Maybe it's because his mother was a teacher. Or maybe it's because he has spent most of his life in classrooms -- as a wide-eyed first grader, a naive college student, a seminarian, and now as a visiting writer in residencies across the country. But there's something about school that infuses the work of Donald Davis.

Collected here are Davis's all-time favorite school stories. Whether we're traveling around the world with Miss Daisy, the fourth grade teacher who was integrating arithmetic, geography, and English before the term "whole language" ever surfaced; or watching in awe as a classmate conjugates malaprops in Miss Vergilius Darwin's Latin class; or driving a school bus and learning about segregation -- we experience flashes of recognition in moments that transcend Donald Davis's Appalachian childhood.