What do you do when the perfect boy for you is the one that no one wants you to have?I've had a crush on Ethan, my big brother's best friend, for years. Unfortunately he's totally off limits. My brother is jealous and doesn't want me anywhere near him, my parents don't want me dating a boy in college, and Ethan's ex-girlfriend is a psycho stalker who's liable to lock me in her trunk and bury me out on the beach somewhere. Not that it matters, because Ethan has neve...

Why couldn’t I just have everyday ordinary neuroses like everyone else?Instead I got saddled with Social Anxiety Disorder. When I go across a room, I get so self-conscious thinking that everyone is staring at me and judging me that I forget how to walk. Any time I'm around people I blush and my hands sweat and I start shaking like I've got hypothermia, and on bad days I get full blown panic attacks. I cope in school--barely--by being that girl that nobody notices. ...

Everyone knows that your best friend's ex is totally off limits.I didn't want to date Dylan, my best friend's ex-boyfriend. I just felt bad for him because the last two girls he'd gone out with had dumped him to go back to their exes. He was a sweet guy who deserved better, and in a moment of insanity I decided to make it happen for him. I was going to discover everything there was to know about him and then find the girl who was his perfect match. It all sounded s...

Worst. Summer. Ever.My best friend moved away at the end of the school year. Now my family has moved into a house that looks a thousand years old and could pass for the Addams Family's summer home. I'm pretty sure it's haunted, and I'm about to be the star of my own paranormal reality show whether I like it or not. But the worst part is that Walker Dean is my new next door neighbor.Walker Dean tears through girls' hearts like a tornado through a trailer par...

Life is complicated when your best friend is your ex-boyfriend.When I broke up with Ashton a year ago I expected things to get easier. We stayed best friends, but keeping our relationship strictly just friends is a lot harder than I thought. All the old feelings are still there hiding just below the surface, and it doesn't take much to bring them out again. I know it won't work, though, so I do my best to keep them under control no matter how much I'd like to give ...

How do you stay positive when the guy you’re falling for attracts girls like a rock star?Sydni has sworn off of boys, especially the bad ones. Her friends are away on vacation, her aunt is being a total witch, her job is about to go up in smoke, and the girls who bullied her in school are still determined to make her life miserable. The last thing she needs is a boy complicating her life - especially a bad boy like Cayden.Cayden attracts girls like a bug za...

A RECORD-BREAKING 56 MILLION AMERICAN WOMEN ARE UNEMPLOYED[From The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), February 2015]A woman is lucky if she has any kind of job at all today! But even if she still has a job, she may work at a dirty job like I did, at a fast food restaurant as a fry cook, flipping greasy hamburgers and fries (then serve them to abrupt, arrogant customers all day long), or as a cleaning lady for a small motel chain, changing hundreds of kids’ smelly urine...

This volume explores the value of using queer pedagogy in an interdisciplinary middle school classroom to promote a better understanding of social justice and the social construction of knowledge among students. In the course of the study, which combined student-centered literacy and mathematical inquiries through a social justice lens, students used critical literacy skills to research social justice topics, learned to read numerical data like traditional print text, and created and solve...

This edited collection illustrates different possibilities for social justice practice in various grade levels, disciplines, and interdisciplinary spaces in P–12 education. Chapters in this unique volume demonstrate teaching with a critical lens, helping students develop critical dispositions, encouraging civic action with students, and teaching about topics inclusive of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Based on empirical research, each contribution is rooted in a critical theoretical f...