Social Sciences Education

From the former secretary of defense and author of the acclaimed #1 best-selling memoir Duty, a characteristically direct, informed, and urgent assessment of why big institutions are failing us and how smart, committed leadership can effect real improvement regardless of scale.

The more you know about panic attacks, the safer you will feel. Here, you will find advice on how to help yourself and what to do to take back control over your life.

How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. Portrayed in mythology as either a gift from heroes or a curse from the gods, it has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine, a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition.

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly re-creates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling, and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience, and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader.

Alexandra Robbins wanted to find out if the stereotypes about sorority girls were actually true, so she spent a year with a group of girls in a typical sorority. The sordid behavior of sorority girls exceeded her worst expectations - drugs, psychological abuse, extreme promiscuity, racism, violence, and rampant eating disorders are just a few of the problems. Pledged combines a sharp-eyed narrative with extensive reporting and the fly-on-the-wall voyeurism of reality shows to provide the answer.

At a time of political polarization and economic turmoil, we yearn for superior leadership. Few have demonstrated this trait better than Captain "Sully" Sullenberger, a man who embodies the core values that are at the heart of America: responsibility, optimism, integrity, loyalty, and compassion. In this follow-up to his best-selling memoir, Sullenberger engages nearly a dozen distinguished Americans to explore the nature of leadership, what it means, what it takes, and how it can be fostered and developed in all of our lives.

In his masterful work, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis observed how modern education was changing our conception of what it means to be human. By cutting off students from the transcendent values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, modern schools ceased cultivating virtue in students and instead communicated a mechanistic vision of the world that viewed students as products to be engineered. Lewis argued that we must recover these transcendent values in order to prevent the dehumanizing tendency in modern education.

How to Teach Anything takes what academics know about education and pedagogy and translates it all into real-world skills and techniques. The learning brain works in very predictable ways, and we can use this to our advantage. Whether you are a student, tutor, professor, teacher, or even TA, understand how information takes hold and becomes useful.

At 13, bright-eyed straight-A student Sara Saedi uncovered a terrible family secret: She was breaking the law simply by living in the United States. Only two years old when her parents fled Iran, she didn't learn of her undocumented status until her older sister wanted to apply for an after-school job but couldn't because she didn't have a Social Security number. Fear of deportation kept Sara up at night, but it didn't keep her from being a teenager.

Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning.

A pioneer of the New Journalism movement, Hunter S. Thompson wrote with a fire that captured the attention of millions. Here Thompson delivers a mind-bending view of the 1992 presidential race, packed with all the horror, sacrifice, lust, and glory that made this campaign so utterly fascinating.

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.

When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.

Developed by experienced professors and professionally narrated for easy listening, this course is a great way to explore the subject of Criminology. The audio is focused and high-yield, covering the most important topics you might expect to learn in a typical undergraduate course in Criminology. The material is accurate, up-to-date, and broken down into bite-sized chapters. There are quizzes and key takeaways following each chapter to review questions commonly tested and drive home key points.

In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum, and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging eight cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment.

In The Ocean in the School, Rick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

In this startling group memoir, four friends - Black and White, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born - use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

Teachers are brain changers. Unfortunately, in traditional public, public-charter, private, parochial, and home schools across the country, most teachers lack an understanding of how the brain receives, filters, consolidates, and applies learning for both the short and long term. Neuroteach was therefore written to help solve the problem teachers and school leaders have in knowing how to bring the growing body of educational neuroscience research into the design of their schools, classrooms, and work with each individual student.