Learning with YOUR purpose in mind -- not your parents', not your teacher's, not your school's Every day, your school, your teachers, and even your peers draw lines to measure and standardize intelligence. They decide what criteria make one person smart and another person stupid. They decide who will succeed and who will just get by. Perhaps you find yourself outside the norm, because you learn differently -- but, unlike your classmates, you have no system in place that consistently supports your ability and desire to learn. Simply put, you are considered lazy and stupid. You are expected to fail. Learning Outside the Lines is written by two such "academic failures" -- that is, two academic failures who graduated from Brown University at the top of their class. Jonathan Mooney and David Cole teach you how to take control of your education and find true success -- and they offer all the reasons why you should persevere. Witty, bold, and disarmingly honest, Learning Outside the Lines takes you on a journey toward personal empowerment and profound educational change, proving once again that rules sometimes need to be broken.

Confessional and often hilarious, in Normal Sucks a neuro-diverse writer, advocate, and father meditates on his life, offering the radical message that we should stop trying to fix people and start empowering them to succeed Jonathan Mooney blends anecdote, expertise, and memoir to present a new mode of thinking about how we live and learn—individually, uniquely, and with advantages and upshots to every type of brain and body. As a neuro-diverse kid diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD who didn't learn to read until he was twelve, the realization that that he wasn’t the problem—the system and the concept of normal were—saved Mooney’s life and fundamentally changed his outlook. Here he explores the toll that being not normal takes on kids and adults when they’re trapped in environments that label them, shame them, and tell them, even in subtle ways, that they are the problem. But, he argues, if we can reorient the ways in which we think about diversity, abilities, and disabilities, we can start a revolution. A highly sought after public speaker, Mooney has been inspiring audiences with his story and his message for nearly two decades. Now he’s ready to share what he’s learned from parents, educators, researchers, and kids in a book that is as much a survival guide as it is a call to action. Whip-smart, insightful, and utterly inspiring—and movingly framed as a letter to his own young sons, as they work to find their ways in the world—this book will upend what we call normal and empower us all.

So begins this controversial and enlightened book by Roger Schank, Ph.D., a world-renowned expert on teaming, who believes that every day of the school year our children are being failed by an academic system that does nothing to stir a lifelong passion for learning. In this lively, sometimes alarming book, Schank shatters the myths about how children learn and offers candid advice for parents who want to raise kids with gumption, ambition, creativity, inquisitiveness, and analytic and verbal proficiency.

Discover Jesus' goals of togetherness, oneness, and unity in an increasingly divided world. When you learn to confront the areas in your heart that might not love as Jesus loved, you can help build a flourishing, Christ-like culture. Throughout his ministry, Jesus specifically bridged the gap with the ostracized, outcast, and overlooked. He told his followers to do the same. The gospel message is for everyone—and our mission as believers is to make disciples of Jesus, not duplicates of ourselves. This requires us to live and love beyond our preferences, to build relationships with those who are different from us, and to go beyond the boundaries of unspoken rules and invisible lines. It's time to break the strongholds of division that have been passed down from generation to generation. In Love Outside the Lines, Jimmy Rollins will expand the gospel message of Christ beyond the lines of cultural norms, show us how to follow in Jesus' footsteps by moving away from racial stereotypes and moving toward things that unite us, empower a culture of people willing to be part of the conversation on racial reconciliation, help us embrace the kingdom truth that we are better together than we are divided, and exemplify a life of dynamic diversity at church, work, and home. Join Jimmy on a powerful journey to rediscover the discipleship of diversity that leads to unity. Together, we will confront our comfort-zone barriers—both known and unknown—and take a detour to pursue the kind of diverse relationships and honest dialog that build a flourishing Christ culture.

Labeled "dyslexic and profoundly learning disabled with attention and behavior problems," Jonathan Mooney was a short bus rider--a derogatory term used for kids in special education and a distinction that told the world he wasn't "normal." Along with other kids with special challenges, he grew up hearing himself denigrated daily. Ultimately, Mooney surprised skeptics by graduating with honors from Brown University. But he could never escape his past, so he hit the road. To free himself and to learn how others had moved beyond labels, he bought his own short bus and set out cross-country, looking for kids who had dreamed up magical, beautiful ways to overcome the obstacles that separated them from the so-called normal world.--From publisher description.

Music Outside the Lines is an informative and practical resource for all who are invested in making music composition an integral part of curriculum. Author Maud Hickey addresses the practical needs of music educators by offering both a well-grounded justification for teaching music composition and also a compendium of useful instructional ideas and classroom activities. Hickey begins with a rationale for teachers to begin composition activities in their own classrooms, with a thoughtful argument that demonstrates that all music teachers possess the skills and training needed to take children along the path toward composing satisfying musical compositions even if they themselves have never taken formal composition lessons. She also addresses some of the stickier issues that plague teaching music composition in schools such as assessment, notation, and technology. Most importantly, she introduces a curricular model for teaching composition, a model which provides an array of composition activities to try in the music classrooms and studios. These activities encourage musical and creative growth through music composition; while they are organized in logical units corresponding to existing teaching modules, they also offer jumping off points for music teachers to exercise their own creative thinking and create music composition activities that are customized to their classes and needs. As a whole, Music Outside the Lines both successfully reasons that music composition should be at the core of school music curriculum and also provides inservice and pre-service educators with an essential resource and compendium of practical tips and plans for fulfilling this goal.