Overview

What happens when you turn a former Marine loose in a classroom filled with seventh and eighth grade students? Two Legs Suffice takes us into an ordinary classroom in an ordinary middle school in Loveland, Ohio and introduces us to young men and women of every color, shape and size imaginable. What's it like to work with 5,000 teens? How does a teacher push Todd to excel, a young man who goes on to Harvard Law School, while addressing the needs of Jen, who lives in squalor at home, with a dead dog in the family bathtub? Teaching might sound easy when you're dealing with Erin, who comes from a broken home, but studies six hours for the first essay test she' s ever taken, or Tom, a Vietnamese teen fresh off the boat, determined to succeed. It can be a hundred times more challenging when you're trying to save Rick, who brings a gun to school to shoot people, or the girl with curly black hair, who is being abused by her father and brother. By turns funny, moving, sad and passionate, Viall explains what it's like to survive and thrive in a world inhabited by teens. Finally, he guides us down a secret path that leads to enhanced learning in any classroom-following a route that should be no secret at all.

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9781512272727

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John J. Viall was born in Akron, Ohio in 1949 and excelled in school, up until seventh grade. At that point he lost interest and eventually managed to finish high school mired in the bottom half of his class. He was admitted to Ohio University in 1967, but dropped out the following year and enlisted in the United States Marines. It was in boot camp at Parris Island that he first began to consider going into teaching-and it was in the Marines that he learned the essentials of motivation. At Parris Island, he explains: I learned motivation was the most potent fuel in the world. And it was the fuel that never ran out. At Parris Island, I learned I could do more-that my comrades could do more-that we could all do more by far. It was this understanding he would try to help students to reach for more than thirty years. Viall never saw combat in the Marines. He did volunteer to go to Vietnam twice. That's how dumb I was, he writes. Instead, he did duty as a clerk in a supply unit in California and defended his country with a loaded staple gun. He returned to Ohio University in 1970, earned his Bachelor of Science degree in education in 1973, added a Master's in American history from the University of Cincinnati in 1976, and began his teaching career as a substitute teacher with the Loveland City Schools in October 1975. He retired after a successful career in May 2008. In 2007, his students helped him raise $13,500 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, after he promised to pedal a bicycle across the United States. He did so and repeated the journey in 2011, at the age of 62, and in part these trips help explain the title of his book. He is happily married, father of four children, all hard workers today.

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