Blog Topic of the Week: Back to School

Last week's blog topic was "Back to School"--a notion that's on most people's minds, in one way or another, at this time of year: many Red Room bloggers are teachers and/or students, many have kids in school, and all of us have memories of classrooms, lessons, and teachers (good and bad). Here are the three bloggers we chose to feature his week:

Farzana Versey shares a memory of teaching visually impaired students, and what she learned from them.

"Many of them were from small towns and despite their education they would land up with jobs as telephone operators or work that did not do justice to their talent or knowledge. I felt no pity, just a deep sense of having too much for too little."

Read "Dark Light"

Peggy Landsman remembers one of her favorite teachers.

"When Mr. McCormack teaches about Paul Revere's Ride, I can swear there's a horse in the room. I make sure to check the bottoms of my shoes before going on to my next class."

Read "Back to School with Mr. McCormack"

Rob Loughran writes about his youngest daughter's first day of school, and how it helped him begin to heal after a tragedy in his family.

"The day I dropped Elisa off for her first day of school I returned, for the first and only time in my life to a quiet and empty house."

Read "First Day"

Each of these three bloggers will receive a copy of Red Room Author Joyce Maynard's novel Labor Day (William Morrow, 2009): "a story of love, sexual passion, painful adolescence, and devastating betrayal as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy--and the man he later becomes--looking back on the events of a single long, hot, and life-altering weekend."

We thank Joyce for donating her book, and we thank you all for participating. There were some wonderful blogs this week--here are a few more you won't want to miss: