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."

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

Their lives were cut brutally short...yet the legacy has on lived on for four decades. They were three of rock 'n' roll's brightest stars, touring together in a music revue that was as grueling as it was magical. Dilapidated school buses that frequently broke down and rarely had heat carried them hundreds of miles across the Midwest with its unforgiving cold. Hoping to get a decent night's sleep, a hot meal, and a chance to clean the clothes they'd been wearing for weeks, Buddy Holly chartered a plane. On February 3, 1959, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly boarded a small plane bound for rock 'n' roll heaven. This is their story, told by the family members, bandmates, and witnesses who lived it. Including material not seen in the original VH1 broadcast, "Behind the Music: the Day the Music Died" is a compelling record of one of rock 'n' roll's defining moments.

The 1999 edition of "The Best American Poetry" will exceed the expectations of the many thousands of readers who eagerly await the annual arrival of this "truly memorable anthology." (Chicago Tribune). Guest editor Robert Bly, an award-winning poet and translator -- famous, too, for his leadership role in the men's movement and his bestselling book, "Iron John" -- has made selections that present American poetry in all its dazzling originality, richness, and variety. The year's poems are striking in their vibrancy; they all display that essential energy that Bly calls "heat," whether the heat of friendship, the heat of form, or the heat that results when a poet "brings the soul up close to the thing" he or she is contemplating. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, "The Best American Poetry 1999" reflects the most exciting and memorable poetry being written at the end of the millennium.