Here are 100 books that Teacher Man fans have personally recommended if you like
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Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I escaped an abusive real life by reading stories that transported me away. They were written by female authors who seemed to speak directly to me. By their example, they told me to be brave and strong. To keep learning. They taught that if I rose to the challenges that presented themselves, I too would end up triumphant like them.
Walls’ recounts her unconventional childhood marked by poverty, instability, and the eccentric choices of her parents.
The memoir offers an unflinching but often tender portrait of a deeply flawed family and the complicated bonds of love and loyalty. Walls’s voice is both clear-eyed and compassionate as she revisits her past.
Wanting to make sense of my own dysfunctional family, I reread this book several times.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I was born in England but was ‘exported’ to Malaya/sia in the 1950s, where my father worked as an engineer. I developed a life-long love for the languages and cultures of the region. I did Chinese Studies at Leeds University and then went to study Chinese literature in China, arriving there in 1976. I have retained a love and fascination for the Far East and have lived and worked in tertiary institutions in Burma, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. I loved the books on my list because they all added to my knowledge of China but in very different ways.
This is a wonderful memoir about teaching English in a school in a small town on the banks of the Yangtze River in Sichuan. Hessler was the first foreigner to live in the town for several decades, and I loved reading about how he learned more about himself from his students and his own understanding of what it is like to be immersed in a completely new cultural environment.
When Peter Hessler went to China in the late 1990s, he expected to spend a couple of peaceful years teaching English in the town of Fuling on the Yangtze River. But what he experienced - the natural beauty, cultural tension, and complex process of understanding that takes place when one is thrust into a radically different society - surpassed anything he could have imagined. Hessler observes firsthand how major events such as the death of Deng Xiaoping, the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, and the controversial consturction of the Three Gorges Dam have affected even the people of…
Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I escaped an abusive real life by reading stories that transported me away. They were written by female authors who seemed to speak directly to me. By their example, they told me to be brave and strong. To keep learning. They taught that if I rose to the challenges that presented themselves, I too would end up triumphant like them.
Raised in a survivalist family that rejected formal education and medical care, Westover never entered a classroom until age 17.
Her journey from rural Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge is a remarkable story of transformation through self-education, resilience, and the pursuit of truth, even when it means questioning your origins.
Like Westover’s father, my father held very strong beliefs separating us from others. But we both instinctively know there was more to life.
Selected as a book of the year by AMAZON, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW YORK TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, VOGUE, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER and RED MAGAZINE
'One of the best books I have ever read . . . unbelievably moving' Elizabeth Day 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told' Louise O'Neill 'A memoir to stand alongside the classics . . . compelling and joyous' Sunday Times
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’ve been a teacher for over 30 years and a traveler for longer. As a child, I lived in Germany and Japan. When I grew up, I continued to travel, teaching and living in Thailand, London, and China. I’ve written book chapters, poetry, travel pieces, and won a number of writing prizes: the 2023 New York Book Festival prize and a finalist for both the Peter Taylor Prize for Literature and the Gival Press Novel Award. A graduate of Middlebury College (BA) and University of Rochester (PhD), I now live in San Diego with my husband and two cats, teach adult literacy, and work as a volunteer at the San Diego Zoo.
Whereas Hessler’s book is about a country gradually opening up to the west, Suki Kim’s book is about a country completely isolated.
Kim works for six months in North Korea at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a school for the boys of the ruling elite. While living there, rather than connecting with her students, she is unsettled by how deep the country’s deceptions are.
The university, although claiming to be a school for science and industry, has neither labs nor modern technology. Her travel is circumscribed and carefully scripted. The students lie effortlessly about things of little consequence. The entire country seems to be built on holograms and shadows. She travels as teacher, but in the end serves as journalist, seeking the truth behind a country that the world barely understands.
It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, except for the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. This is where Suki Kim has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.
Life at the university is lonely and claustrophobic. Her letters are read by censors and she must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but also from her…
I taught teenagers and young adults for 40 years. During these years, I always thought about what I could use to make my classroom an exciting place for learning. I would hear a new song about loneliness that I wanted to share with my students. Or I would think of a prompt they would laugh about in notebook writing. Too often, we take the dedication teachers give to their students for granted. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have and make you remember again a special teacher in your life who gave his/her all, and if you’re a teacher, here’s to you!
