Books
Jocelyn Turner’s “Fighting the White Knight” Exposes a Wasteful Testing Frenzy That Traps Teachers and Abuses Demoralized Students. Her Refreshing Solutions Offer Hope.
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Drawing on her years of teaching experiences, and firsthand accounts of how students were failed by faulty and arbitrary standards and the exploding number of tests resulting from those standards, Ms. Turner sets out to open the eyes of readers to the reasons why the American education system is failing countless students, especially those who require extra learning support. She provides examples showing how proposed solutions to close the achievement gap routinely accomplish the opposite, widening that gap instead.
In her final year of teaching, the author found that over one-fifth of her valuable instructional hours were lost to testing demands. Those demands were based on curricular goals that could not be accomplished without substantial remedial education – yet too little time had been budgeted to teach the material slated for that year. Almost no class time remained to fill-in missing knowledge from previous years.
After ten years as a teacher in four districts and an alternative high school under twelve revolving-door principals, primarily in financially- and academically-disadvantaged districts, she found that she had had enough. Despite her best efforts, government education mandates kept sabotaging the students they were intended to help. Students who had fallen behind kept falling further behind, often as a direct result of tests and other measures designed to document and treat their learning deficits.
“Since No Child Left Behind, US schools have been burying students in tests and then drawing often misguided conclusions–when sometimes the only conclusion anyone ought to draw is that student X obviously spent hours staring at a set of questions he or she did not understand and maybe could not even read,” writes Turner.
Published by Covenant Books of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Jocelyn Turner’s new book also looks at the $1.6 trillion student debt crisis, a consequence of a single-minded, college-bound pipeline that fails to consider student interests and aptitudes; vocabulary deficits left to fester due to narrowly targeted curricula; and the sneaky gutting of elective, vocational, and gifted education.
Readers can purchase “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards, and Other Good Intentions” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Covenant Books is an international Christian owned and operated publishing house based in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. Covenant Books specializes in all genres of work which appeal to the Christian market. For additional information or media inquiries, contact Covenant Books at 843-507-8373.
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Books
Former Wildlife Officer Rick Larnerd Blends Gasparilla Legend with Modern Florida Thriller in New Novel
Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk
Rick Larnerd has published a new novel, "The Mystery of Gasparilla Bay," that sets a present-day Florida conservation story against the backdrop of the Jose Gaspar pirate legend. The book is out now through Covenant Books, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and the Apple iTunes Store.
The novel follows Andy Warden, a Florida conservation officer, as he tracks an alligator poacher named Bart Thibodeaux through the state’s backwaters and bayous. According to the publisher, Thibodeaux’s pursuit of illegal game takes a dangerous turn when he takes a vacationing mother and her two children hostage while she is treasure hunting along the Gulf Coast, a decision that sets the novel’s central chase in motion. The story threads in the real history of Jose Gaspar, the early nineteenth-century pirate whose reputed buried treasure along Florida’s Gulf Coast has drawn hunters and storytellers for generations.
Larnerd’s own background runs close to his protagonist’s. He spent thirty-one years in law enforcement, working as a wildlife officer in both Pennsylvania and Tennessee before serving eight years as chief of police in his Tennessee hometown. He also served as an active-duty infantryman. The publisher’s materials describe that experience as shaping the novel’s depiction of conservation work and the people who do it.
"I wanted to blend the romance of pirate legend with the reality of modern-day conservation challenges," Larnerd said, according to the announcement. "The result is a story that keeps readers on the edge of their seats while honoring both history and the natural world."
The book is published through Covenant Books, a Christian publishing house. Larnerd has said on social media that the novel has already drawn its first reader review, though he did not detail its contents.
Studio CarryOnHarry sees a natural hook here: a work authored by someone with thirty years of real law enforcement experience brings distinctive credibility to its fictional conservation officer protagonist than most adventure fiction manages.
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Books
Barry R. Willis’s New Book Traces the Pony Express and Its Costs on the Frontier
Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk
Author Barry R. Willis has published "The Legacy of the Pony Express: True Tales from the Old West," a history of the short-lived mail relay service that has become one of the enduring symbols of the American frontier. The book is published through Covenant Books.
The Pony Express ran for about eighteen months beginning in 1860, carrying mail across roughly 1,900 miles between Missouri and California before the transcontinental telegraph made it obsolete. Willis’s account draws on primary sources, period writings and firsthand testimonies to reconstruct the riders’ journeys across mountains and plains, according to the announcement.
The book doesn’t stop at the riders themselves. According to the publisher, Willis places their exploits inside the larger story of westward expansion, including its toll on Native American communities, and examines how economic pressure, political ambition and individual risk-taking intersected during the period. The narrative also touches on wagon trains and the gold rushes that drew settlers west alongside the mail route.
"The stories of these riders and the era they inhabited deserve to be told with honesty and depth," Willis said in the announcement. "By presenting multiple perspectives — including the often-silenced voices of Native Americans — we can better understand both the achievements and moral complexities of our frontier heritage."
Willis has previously written on American musical heritage, a background the publisher says informs his approach to historical narrative here. "The Legacy of the Pony Express" is available in hardcover and as an e-book through major retailers including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books and Google Play.
Studio CarryOnHarry is always glad to see frontier history get the fuller, more complicated treatment — the Pony Express makes for a good story, but the context around it is where the real history lives.
Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.
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