Getting schooled
Ratings2
Average rating5
15
Ratings2
Average rating5
"In this powerful, eloquent story of his return to the classroom, a former teacher offers a rousing defense of his beleaguered vocation Perhaps no profession is so constantly discussed, regulated, and maligned by non-practitioners as teaching. The voices of the teachers themselves are conspicuously missing. Defying this trend, teacher and writer Garret Keizer takes us to school--literally--in this arresting account of his return to the same rural Vermont high school where he taught fourteen years ago.Much has changed since then--a former student is his principal, standardized testing is the reigning god, and smoking in the boys' room has been supplanted by texting in the boys' room. More familiar are the effects of poverty, the exuberance of youth, and the staggering workload that technology has done as much to increase as to lighten. Telling the story of Keizer's year in the classroom, Getting Schooled takes us everywhere a teacher might go: from field trips to school plays to town meetings, from a kid's eureka moment to a parent's dark night of the soul.At once fiercely critical and deeply contemplative, Keizer exposes the obstacles that teachers face daily--and along the way takes aim at some cherished cant: that public education is doomed, that the heroic teacher is the cure for all that ails education, that educational reform can serve as a cheap substitute for societal reformation.Angry, humorous, and always hopeful, Getting Schooled is as good an argument as we are likely to hear for a substantive reassessment of our schools and those who struggle in them"--
Reviews with the most likes.
Keizer is my brother in education. He, like me, started teaching long, long ago. He, like me, is a hearty proponent of a rigorous education. He, like me, left education for many years to pursue other things. He, like me, returned to education after a long hiatus to find things had both changed and remained the same.
I loved this little memoir of the year he spent back in the classroom. It was lovely and painful to see his clear look at students today. The images and quotes he put up on the walls of his classroom that were never commented on by the students. Disturbing and yet something that I, too, have observed, something that I, too, don't quite understand. The strength of students in light of the troubles they face at home. The disappointments of a teacher who hopes for more from his students and the occasional unexpected triumphs of a teacher with a lesson that resonates with the classes.
(I have only one criticism; had I been his editor, I'd have asked Keizer to soften his diatribes against American capitalism as I found these to be a little annoying in light of his subject.)
Recommended.
