Backward and Blind

When a young economics researcher decides to embrace change and takes a teaching position on a whim, she enters the job with confidence. It doesn't take long until she feels as though she is tumbling downhill, backward and blindfolded, just as one of her students did while skiing, before having to take him to the hospital.

After her job morphed into a career, Jean A. Miller Mariner retired with immeasurable lessons to share-for math and for life. Turning from backward and blind to forward and focused, she witnessed the identical pivot for her students over the years and penned these hilarious, complex, and heart-warming tales to demonstrate.

Ms. Miller Mariner's story collection is a gift for all the teachers out there, and for the students who drove them to become better educators (even while, like her, they may have been the one steering the bus). Here the good math teacher adds humor to the unthinkable and subtracts nothing, leaving us with one question with absolute value: Who helps whom turn each other's lives around?