Any Given Monday ...: An Urban Educator’s Journey

How can we do school differently? Mokysha Benford, Ed.D., seeks to answer that question and others in this deeply personal collection of vignettes highlighting the lessons she’s learned in various roles at school—ranging from substitute teaching to building principal. She explores the myriad problems that show up at school on any given day. These issues go far beyond teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and many educators have no clue how to deal with them. For instance, how do you handle students throwing desks and chairs, running out of school and into traffic, elementary school children engaging in sexual acts, and helping fifth-grade students pass an assessment when they don’t know the alphabet? There are no easy answers, but success begins by focusing on more than academic subjects and giving freely of yourself on Any Given Monday.