Phillip Done
Phillip Done is the author of the soon to be released The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom by Simon & Schuster/Avid Reader Press. He is also the author of the acclaimed 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching, Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood, The Charms of Miss O'Hara: Tales from Gone with the Wind & the Golden Age of Hollywood from Scarlett's Little Sister, and The Ornament Box: A Love Story with a foreword by screen legend Debbie Reynolds. Phil's writing has also been featured in Reader's Digest, Real Simple, The Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times.
“The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge. . . Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher.”
Phillip Done