Letters From Algeria and The Day Everything Changed

For the author of Letters from Algeria, "The Day Everything Changed" came decades before September 11, 2001. Her memoir shows how her 1966 epiphany affected her response to the war on terrorism as she shares her letters from Algeria in the mid-1970s as well as those of her students after the attacks on September 11 and reflects on what led her to living in a country predominantly Arab and Muslim. Tina Martin, author of the memoir Everything I Should Have Learned I Could Have Learned in Tonga, did learn some of what she should have and could have during her two years in Algeria. Before teaching at City College of San Francisco for thirty-two years, she taught and/or trained teachers on five continents--Oceana, Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia. Her most eventful decade was the 1970s, when she lived in Tonga, Spain, and Algeria, got her MA in TESOL, got married, and had a baby, now forty-two years old. Her pieces "An Algerian Wedding" and "Crash Course in Spanish: How Getting Robbed Can Enhance Language Learning" appear in the anthologies I Should have Stayed Home (2003) and I Should Have Gone Home (2005), and "God, President Kennedy, and Me" in the anthology Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth (2011). Her hobbies include walking all over San Francisco and reading, including 120+ books for the mother-son Jo-Mama Book Club, founded in 2007.