Cry repeatedly. Laugh often. Sigh with recognition. That's what you'll do when you read Dave Ellison's Chalk Dust - a mini-masterpiece of the teaching life. Sensitive, compassionate, deeply intelligent, Dave is the kind of person you hope will teach your own children. An award-winning teacher, vice-principal, and teacher educator, Dave has also been a columnist at The Argus, a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper. This collection of over 70 of Dave's best columns is at once touching, delightful, poignant, and unflinchingly honest. In "A Box of Raisins," Dave recounts a distraught father finally embracing his estranged son; in "Sorry," the student who cunningly turned the tables; in "Rest Easy," the deception of high stakes testing; and in "Beardless," teenagers' playful antics.

Chalk Dust delivers fresh, informed, and multifaceted views of education by a teacher/administrator who has worked in the trenches and loves what he does. Lose yourself for a couple of hours in a transcendent book. Or dip into it for brief stories that will support or challenge you. Come away from your reading and know, if you are a teacher, that you have the best job in the world. Or remember those thoughtful teachers like Dave who made a difference in your own life.