Hi, teachers! Last year, I started tagging all my poem documents. You know, giving them labels in order to find all my poems that are, say, about science, or are haiku, or whatever. I realized then that I had a fair number of poems about teachers and teaching, and I thought, Hey, maybe I can gather these together into a collection just for teachers!
So, I did. I gathered those poems, and I wrote a lot of new ones, too. The new poems often emerged right after I did school visits, attended NCTE, or saw posts on Facebook or blogs that really hit me. I was writing and writing and finally realized, I’ve got to stop at some point! And, I thought it would make a nice end-of-year book for teachers.
So, The Heart of a Teacher is available on Kindle now. It’s 64 poems in all sorts of voices and forms and attitudes. My hope is that every educator who reads it will find himself/herself in there somewhere, and that, most of all, the immense admiration I have for teachers comes through.
“A Librarian Can Be…” and “The Heart of Teaching” are image versions of two poems from the book–and you can see them here. I’ll share a few more over the next few weeks. (And there are several poems plus the Table of Contents in the Book Description on Amazon.) Meanwhile, if you think you or a colleague would appreciate a poetry collection celebrating teachers, I hope you’ll check it out. Thank you, educators, for everything you have done and continue to do in my life and my family’s life. This book is for you.
So many congratulations, Laura! What a wonderful table of contents…I was taken back to my teaching days and found myself thinking about the teachers I love so much. Teachers have huge hearts…you have written a gift. xxx
What a nice gift from you! I’ve bought it and will share. Thanks!
This is really a lovely idea!
Buying today and looking forward to sharing some with my house team at our end-of-year meetings!
I’ve kept this post so I can see about your book, and it sounds lovely, Laura. Thanks very much for creating it for teachers everywhere!