Parents, and most politicians, agree about the vital importance of quality education for American children. We have been told by the news media that our children cannot read, cannot do math, cannot communicate effectively; in other words, our education system is in crisis and our children are paying the price. Author Fred Stephenson, an educator himself, examines not the students but the adults who provide the teaching. In EXTRAORDINARY TEACHERS, author Fred Stephenson invited recipients of The University of Georgia’s Josiah Meigs Award for Excellence in Teaching to write on teaching philosophy, responsibilities, advice, myths and realities in the teaching environment. The result is this book, a collection of 36 candid, encouraging and insightful papers edited into a coherent dialog on all aspects of American education.

Most critics agree that teachers and teaching methods make or break an educational system. The teachers who contributed to this book are widely diverse as to their teaching styles, but united in their devotion to excellence. They inspired Fred Stephenson to compile their contributions into a book that could be shared with parents, educators and students. Stephenson says that this is a book about “what it means to be a teacher and about the love and respect that bond students and teachers together.” Stephenson has been in the classroom, from both sides of the desk, for a long time: “I sat in classrooms for twenty-two years as a student. For the past twenty-nine years I have been a high school and college teacher. And for thirty-two years I have been a parent conscientiously monitoring our three children as they passed through the schools on their educational journeys. From these experiences I have drawn one significant conclusion. America’s educational system is seriously flawed, underachieving, and heavily in need of change.... My colleagues and I wrote this book to share what we have learned in our more than one thousand years of teaching experience and to lead this country along the path to educational excellence.”

This is an eye-opening book. It manages to be uplifting and hopeful while at the same time being honest about the fact that our schools and our classrooms and many of our individual teachers are not all they should be. The hope and encouragement come from the examples these teachers set. They are dedicated to a profession they feel is one of the most important in the world. Their zeal is boundless and their success proves that the abysmal state of American education can be turned around, not through government intervention, but from the inside out.

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