For many students of all ages, school is not the encouraging and meaningful experience that it ought to be. For teachers, pressures can sometimes become enormous. In a healthy, meaningful, and enriching education, teachers and students treasure, celebrate, and nurture themselves and each other. Helping Kids Hope describes one teacher's efforts to learn and to teach in this way. Divided into seven thematic sections, this book offers glimpses of the emotional and intellectual lives of individual teachers and their students—children, teens, and adults. It recreates the issues with which they struggle, so that academic learning can be seen in context. Author Nancy E. Gill invites readers to listen to all the voices and to learn from them as well as she focuses on the need for meaning and how it can shape both teaching and learning for a lifetime.