To all of you veteran teachers, new teachers, student-teachers, and maybe even some of you thinking about becoming a teacher, The Show Matters is for you. Discover the many ways your classroom is a stage and why your show matters. Ignite your imagination with these simple yet empowering ideas. Awaken your creative talents to spark wonder and relentless enthusiasm for learning in the hearts and minds of your students.
Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather’s bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball’s history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.
Almost twenty-five years ago, Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first documented a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that unobtrusively altered the order and emphasis of news stories in selected television broadcasts. Their resulting book News That Matters, now hailed as a classic by scholars of political science and public opinion alike, is here updated for the twenty-first century, with a new preface and epilogue by the authors. Backed by careful analysis of public opinion surveys, the authors show how, despite changing American politics, those issues that receive extended coverage in the national news become more important to viewers, while those that are ignored lose credibility. Moreover, those issues that are prominent in the news stream continue to loom more heavily as criteria for evaluating the president and for choosing between political candidates. “News That Matters does matter, because it demonstrates conclusively that television newscasts powerfully affect opinion. . . . All that follows, whether it supports, modifies, or challenges their conclusions, will have to begin here.”—The Public Interest
Top Chef. America’s Next Top Model. Survivor. Dancing with the Stars. American Idol. Big Brother. The Biggest Loser… Everyone has a guilty reality television pleasure. Curated by Party Girl author Anna David, Reality Matters is a collection of hilarious yet revealing essays from novelists, essayists, and journalists—including Toby Young, Neil Strauss, and Stacey Grenrock Woods, among many others—about the reality television shows they love, obsess over, and cringe at; and why they, and America, can’t stop watching.
My name is Heath Germaine. As the starting cornerback for the Southeast San Antonio University football team, all eyes are on me. Under such crushing pressure, there’s no room for error in my bid to reach the NFL and help support my large family. With stakes this high, who can afford distractions? Not me, which is how I ended up in a fake relationship with the most irritating woman I know – Lauren Bagley. As a competitive gymnast, her only focus is securing a spot at the college nationals competition. If being her pretend boyfriend helps keep the idiot guys on her team off her back and the cleat chasers off mine, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. Nothing is real. We’re only pretending. Everything’s a game. So why does she suddenly matter to me? Matters to Me is the fourth book in the bestselling Hart series but can easily be read as a standalone. The series order is: Change of Hart Hart to Heart Matters of the Hart Matters to Me Topics: contemporary romance, football romance, sports romance, football series, modern romance, hot romance, emotional romance, college sports romance, HEA, strong heroine, college football player, college gymnast, anxiety, heart-warming, happy ending, alpha, romance, pro football, family, love, enemies to lovers, fake relationship, M.E. Carter, M.E. Carter football, single woman, interracial relationship, alpha hero, Hart series, new adult romance
A laser-beam focus on improving instruction to improve learning If we want to change how students write, compute, and think, then teachers must transform the old “assign-and-assess” model into engaging, coherent, and rigorous instruction. The authors show school leaders how to make this happen amidst myriad distractions, initiatives, and interruptions. Unlike other books that stop at evaluating teachers and instruction, this work demonstrates how to grow schools’ instructional capacities with a three-step process that involves: Envisioning what good teaching looks like Measuring the quality of current instruction against this standard Working relentlessly to move the quality of instruction closer and closer to the ideal
A guide to bringing nonfiction into the curriculum in third through eighth-grade classrooms, with strategies and ideas for reading nonfiction, conducting research, and writing reports.
Something very unusual is occurring on this planet right now. You have no doubt noticed it. It may be producing a more than normal amount of challenge and disjointedness in your life, and perhaps even some major upheavals. You are probably noticing it in the lives of others as well. For a while you may have thought that this was all just your mind playing tricks on you; that things were not really happening any differently, and that you’re just a little tired, a little overcommitted, a little oversensitive. But now, as each day presents itself with obstacles mounting and challenges increasing and more and more personal issues coming up to be faced and healed, it is apparent that all of this is not an illusion, not an exaggeration. So you may be asking, "Why is all this happening? What am I doing wrong?" And here’s the answer . . . You’re doing nothing wrong. AND . . . there is something very unusual going on right now in your life, and all over the planet.
