Marilyn Forrester arrived in Alaska in 1977 with a goal of striking it rich by being a welder on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. With her traumatic divorce behind her, a new English degree, return airline ticket, and $200 in her pocket, she was ready for adventure. However, she didn’t do welding, but had unique and exciting adventures as she worked for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company in Anchorage, at Pump Station Five, and later at Prudhoe Bay. While working at Prudhoe Bay, she applied for a teaching position at Alaska Business College, and was immediately hired. Marilyn discovered she loved teaching and learning! After many humorous predicaments, she was hired at the Bush village of Napaskiak. As a teacher, Marilyn has a deep love for children that shines through in Teaching at the Top of the World. Sometimes Marilyn reflected, “And they are even paying me to do this job.” She became an advocate for her Special Education students. Her many adventures include being lost in a whiteout while walking home from school, showering without soap and drying with Kleenex, and golfing in the Nome Bering Sea Tournament. Teaching at the Top of the World chronicles the joys and hardships of living and teaching in remote Alaska. Perhaps she really did strike it rich—she affected the lives of hundreds of children.Marilyn was one of the writers featured in Alaska Women Write, a collection of stories about adventurous Alaska women.

The incredible bestselling book from the author of No Barriers and The Adversity Advantage Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of thirteen. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disability and lead a fulfilling and exciting life. In this poignant and inspiring memoir, he shares his struggle to push past the limits imposed on him by his visual impairment-and by a seeing world. He speaks movingly of the role his family played in his battle to break through the barriers of blindness: the mother who prayed for the miracle that would restore her son's sight and the father who encouraged him to strive for that distant mountaintop. And he tells the story of his dream to climb the world's Seven Summits, and how he is turning that dream into astonishing reality (something fewer than a hundred mountaineers have done). From the snow-capped summit of McKinley to the towering peaks of Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro to the ultimate challenge, Mount Everest, this is a story about daring to dream in the face of impossible odds. It is about finding the courage to reach for that ultimate summit, and transforming your life into something truly miraculous. "An inspiration to other blind people and plenty of us folks who can see just fine."—Jon Krakauer, New York Times bestselling author of Into Thin Air

The journey up Mount Everest is never easy. Climbers risk their lives as they struggle around jagged towers of ice, over snow-covered boulders, and across gaping crevasses. Pete Athans knows these dangers well. He has climbed Mount Everest fourteen times and reached the summit seven times. What is it like to climb the highest mountain on Earth? In this book, you'll follow Pete to the top—and learn about his adventures along the way.

In this stunning picture book, Steve Jenkins takes us to Mount Everest - exploring its history, geography, climate, and culture. This unique book takes readers on the ultimate adventure of climbing the great mountain. Travel along and learn what to pack for such a trek and the hardships one may suffer on the way to the top. Avalanches, frostbite, frigid temperatures, wind, and limited oxygen are just a few of the dangers that make scaling this peak one of the most extreme physical challenges one can experience. To stand on the top of Mount Everest is to stand on top of the world. With informative text and exquisitely detailed cut paper illustrations, Steve Jenkins brings this extreme journey alive for young adventurers.

Winner of the 2013 American Educational Studies Association's 2013 Critics Choice Award! Teachers the world over are seeking creative ways to respond to the problems and possibilities generated by globalization. Many of them work with children and youth from increasingly varied backgrounds, with diverse needs and capabilities. Others work with homogeneous populations and yet are aware that their students will encounter many cultural changes in their lifetimes. All struggle with the contemporary conditions of teaching: endless top-down measures to manipulate what they do, rapid economic turns and inequality in supportive resources that affect their lives and those of their students, a torrent of media stimuli that distract educational focus, and growth as well as shifts in population. In The Teacher and the World, David T. Hansen provides teachers with a way to reconstruct their philosophies of education in light of these conditions. He describes an orientation toward education that can help them to address both the challenges and opportunities thrown their way by a globalized world. Hansen builds his approach around cosmopolitanism, an ancient idea with an ever-present and ever-beautiful meaning for educators. The idea pivots around educating for what the author calls reflective openness to new people and new ideas, and reflective loyalty toward local values, interests, and commitments. The book shows how this orientation applies to teachers at all levels of the system, from primary through university. Hansen deploys many examples to illustrate how its core value, a balance of reflective openness to the new and reflective loyalty to the known, can be cultivated while teaching different subjects in different kinds of settings. The author draws widely on the work of educators, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, novelists, artists, travellers and others from both the present and past, as well as from around the world. These diverse figures illuminate the promise in a cosmopolitan outlook on education in our time. In this pioneering book, Hansen has provided teachers, heads of school, teacher educators, researchers, and policy-makers a generative way to respond creatively to the pressure and the promise of a globalizing world.

A story of adventure and danger among the Polar Eskimos.

In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world. Computers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers. Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible.

New Revised Edition. How can we create a just, healthy, and humane world? What is the path to developing sustainable energy, food, transportation, production, construction, and other systems? What’s the best strategy to end poverty and ensure that everyone has equal rights? How can we slow the rate of extinction and restore ecosystems? How can we learn to resolve conflicts without violence and treat other people and nonhuman animals with respect and compassion? The answer to all these questions lies with one underlying system—schooling. To create a more sustainable, equitable, and peaceful world, we must reimagine education and prepare a generation to be solutionaries—young people with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to create a better future. This book describes how we can (and must) transform education and teaching; create such a generation; and build such a future.

What will the post-Taliban government of Afghanistan look like? How will the war in Afghanistan affect the already unstable politics of Central Asia? In War at the Top of the World, veteran foreign correspondent Eric Margolis presents a revelatory history of the complicated and volatile conflicts that have entangled Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United States, the Soviet Union, and many others. By 1999, Pakistan had proven they have medium-range nuclear weapons, and now the threat that their government could be taken over by a radical Islamic fundamentalist faction is stronger than ever. In fact, Osama bin Laden has already claimed to have a nuclear weapon. How could this have happened? Margolis plays witness to the escalating conflicts of the past decade, tracing disputes over Afghanistan, as well as those ever neighboring Kashmir and Tibet, back to their Cold War roots, exploring clashes that continue to threaten to destabilize the region today. Combining vivid first-hand accounts of a war correspondent with a historical and strategic overview of the region, Margolis guides the reader through the geopolitical complexities of the area and its key players. He offers a clear, concise analysis of a complicated and little-understood part of the world that is home to a quarter of the world's population. Fascinating and now more timely than ever, War at the Top of the World is an extraordinary read for anyone interested in the current global balance of power.

At some point during the inhumanly cold Himalayan winter straddling 1965 and 1966, a peculiar collection of box-shaped objects -- one sprouting a six-foot, insect-like antenna -- plummets nine thousand feet down the sheer flanks of a remote peak. Ripped from its moorings by an avalanche, the jumbled apparatus slides down a funnel-shaped hourglass of hard snow and shoots over a black cliff band, careening a vertical distance six times the height of the Empire State building. The boxes come to rest on the glacier at the mountain's base. One, an olive-drab casing the size of a personal computer, begins to sink. Then, trailing a robotic dogtail of torn wires, it slowly burns through the snow, melting into solid blue glacial ice, eventually disappearing beneath the surface, and never seen again. No one actually witnessed this event. But as you read these words, nearly four pounds of plutonium -- locked in the glacier's dark unknowable heart -- are almost certainly moving ever closer to the source of the Ganges River. Eye at the Top of the World, provides a harrowing present-day account of Takeda's expedition to solve the mystery of Nanda Devi.