This unique collective story and guidebook encourages and supports educators to envision their future journey while living fully in the present. Using developmental understanding of mid-life and the years beyond, this book expands on the present and potential experience of teachers, both active and retired, in these areas: -Work -Ways of being -Personal connections -Caring for self and others -Planning and preparing, and -Fulfillment and freedom Readers will find validation of their experience as developing and mature educators and the encouragement to continue to enhance their abilities and professional lives. Through examples from the lives of other educators, questions for reflection, and the commentary and perspective of the author, those seeking enhancement in each dimension of their lives will find a home in this guide. Written in conversational style, this book will be of interest to educators and retired teachers and administrators as well as beginning and pre-service teachers.

"Great for new teachers and veterans alike. I would highly recommend it to enhance a mentoring program."
-Mary Camp, Special Services Coordinator, Peoria Public Schools, IL

"The process and strategies in this reflective journal are invaluable."
-Laura M. Frey, Assistant Professor, Central Michigan University

"This guide is a positive professional lifeline for us!"
-Mary Gale Budzisz, Retired Teacher

Give yourself the gift of reflection every day!

An invaluable addition to any briefcase or book bag, this week-by-week calendar provides teachers with a wealth of opportunities to consider each day's successes and challenges and to set new goals for the next day, week, or year. This thoughtful planning and organizational resource includes:

• A weekly planning calendar with writing space for every day of the year
• Monthly themes, professional tips, motivators, and affirmations
• Room to record your weekly goals and "To Do" lists

With room for daily and weekly reminders, memos, and reflections, this is an ideal planning tool for busy teachers-or the perfect gift for colleagues and friends!

When Bill Meissner's collection of short stories Hitting into the Wind was published in 1994, it was called "a quiet masterpiece of baseball writing" by the Greensboro, North Carolina, News and Record. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said, "Bill Meissner captures baseball with all its crystalline beauty--the remarkable reverberation of time and space and character." And The New York Times Book Review said, "Just about every tale here recalls those precious years when a chance to play in the majors was all a boy could ask from life."

Now, in his first novel, Bill Meissner again uses baseball as a window to his characters. In Spirits in the Grass, we meet Luke Tanner, a thirty-something ball player helping to build a new baseball field in his beloved hometown of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Luke looks forward to trying out for the local amateur team as soon as possible. His chance discovery of a small bone fragment on the field sets in motion a series of events and discoveries that will involve his neighbors, local politicians, and the nearby Native American reservation. Luke's life, most of all, will be transformed. His growing obsession with the ball field and what's beneath it threatens his still fragile relationship with his partner, Louise, and challenges Luke's assumptions about everyone, especially himself.

Spirits in the Grass rings true with small-town Midwestern values. The characters, including Luke's independent partner Louise, grapple with their passion and their identities. In this beautiful and haunting novel, baseball serves as a metaphor for life itself, with its losses and defeats, its glories and triumphs.

Fourteen degrees below zero cold enough to freeze the soul
Lewis Ingraham is cold. He s lost his wife to cancer, his executive career, his once sure grip on the world around him. All that he can hold on to is his beautiful daughter Jay, a brilliant student who has become a struggling single mother. But he sees that even Jay is starting to slip away from him, in favor of Stephen, her self-important boyfriend. This time Lewis is going to fight back.
But when Lewis takes out his fury on Stephen, he ignites a chain reaction of violence. Now winter is bearing down on Minnesota. Desire, guilt, and rage are swirling in the snow. And a heinous crime is about to lead three people down a steep and unforgiving slope into a realm of cold, hard truth.
Set in a chillingly barren milieu and invoking comparisons to Donald Westlake s bestselling classic The Ax, 14 Degrees Below Zero is a stunning, provocative, and utterly unforgettable experience in psychological suspense and American" "noir fashioned from the heat of ordinary lives."

SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG WITH JOHN WRIGHT.
His mind is playing tricks on him. He sees people he thinks he knows, but they re only strangers. His memory flickers in and out of focus. What he does know is this: He hasn t seen his fiancee, Iris, in over three years. He fled their Los Angeles apartment one night after a fit of rage that may or may not have left her dead. He s been living off a small fortune he stole from Iris s wealthy, manipulative father. He keeps it hidden behind the wall of his Minneapolis bedroom. He bides his time and waits for the police to find him and charge him with his lover s murder though he isn t sure if he killed her, or if she s really dead.
Iris was his anchor, the one joy in his troubled life. At Harvard, she transformed John from a shy and awkward freshman into an elegant, self-assured man. But now she s gone, and his memories of her are obscured by a miasma of guilt and uncertainty.
Then one bright day Iris returns. But is she real, or just a cruel figment of his addled brain? Only a journey into the deepest corners of his past will reveal the truth about John and Iris about life and death and love, and secrets too dark to reveal."

It takes a baby to turn a guy into a man.

The poems of Thomas R. Smith's second collection of poetry explore passions within relationships, the grief of sons, brothers and fathers, and the steady joy of commitment to the poet's art. "Some of the finest American love poems of recent decades."--Robert Bly