Thread: Teacher memoirs

Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story by Brendan Halpin. Had me in stiches and was moving too. Loved his style.

Great username!

For upper elementary or early middle school, "Among schoolchildren" about Mrs. Zajac
[url="http://www.amazon.com/Among-Schoolchildren-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0380710897/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198622775&sr= 8-1"]http://www.amazon.com/Among-Schoolchild ... 775&sr=8-1[/url]
What a long URL!
Anyway I read this book in my senior year of college just as we were about to start our practicum, and it made my transition from student to teacher a little easier.

Thanks to both of you. I'll order Losing My Faculties tonight. I finally finished Dangerous Minds. It was much better than the movie. When I saw the movie I kept wondering, "So... just where does she get the money to take kids out to fancy restaurants?" It certainly wasn't from her paycheck. In the book she buys a kid a sandwich from a deli. Not quite the same thing. Still, her book begins to be a bit repetitive. Over and over again she describes some problem getting kids motivated and again and again she describes her successful methods to overcome the students' resistance to learning. While the movie is glossy and trite at times, her methods are much more plodding, accurately describing the tediousness of our job. That made it a difficult read, as if I was reading my own homework. I felt that way with Ms B's book as well. And another thing: Over and over again she challenges some kid into a fist fight to deflate some potential fight between kids. Uh, does she have some neurotic need to emasculate men? Frank McCourt solves the same problem by picking up a kid's sandwich off the floor and eating it. I also miss McCourt's humor in Dangerous Minds and Ms B's Classroom.

On the other hand, the only book so far that matches the level of violence I was witnessing while teaching in Los Angeles is Freedom Writers. I've only just started it but still the level of murderous threat is immediately apparent. What I don't get from any of these writers is any sense of threat to the teacher. Perhaps that's where my book will differ. After all, my first day of teaching I had to talk a kid out of cutting my throat.

Jonathan Kozel. I just finished Letters to a New Teacher. His other books like Savage Inequilities aren't really memoirs, more like case studies but very interesting and easy to read.