Product Description: Professor Bel Barrett has enough on her plate teaching English at a Jersey City community college. Between hot flashes, she's worrying about her two grown kids and whether her significant other is becoming less significant. Yet somehow Bel lets a colleague, Vinny Vallone--part-time Funeral Services Education teacher, big-time undertaker--flatter her into believing that the future of feminism in the funeral business depends on her acting as a role model by teaching his class how to research and write...read more

The plight of the new teacher has changed little during the last 30 years. Neophytes still confront the same conflicting demands--to foster students' academic development while controlling their behavior, often in crowded classrooms in ill-equipped and poorly administered schools. Thanks to five books, Isenberg (a 30-year veteran of urban classroom teaching) found solace and support. The five books are Up The Down Staircase, Teacher, How Children Fail, To Sir With Love, and 36 Children. As teaching narratives, these best-selling writings of classroom teachers are a precious legacy of wisdom, inspiration, and experience. Going By The Book is the first published account of the role of teaching narratives in the ongoing professional development of a working teacher. It also serves to illustrate the importance of shared stories in maintaining the will to endure in the teaching profession. (view table of contents)

New Jersey community college professor Bel Barrett is once again drawn into a murder investigation when one of her colleagues, a woman who was a member of a panel to decide where some hotly contested scholarship money is to be awarded, turns up dead, a killing that reveals the woman's odd double life as an academic during the day and stripper at night. Original.

Product Description: Things are scarier since that black day in September that shook Manhattan and the world. But across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey, community college professor Bel Barrett intends to live without fear. Then one of her co-judges of a scholarship contest is found dead - a woman who lived a strange double life as academic by day and stripper by night...read more

Busy planning her wedding to her fiancé Sol, middle-aged New Jersey community college professor Bel Barrett takes time out to investigate the demise of an elderly student, pigeon racing enthusiast Dom Tomaselli, who plunges to his death from a rooftop. Original.

Product Description: With a great job as a community college professor, some peace and quiet now that the kids are out of the house, and a loving new husband, it would seem Bel Barrett finally has a chance to kick back and enjoy life. But just when things seem too good to be true, trouble rears its ugly head again––this time in the form of a hateful rap that's circulating on a popular college website...read more

Product Description: With a sensibility shaped in the sixties and kids born in the seventies, Jersey City community college professor Bel Barrett hit the big five-O in the nineties. The patronage politics of urban academia and the dreams and demands of city students threaten to burn Bel out but it's hot flashes and a fancy fundraiser that really turn the heat on...read more

Jersey City community college professor Bel Barrett sets out to find out who killed her boss, college president Altagracia Garcia, during a fund-raising party, after a young culinary arts student is accused of the crime. Original.

When middle-aged New Jersey community college professor Bel Barrett encounters former student Ashley Roberts, a young woman distraught over the 'accidental' death of a colleague, Bel is compelled to investigate the tragedy and becomes caught up in the dangerous world of corporate espionage and murder. Original.

Product Description: Mood swings aren't the only hormonal hotspots in Bel Barrett's midlife -- now she's having a religious identity crisis...and a dose of Jewish guilt to boot! The fifty-something New Jersey community college professor never dreamed she'd run into former student Ashley Roberts -- a young woman she once may have wronged -- in a study group at her synagogue...read more

Product Description: Dead Ringer for a Dead SingerFifty-something New Jersey community college professor Bel Barret has had enough "changes of life" lately to last her a lifetime. Her daughter has cheerfully announced her pregnancy and her impending marriage in a single e-mail...read more

Product Description: Maybe it was a case of menopausal madness -- or the blatant bribe of a pound bag of M&Ms -- but fifty-something Jersey City community college prof Bel Barrett found herself agreeing to head up the Urban Kayaking Club. Now she's dragging her tush down to the banks of the Hackensack River early every Saturday morning when she could be doing something constructive ...read more