Lucy Black is a skilled educator, administrator, writer and advocate who expertly and with compassion shines a light on the dark side of school. By giving voice to some of our most vulnerable students and emphasizing the truth and importance of the proverb ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, Black shows just how much care, connection and support is needed in our education system—and how far we have to go.

— Janet Vendrig, retired Public Health Nurse

The stories in Class Lessons go beyond the Hollywood tropes of high school experience and reveal heart wrenching snapshots of young people trying to survive impossible and often horrifying situations, and the dogged frustration and hope of a career educator trying her best to make a difference. An indelible collection that sheds light on the limitations of modern-day schooling, and the lives of vulnerable students who are lost within it.

— Hollay Ghadery, author of FUSE, Rebellion Box, Widow Fantasies

These reflections shared by Lucy Black serve to disclose the limitations of the public education system as teachers and school administrators strive to serve every student. We are reminded that our secondary schools are a cross-section of the community. Therein, are thousands of dedicated educators like Lucy Black, who take on all comers with the singular purpose of mentoring the development of each teenager into a productive and resourceful citizen. In this effort, given system limitations, failures will result. As Black’s reflections reveal, such failures may haunt educators long after retirement instilling them to ponder how better outcomes could have been achieved. While these stories of failure are tragic, each reflects a sterling level of devotion and resourcefulness. Make no mistake, this is the same commitment that is made to every student, most of whom thrive and grow.

Certainly, Lucy Black’s accounts should cause those in positions of influence to ponder the costs, both human and financial, of maintaining for a lifetime those who fall through the cracks in our school system.

— Joe Allin, former Assistant Director – York Region District School Board, and former Chair – Durham District School Board

These are the kinds of stories that keep educators up at night. Most parents have no idea what really goes on behind the closed doors of schools. Lucy Black takes us down the locker lined halls and into the chaotic lives of the most vulnerable students. With great compassion, she shows how an educator can provide buoys of hope amidst turbulence and despair. Without quailing or judgement Black demonstrates the most elusive quality of our best teachers -- a spirit of generous pedagogy.

—Anna-Liza Kozma, Journalist and Senior Producer, CBC Radio.

I read, I wept, I turned the page and wondered where Gemma and Katie and their peers were now. “Watching the thrust and parry of students” as Black does so well is not the same as persuasively recreating that thrust and parry, but it is the necessary first step, the moment of recognition that only a wise teacher foresees. Lucy E. M. Black is not only a brilliant writer, but she also knows the ropes of the school system from the inside—like history and geography blending into a new genre. Her eye goes immediately to students who lean out, who cross over, who cannot let go of sorrow or escape its wily traps. Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth is a visionary collection of stories. The “vulnerable” heroes are more attractive because they are young folks in our midst facing a complicated and striated world—by most accounts, the world we have both knowingly and unknowingly made for them.

— Marlene Kadar, Senior Scholar and Professor Emerita, Department of Humanities, and
School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University, Toronto

Within Lucy E. M. Black’s fiction, the reader quickly becomes invested in her characters. Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth, a collection of fictionalized accounts based on Ms. Black’s career as an administrator in the public education system takes on a poignant urgency that leaves the reader in horrified disbelief, angry, and sickened by the life stories of students, and particularly young women. As she acknowledges, the support systems she worked with were many, including education, health professionals, and social agencies. Still, for some students, trying to cope with school and life, no manner of resources or care could protect them or direct them onto a trajectory to a happy ending. This haunting work is a witness and testimony to the author’s love for the vulnerable students who came under her care.

— Gail Kirkpatrick, author Sleepers and Ties