Getting Schooled
The Reeducation of an American Teacher
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This memoir by Harper's contributing editor Keizer (Privacy), written entirely in the present tense and based on a 2011 Harper's essay of the same title, is at once a sympathetic portrait of a school, a searing indictment of a culture that uses working-class children as cannon fodder, and, unexpectedly, a page-turner. Keizer, who left public school teaching 14 years ago to write full-time, returns to his former profession when his wife's job situation changes and the couple needs health insurance. After a fruitless search for a university appointment, Keizer resumes his post in a high school English classroom in rural Vermont; the principal is one of his former students. He chronicles the difficulties teachers face, including the staggering amount of time they devote to using supposedly time-saving technology. Keizer also trenchantly analyzes the ways his students are pulled into the deadening culture of the capitalist marketplace, and the heroic efforts of small-farm families to survive in a landscape of agribusiness. The author depicts his colleagues and students with tough-minded admiration. At the end of the year, Keizer leaves the classroom to go back to his writing desk a loss for the students he might have taught, but a gift to readers and left-leaning policy wonks who seek intelligent commentary on education. Jonathan Kozol fans will have a new favorite.
