Ride the Butterflies
Maybe it’s because his mother was a teacher. Or maybe it’s because he spent so much of his life in classrooms—first as a curious first grader, then as a hopeful college student, later as a seminarian, and now as a visiting writer who travels to schools all over the country. Whatever the reason, school has always been at the heart of Donald Davis’s stories, and this book gathers his very favorite school adventures.
Readers get to travel the world with Miss Daisy, the fourth‑grade teacher who mixed math, geography, and English long before anyone used the phrase “whole language.” We sit in Miss Vergilius Darwin’s Latin class, amazed as a classmate accidentally invents new words while trying to conjugate the old ones. We even climb aboard a school bus with Donald as he learns firsthand about segregation and what fairness really means.