I love this book, a classic from the 1960s, for its humanity and how much this young, inexperienced teacher cares about her students. She is pretty much thrown into the NYC public schools and struggles to stay afloat.
The book, written as a novel, is actually a collection of discarded scraps of paper from the classroom wastebasket—notes, doodles, memos, hall passes, student complaints. The young teacher expresses age-old dilemmas teachers face: “Am I making a difference? Do I get through? Do they care? Do they understand how much I care?”
Our reissue of Bel Kaufman's bestselling 1964 novel timelessly depicts the shambolic joys and myriad frustrations of a young teacher. With an introduction by Diane Ravitch.
Sylvia Barrett arrives at New York City's Calvin Coolidge High fresh from earning literature degrees at Hunter College and eager to shape young minds. Instead she encounters broken windows, a lack of supplies, a stifling bureaucracy, and students with no interest in Chaucer. Her bumpy yet ultimately rewarding journey is depicted through an extraordinary collection of correspondence: sternly worded yet nonsensical administrative memos, furtive notes of wisdom from teacher to teacher, 'polio consent slips',…
My connection to books about Iran goes beyond simple curiosity—it's personal. Reading these stories feels like going back to the streets and memories that shaped my childhood. The books I’ve chosen to highlight here offer powerful and moving portraits of Iranian life. They reflect the struggles and beauty of a country that has played a big role in my own journey, both personally and as a writer. Each one shows a different side of Iran, capturing voices and experiences that are often overlooked or misunderstood. Together, they offer a deeper understanding of what it means to be Iranian.
This memoir tells the true story of a literature professor in Iran who invited a small group of her former female students to secretly meet at her home and discuss banned Western books. Nafisi shares how, in a country where personal freedom was disappearing, these stories became a way for them to hold on to their voices and identities.
The book blends their real lives with the novels they read—like Lolita and The Great Gatsby—showing how fiction can offer hope and resistance, even in the darkest times. It's both a sharp look at life under an oppressive regime and a moving reminder of how powerful books can be.
When Azar Nafisi was fired from Tehran University (where she was teaching English literature) because she refused to wear a veil, she gathered a group of her female students and resumed her classes at home, privately and discreetly. There, a group of young women discussed, argued about and communed with Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Henry James, Nabokov and others in the canon of English writers. The surreal picture of reading "Lolita", weighing the sexuality of Jane Austen or the American authenticity of Gatsby in the severe aftermath of Iran's Islamic Revolution was not lost on either Nafisi or her students. The…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I taught teenagers and young adults for 40 years. During these years, I always thought about what I could use to make my classroom an exciting place for learning. I would hear a new song about loneliness that I wanted to share with my students. Or I would think of a prompt they would laugh about in notebook writing. Too often, we take the dedication teachers give to their students for granted. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have and make you remember again a special teacher in your life who gave his/her all, and if you’re a teacher, here’s to you!
A student would be incredibly lucky to have had Palmer as a teacher. I adore his humanistic way of thinking about teaching. As we all know, a classroom can be such a joyful place if teachers and students are on a voyage of discovery, but at other times, a lifeless, frustrating place to run away from. This is the most theoretical book of the five, but it’s based on his years of teaching experience.
Palmer feels strongly that good teaching cannot be reduced to technique if a teacher doesn’t have self-knowledge. I really appreciated his advice to slow down, keep questioning, and work on learning who you are. This is good advice for not just teaching but any field!
Wisdom that's been inspiring, motivating, and guiding teachers for two decades
The Courage to Teach speaks to the joys and pains that teachers of every sort know well. Over the last 20 years, the book has helped countless educators reignite their passion, redirect their practice, and deal with the many pressures that accompany their vital work.
Enriched by a new Foreword from Diana Chapman Walsh, the book builds on a simple premise: good teaching can never be reduced to technique. Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher, that core of self where intellect, emotion, and spirit…
As a young student, my goal was to be invisible. I was the child who hid between the time-honored cracks in the floorboards of the antiquated school where – decades earlier – my mother also attended. I resided between the cracks (BTC); the not-so-fancy term for those students who faintly prick the adult senses that something is amiss. How ironic as I fast-forward to my initial career decision, I actually chose to become a teacher, a daily life path in the very environment I once despised. Yet, former BTC membership caused me to seek out those silent, self-marginalized students to bring them out of the floorboards and into the daylight.
