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A Teacher's Odyssey in Poor America
University of California Press
January 2013
On Sale: January 13, 2013
296 pages
ISBN: 0520266498
EAN: 9780520266490
Kindle: B00AZV2H00
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Can one teacher truly make a difference in her students’
lives when everything is working against them? Can a love
for literature and learning save the most vulnerable of
youth from a life of poverty? The Road Out is a gripping account of one teacher’s journey
of hope and discovery with her students—girls growing up
poor in a neighborhood that was once home to white
Appalachian workers, and is now a ghetto. Deborah Hicks, set
out to give one group of girls something she never had: a
first-rate education, and a chance to live their dreams. A
contemporary tragedy is brought to life as she leads us deep
into the worlds of Adriana, Blair, Mariah, Elizabeth,
Shannon, Jessica, and Alicia?seven girls coming of age in
poverty. This is a moving story about girls who have lost their
childhoods, but who face the street’s torments with courage
and resiliency. “I want out,” says 10-year-old Blair, a tiny
but tough girl who is extremely poor and yet deeply
imaginative and precocious. Hicks tries to convey to her
students a sense of the power of fiction and of sisterhood
to get them through the toughest years of adolescence. But
by the time they’re sixteen, eight years after the start of
the class, the girls are experiencing the collision of their
youthful dreams with the pitfalls of growing up in chaotic
single-parent families amid the deteriorating cityscape. Yet even as they face disappointments and sometimes despair,
these girls cling to their desire for a better future. The
author’s own life story—from a poorly educated girl in a
small mountain town to a Harvard-educated writer, teacher,
and social advocate—infuses this chronicle with a message of
hope.
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