Michael Harker’s goal is to record Iowa’s historically significant architecture before it disappears forever. From Coon Center School no. 5 in Albert City to Pleasant Valley School in Kalona, North River School in Winterset to Douglas Center School in Sioux Rapids, and Iowa’s first school to Grant Wood’s first school, he has achieved this goal on a grand scale in Harker’s One-Room Schoolhouses.

This engaging book examines the history of the one-room school and how successive generations of Americans have remembered--and just as often misremembered--this powerful national icon.

Annotation One- and two-room schools represent a paradoxical time in Texas history when school played second fiddle to family duties but still served as the focus of community life. Luther Bryan Clegg's The Empty Schoolhouse provides a direct link to the past through interviews with students who attended these schools and teachers who taught in this area between Fort Worth and Odessa and the Hill Country and Amarillo. Former students share stories describing Friday afternoon "literary societies, " dead snakes in desk drawers, pranks, fires, travel to and from school, and discipline. Drawing on historical and sociological data as well as interviews, Clegg presents intriguing accounts of rural life, preserving the uniqueness of the "olden days."

In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver’s Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city’s most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees, and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world’s most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park’s landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with nature.

From New York Times bestseller Rory Feek, one half of the singing duo Joey+Rory, comes The Cow Said Neigh!, a fun and humorous tale of farm animals who wish they were like the other animals . . . which leads to a farm-full of confusion! Children will laugh out loud when the cow wants to run free like a horse, the sheep wants a snout like a pig, and the dog wants to be inside like the cat. The Cow Said Neigh! will teach children: Animal sounds with clever rhymes How to celebrate the unique strengths in each of us This delightful book is perfect for: Reading out loud at home or in classrooms Ages 4-8

A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere: this is the goal of the Khan Academy, a passion project that grew from an ex-engineer and hedge funder's online tutoring sessions with his niece, who was struggling with algebra, into a worldwide phenomenon. Today millions of students, parents, and teachers use the Khan Academy's free videos and software, which have expanded to encompass nearly every conceivable subject; and Academy techniques are being employed with exciting results in a growing number of classrooms around the globe. Like many innovators, Khan rethinks existing assumptions and imagines what education could be if freed from them. And his core idea-liberating teachers from lecturing and state-mandated calendars and opening up class time for truly human interaction-has become his life's passion. Schools seek his advice about connecting to students in a digital age, and people of all ages and backgrounds flock to the site to utilize this fresh approach to learning. In The One World Schoolhouse, Khan presents his radical vision for the future of education, as well as his own remarkable story, for the first time. In these pages, you will discover, among other things: How both students and teachers are being bound by a broken top-down model invented in Prussia two centuries ago Why technology will make classrooms more human and teachers more important How and why we can afford to pay educators the same as other professionals/DIV How we can bring creativity and true human interactivity back to learning/DIV Why we should be very optimistic about the future of learning. Parents and politicians routinely bemoan the state of our education system. Statistics suggest we've fallen behind the rest of the world in literacy, math, and sciences. With a shrewd reading of history, Khan explains how this crisis presented itself, and why a return to "mastery learning," abandoned in the twentieth century and ingeniously revived by tools like the Khan Academy, could offer the best opportunity to level the playing field, and to give all of our children a world-class education now. More than just a solution, The One World Schoolhouse serves as a call for free, universal, global education, and an explanation of how Khan's simple yet revolutionary thinking can help achieve this inspiring goal.