THE BOB EDWARDS SHOW HIGHLIGHTS – May 4-8, 2015
Monday, May 4, 2015: Today kicks off National Teacher Appreciation Week, so we’ll be hearing from some of our favorite educators. Summers off… work days that end at 3:00pm … great hourly wages… sounds pretty sweet. Bob debunks those myths and more in his conversation with Ninive Clements Calegari and Daniel Moulthrop co-authors of a book titled Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers. Bob will also talk to Jonathan Dearman, one teacher who broke his students’ and principal’s hearts when he left teaching to sell real estate.
Tuesday, May 5, 2015: Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day – and today, Bob talks to a great one. Rafe Esquith is a fifth grade teacher at a public school in Los Angeles. He is the only teacher in history to receive the National Medal of the Arts. His students voluntarily come to school at 6:30am and stay well past the bell nearly every day. Why? Because Mr. Esquith’s approach is to Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, which is the name of one of his books. Esquith will also discuss his follow up book titled Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World. He also wrote a book of advice titled Real Talk for Real Teachers.
Wednesday, May 6, 2015: We take a break from Teacher Appreciation Week to pay tribute to Orson Welles…today (May 6th) would have been his 100th birthday. Perhaps the most influential director in film history, Welles nonetheless suffered numerous setbacks in his career as he battled studio heads who withheld money and support… and the stigma of appearing overweight and washed-up as a television pitchman in the 1970’s. Joseph McBride hopes to set the record straight with his third and most recent book on the enigmatic auteur, entitled What Ever Happened To Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career. Then, Bob talks with Chris Welles Feder about her father – his devotion to his art, and his distance from his family. Welles Feder is the author of In My Father’s Shadow.
Thursday, May 7, 2015: We get back to appreciating teachers today. Bob talks with Jason Kamras about being named the National Teacher of the Year in 2005 and updates us on what he’s been doing over the past decade. He has left the classroom to become “Chief of Human Capital” for the DC Public School System. Nearly 50 percent of new teachers in urban schools quit within three years. And since he first started writing about teaching, new teachers have looked to education activist Jonathan Kozol for advice on how to survive those first few years. Kozol joins Bob to talk about his book, Letters to a Young Teacher. On his first day teaching a writing workshop to third graders, Sam Swope gave his students a simple task: write a story – any story. What was supposed to be a 10day project evolved into a three-year odyssey, involving 28 kids from 21 different countries. Swope wrote about the experience in the book I Am a Pencil: A Teacher, His Kids and Their World of Stories.
Friday, May 8, 2015: We conclude our nod to Teacher Appreciation Week today with Irish writer Frank McCourt – he won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, Angela’s Ashes. He died in 2009, but Bob spoke with McCourt about his memoir Teacher Man, which focuses on his three decades spent teaching English in New York City’s public school system. Then, Bob talks with another teacher. When talk turned to salaries at a dinner party a few years ago, a rich lawyer blurted out, “I mean YOU’RE a teacher, Taylor. Be honest. What do you make?” Taylor Mali took offense and since then has been on the offensive, defending the role and the profession of teachers. His poem “What Teachers Make” has been viewed millions of times on YouTube and Mali has written a book by the same name.