High school students spark book series

Michelle Hennessy – News Writer

Author, speaker, and high school teacher Daniel Blanchard said more needs to be done to help struggling teenagers in inner city schools.

“A lot of the inner city schools are typically struggling schools and there’s a lot of people coming in who are trying to run it like a business and the attitude is like ‘it’s my way or the highway.’ That’s no way to run a school,” said Blanchard. “The American Federation of Teachers, they’ve always believed in collaboration and teamwork. If we want to improve education it’s all about teamwork and bringing teachers and students and parents together. The bottom line is, if you want to make education successful, everyone has to be involved in the process.”

Blanchard, who struggled himself growing up in Hartford, Conn., is an award winning author for his series, “Granddaddy’s Secrets,” about a young boy struggling with his upbringing.

“It’s a series following the life of a struggling teen,” said Blanchard. “It’s actually a trilogy, the third one I’m working on right now, two of them are actually already out. October 2010 was when ‘Granddaddy Feeling Lucky’ came out and then two years later in 2012 the second book came out.”

Citing his students as his main reason to write the books, Blanchard said though he never thought it would get published, he won the Local Writers Award for the Connecticut Writing Project, in conjunction with Aetna and the University of Connecticut, for the last two years.

“My students, over about 10 years kept telling me to write a book,” said Blanchard. “I’ve worked with some interesting kids, some difficult kids who have been faced with some difficult times. So over about a period of 10 years they said things like ‘you should write a book and teach other kids what you’ve taught us’ and obviously every year it’s a different group of students. So I just thought, you know, maybe I should listen to my students.”

Blanchard, who struggled himself growing up in Hartford, said he saw education as a way out of it earning himself seven degrees.

“My family was the only white family on the street so we got in a lot of trouble because we were different from everyone else,” said Blanchard. “So I struggled, I had a difficult upbringing and I struggled so all these experiences helped with the book. I’ve seen way too many kids fall victim to tough lives but I know there’s a way out – if I can make it out of it then they can make it out of it. All these things factored in when it came to writing the book.”

Now as a teacher at New Britain High School, he hopes to inspire his students in a similar way, stressing the importance of having a strong role model in teenagers’ lives.

“I didn’t have a mentor growing up but I feel like some of my sport heroes I really looked up to,” said Blanchard. “I saw them doing some great things and I thought ‘I want to do that.’ Once I got to college, I started reading a lot of biographies of all these special people and I thought how I wanted to be like them.”

With Southern offering so many education courses, Blanchard said his advice for aspiring teachers would be to engage with students.

“The advice I would have for teachers is to always follow ‘CANDI’, that’s ‘Constant And Never-ending Deliberate Improvement,’” said Blanchard. “There’s always a way to improve. It’s not good enough any more to sit students down with a textbook, your role is to inspire. These kids are listening to you, even when it seems like they’re not listening to you.”