TEACHER’S JOKE AND STORY BOOK

COLLECTED by STANLEY B. GRAHAM

by Stanley Graham


Formats

Softcover
£9.95
Softcover
£9.95

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 17/06/2016

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 210
ISBN : 9781524609528

About the Book

My original purpose in compiling these jokes was to help myself to tell them in the classroom. During the last several years of my teaching career (thirty-five years of high school science—physics, earth science, chemistry, biology), I was in the habit of using the final few minutes of each class to tell jokes and stories to my students. That time is usually wasted anyhow as students are thinking about leaving and going to their next class. After I began this practice, I found that they were actually looking forward to the jokes each day.


About the Author

The author, Stanley B. Graham, is a retired high school science teacher, having taught thirty-five years in four village and small town schools. Educational background: BA, Ohio State; MA, Wesleyan University, Connecticut; and attendance at Summer NSF in physics and the earth sciences, including University of Vermont, Fordham; University of Redlands, California; Boston College; and Kent State. During his retirement, he has written and published five other novels and a biography. Raw material for his books have been his journal or diary he has kept most of his life, and letters which he has kept in chronological order in notebooks. Referring to these records helps to jog his memory and elicit fine details. For him, the exploration of human relationships has been interesting and challenging. Nearly all of his characters are based upon people he has known and loved. One of his favorite quotations is a statement, paraphrased from the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, famous for his novel The Great Gatsby: “If you start with real people, you will end up with stereotypes. If you start with stereotypes, you will end up with nothing.” Graham lives in Median, Ohio, where he taught science (physics, earth science, chemistry) the last twenty-six years of his thirty-five-year teaching career. During this time, he and his first wife, Cynthia Davis, reared their two sons, Jeffrey and Douglas. His dear wife Cynthia died of cancer in 1991, just one year after his retirement. They were married for twenty-nine years. He remarried in 1992 to Elizabeth “Betty” Ramirez. She died in 2009. They were married for seventeen years. He grieves for both of his wives, whom he loved dearly. Because of his two good marriages, Graham finds himself to be the proud patriarch of a loving and supporting extended family: his two sons, Betty’s three sons and daughter, their spouses, and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Naturally, Graham hopes that his descendants will read his books sometime during their lifetimes; they might provide entertainment for empty nesters. What was it like living back in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s? At the present time, that is as far as the novels cover. As stated earlier, nearly all of Graham’s characters are based upon real people. The character of Kert in this novel is based upon a woman that he was engaged to in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He has fond and loving memories of her, even though she eventually broke his heart. He often wonders what would have happened if they had married. But you cannot rewind time as you can a DVD or a movie film and go back and alter the events. He recalls a stanza in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: LXXI The Moving finger writes; and having writ Moves on: nor all your piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it He has produced a book trilogy: Book 1, I Was Here: The Young Manhood and Education of Rick Stevens Book 2, To Become a Rich American Book 3, A Farewell to Three Wives: The Marriages of Rick Stevens