acknowledge and celebrate your professionalism and reverberate with vital lessons that any education professional can apply to his or her work right away.

Sometimes poignant, sometimes playful, sometimes triumphant, and always heartfelt, Tales Out of School covers more than sixty years and spans the geographic and philosophical boundaries of twentieth and twenty-first century education. From a desolate one-room schoolhouse to the energizing halls of Columbia's Teachers College; from the suppression and humiliation of teachers who belittled women and regularly employed corporal punishment to the resonant passion and pride that helped her grow into a pioneer of child-centered practice, Sloan's memoir demonstrates not only how her commitment to educational excellence changed her life and those of thousands of children across the country but how you can do the same for your students.

Tales Out of School is a book for anyone interested in education, including policy-makers and parents, and it's ideal for new and preservice teachers who want to know what it takes to be a gifted teacher, veteran teachers looking for a mentor's inspiration, and administrators who want to share the wisdom of a respected leader who has been an active participant in the ever-changing professional landscape. Let Glenna Davis Sloan take you through a lifetime of dedicated teaching and learning; read Tales Out of School and find out why one woman's passion for education means so much to your future practice.

Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film

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Tales Out of School by Jo Keroes

Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film
Jo Keroes
Manufacturer: Southern Illinois University
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

History & Criticism | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0809322382

Customer Reviews:

Tales Out of School by Jo Keroes.......2001-04-15

"For as long as I have been an adult, I have been a teacher."

Jo Keroes, Tales Out of School, Acknowledgments, ix

_Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film_, Jo Keroes' recent book (Southern Illinois Press, 1999), explores sexism, racism, ambition, relationships between students and teachers, and the dynamics of the teaching life. Keroes writes about the images of teaching in novels, films and letters. Males such as Sir in _To Sir With Love_ are often portrayed as heroic as they struggle to teach their initially truculent students, while women such as Miss Jean Brodie in _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie_ are more often portrayed as sinister, frustrated, manipulative or thwarted as they try to reach pupils who are often increasingly insoucient or suspicious. Whether on film or on paper, her tales are dramas that take place in the classroom, in tutorials, in the often neglected or ridiculed situations in which teachers and students find themselves. Jo Keroes draws from literary theory and techniques, research and teaching experience to explore teachers' fictional and dramatic images, to unravel volatile mixes of feelings, ideas, participants and purposes. As she comments in the Introduction:

This tension between reality and representation, these contradictory images and expectations, are suggestive precisely because they speak to society's need to construe images that deny and in some cases counter a reality we find dangerous and/or unacceptable. More simply, they reveal our continued ambivalence about women's power. I'm interested in exploring not just the way these stereotypes continue to play out, but also the tensions the stereotypes reveal and the ways in which certain texts work to subvert them. While we often see traditional gender patterns inscribed in fiction and film, the most interesting of these patterns show disruptions and disharmonies, inconsistencies and contradictions, resistance to and variations on familiar themes (8).

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