Events

Thursday, June 26th, @ 6:00 PM

Join us for the June Book Club Chat about Backward and Blind with the author Jean A. Miller Mariner. Books will be available for purchase for $20, with $5 of the cost being donated to the Library.

2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FINALIST IN EDUCATION

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 heartwarming 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?

Raised in New England, Jean A. Miller Mariner moved to Colorado for her first teaching assignment at an independent residential high school. That led to more than thirty years at six different schools teaching middle-school through college-level math and psychology courses, all while rearing three children with her beloved husband. With a BA from Oberlin College and an MAT from Colorado College, she also coached swimming, math, and debate competitions; organized community service activities; served as a dorm parent; and wrote for a textbook company. Splitting her time between the mountains of rural Maine and the mountains of the southwest, she identifies as part Southwesterner and part New Englander. Now retired to a wealth of new life experiences, she has revived interests in writing, mountain biking, open water swimming, traveling, fabric arts, and volunteering for a local food bank.