After more than thirty years of teaching college students, Dr. “Tony” Fredericks put pen to paper to create a practical and solution-based guide for adjunct professors.
First, the reader is guided to establish best teaching practices for this specialized group of students. The author also provides countless tools as he details how to select a textbook and design a syllabus, define first-day teaching expectations, pose effective questions to propel stimulating discussions, and teach diverse populations of students.
Meticulously constructed, the author composes the text in a well-organized and easy-to-read format. As an aside, Dr. Tony Fredericks currently is the author of over one-hundred-seventy books, comprised as adult non-fiction books, children’s books, pre-service teacher books, and teacher resource books. Not too shabby.
The Ancillary Army. Freeway Flyers. Roads Scholars. Turnpike Teachers. These are some of the nicknames given to part-time college teachers. They may teach one or two courses at a single institution, or, in some cases, they may teach multiple courses at multiple institutions. Often their office consists of the front seat of their car, and their desk is a cardboard box. Their lunch is whatever they can grab at McDonalds while zipping through traffic to their next scheduled class.
For many, the thought of teaching one or two courses in their area of specialty is most appealing. Not only does…
As a young student, my goal was to be invisible. I was the child who hid between the time-honored cracks in the floorboards of the antiquated school where – decades earlier – my mother also attended. I resided between the cracks (BTC); the not-so-fancy term for those students who faintly prick the adult senses that something is amiss. How ironic as I fast-forward to my initial career decision, I actually chose to become a teacher, a daily life path in the very environment I once despised. Yet, former BTC membership caused me to seek out those silent, self-marginalized students to bring them out of the floorboards and into the daylight.
After nearly four decades of serving as a United States Navy Seal, Four-Star Admiral McRaven chronicles the lives of everyday heroes, such as the courage of Dr. Kenneth Cooper, astronaut; or the tenacity of Dr. Jim Allison, cancer researcher.
Chapters are organized as short stories, devoted to promoting the lives of heroes who espouse honorable qualities that range from sacrifice to forgiveness. Simply stated, Admiral McRaven details character-building stories that promote the best in humanity.
From the acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Make Your Bed—a short, inspirational book about the qualities of true, everyday heroes.
THE HERO CODE is Admiral McRaven's ringing tribute to the real, everyday heroes he's met over the years, from battlefields to hospitals to college campuses, who are doing their part to save the world.
When Bill McRaven was a young boy growing up in Texas, he dreamed of being a superhero. He longed to put on a cape and use his superpowers to save the earth from destruction. But as he…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve been a teacher for over 30 years and a traveler for longer. As a child, I lived in Germany and Japan. When I grew up, I continued to travel, teaching and living in Thailand, London, and China. I’ve written book chapters, poetry, travel pieces, and won a number of writing prizes: the 2023 New York Book Festival prize and a finalist for both the Peter Taylor Prize for Literature and the Gival Press Novel Award. A graduate of Middlebury College (BA) and University of Rochester (PhD), I now live in San Diego with my husband and two cats, teach adult literacy, and work as a volunteer at the San Diego Zoo.
Perhaps the most famous teacher abroad is Anna Leonowens, who was immortalized in the musical The King and I. A lowly Victorian woman single-handedly reshapes the history of Thailand. If you want to read that story you can read Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam.
Far more interesting is Anna’s true story: a con artist, who lies about everything that happened to her. Habegger’s biography Masked sorts through the lies and fiction. He offers a complicated narrative of a biracial woman who told exaggerated tales of enslavement, romance, and her imagined role in democratizing Thailand. Her life becomes one of fancy and self-invention. Both sadly are traps too often seen in myths crafted by self-absorbed travelers living abroad.
A brave British widow goes to Siam and-by dint of her principled and indomitable character-inspires that despotic nation to abolish slavery and absolute rule: this appealing legend first took shape after the Civil War when Anna Leonowens came to America from Bangkok and succeeded in becoming a celebrity author and lecturer. Three decades after her death, in the 1940s and 1950s, the story would be transformed into a powerful Western myth by Margaret Landon's best-selling book Anna and the King of Siam and Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I.
