Listen to Love, Mrs. Euker by Susan Cunningham Euker

Book Description

Love, Mrs. Euker is a series of vignettes written by a 40-year-old former teacher who returns to the classroom after ten years of retirement, leaving the calm and comfort of her well-ordered suburban life as a wife and mother for the wilds of a modern blackboard jungle. While she aspired to have a positive influence on her students, what she didn't foresee was the unexpected impact returning to teaching would have on her. In the true spirit of coddiwompling defined as traveling in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination, this Baltimore-based schoolteacher left her domestic cocoon and journeyed headlong into an unforeseen and unsettling future. While her family remained her central focus, she discovered a different dimension to her life, and in teaching teenagers, learned much about herself. Experience the joys and heartbreak of a life-changing career in education as you stand in a teacher's shoes as she cheers her students' success, grieves over lives interrupted, and experiences the challenge and rewards of preparing young people for an uncharted future. With wit, hard-earned wisdom and confessed foibles here and there, this veteran teacher presents a candid, insightful perspective of a career in education in all its tedium and shining moments of glory. In her account of twenty years of coaching, instructing, guiding and counseling students, live through the triumph and tears as she recounts her "purposeful journey towards a vague destination." In this tribute to her former students at Hereford High School in suburban Baltimore, she writes for everyone who has ever sat in a classroom, or held a piece of chalk in their hand, or dreamed of inspiring the future. This is a love letter to teachers and their students everywhere.