This blog is not simply online support for my upcoming book, Dance Like a Wave Upon the Sea, but it serves as a place of expression about the many complicated issues associated with censorship issues in education. Here you will find my observations, feelings, and ideas–as well as updates about the upcoming release of the memoir.
The memoir’s compelling story offers the passions of an English teacher and the curiosity of a hardworking student. Both are caught in a vortex of prejudice, a 21st-century high school clinging to an image of success and identity in an age of change, and the resulting challenges that face those who are unafraid to examine human experience. The memoir offers reflections on the drive to learn and to teach, lingering over personal and professional moments that illustrate those yearnings It also includes challenges to these desires and the no small slight of a school administrative abandonment, of a teacher, of students and of the idea of education itself. However, the power of integrity and kindness, which forms the fabric of healthy communities, ultimately rescues me from injustice.
On February 25, 2015, I taught my AP/ECE Literature and Composition course at South Windsor High School. With 12 minutes left in period three, a student offered questions about an Allen Ginsberg poem that he had brought to class. The aftermath of abandonment has changed me and my life. Dance Like a Wave Upon the Sea is my memoir about devotion to education in the face of intolerance. 12 Minutes Before Cruelty is a blog established to address issues associated with the fierce passion associated with teaching that empowers students to become the people they need to be and support them through an engaged conversation about out pluralistic society.
June of 2019 is the targeted release date.
Dance Like a Wave Upon the Sea 