Adequate Yearly Progress
Book Feature - Adequate Yearly Progress by Roxanna Elden
HBL Note: Both of my parents are educators. My mom was an elementary teacher when I was growing up and later became and elementary principal. My dad was a middle school principal for most of my life, including when I was in middle school. I was pretty excited when I got to high school and was finally in a building that didn’t have one of my parents down the hall. My very first teacher asked if I was related to Dr. Steffes (my dad) and I said ‘No, no relation.’ Needless to say it made it back to my dad before I got home and he had a good laugh about it. I still haven’t lived that down. So when I heard there was a novel about teachers coming out, I was quick to sign up to feature it on my blog. Scroll down to read Adequate Yearly Progress by Roxanna Elden.
From the publisher:
A workplace novel that captures teaching with humor, insight, and heart. This perspective-hopping debut follows teachers at an urban high school as their professional lives impact their personal lives and vice versa.Each year brings familiar educational challenges to Brae Hill Valley, a struggling high school in one of Texas's bigger cities. But the school’s teachers face plenty of challenges of their own. English teacher Lena Wright, a spoken-word poet with a deep love for her roots, can never seem to satisfy her students that she’s for real. Hernan D. Hernandez is confident in front of his biology classes, yet tongue-tied around the woman he most wants to impress: namely, Lena. Down the hall, math teacher Maybelline Galang focuses on the numbers as she blocks out problems whose solutions aren’t so clear, while Coach Ray hustles his football team toward another winning season, at least on the field. Recording it all is idealistic history teacher Kaytee Mahoney, whose blog gains new readers by the day but drifts ever further from her in-class reality.And this year, a new celebrity superintendent is determined to leave his own mark on the school—even if that means shutting the whole place down. The fallout will shake up the teachers’ lives both inside and outside the classroom.