womens studies

This book captured my curiosity as I am a highschool teacher myself. There are many stories of professional educators who have thrown their lives and reputations away for temporary trysts with students; the author of this book accomplished both and yet has no insight as to why.

To become a teacher takes at least 5 years and thousands of dollars. It is a gruelling, exhausting endeavor - how could anyone jeopardize so much for so little? Heather Ingram makes no explanation for how a woman of 30 could be attracted to a teenager. Had the boy in question been a straight-A student, champion chess player, brain-surgeon-in-the-making, perhaps one could perhaps understand (not excuse) a potential friendship developing. But this kid was the dunce of the class; a punk whose only hobbies seemed to be getting drunk and stoned and driving his pick-up truck through the mud with his loser friends.

How good a lover can a kid this young be? What on earth do you talk about? Where is your brain, allowing teenage boys to hang-out, drink alcohol, and smoke pot at your house? Heather Ingram didn't just have an affair with this one student; she also slept with his friend! It's about as pathetic and squalid as it gets: teenage boys get to bonk the desperate teacher.

She deserved to have her teaching certificate made void - she is an embarrassment to the profession and makes an already difficult job harder for all the teachers who follow the rules. Most frustrating about this book is its lack of insight, or introspection. Ingram details what happened, but not why it happened. Coming across as decidedly immature and psychologically impaired, Ingram fails to acknowlege how her actions, how her utter lack is discretion, contribute to the overall lack of respect students show for authority. Teaching is a tough job. People like Heather Ingram make it all the more difficult. It is truly appalling that this woman is being congratulated for her "honesty".

This is the world we live in: Make a mess of your life, behave like an amoral fool, turn an entire community upside down, and somehow you are deemed worthy of public forgiveness. You get to write a book about it and make money. You get to be on talk shows. Only in America....

Heather Ingram was a respected teacher by not only her students but her co-workers as well. In this book she tells of her 3 year love affair with her student "Troy". The deeper you read the more you get to know and understand Heather's true feelings of love towards this person she saw as the man of her dreams.
This was the type of book once you opened it you couldn't put it down. It took me three days and I loved it.

I couldn't put it down, I finished it in two days. It is not a love story with a fairytale ending, but it is a story about love. A true and honest account about two people who fell in love at the wrong place and the wrong time. Heather Ingram describes her love affair with one of her students in a way that is so raw and heartfelt that one cannot help but begin to look past the "scandal" and start to see the truth about two people who found in each other something they were missing in themselves. It is heartbreaking to read about their affection towards one another and to know that if they could have waited only a matter of months (until he was 18 and out of school) that they could have avoided the tragedy, the courts, and the headlines.
A truly wonderful book that gives the reader a greater understanding of how every decision we make will shape our lives for better or worse. I cannot say what happened was right, the author herself knows her own mistake. I feel like the relationship was not wrong, the circumstances in which it happened were.