Getting Schooled - Hardcover

Keizer, Garret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805096434 ISBN 13: 9780805096439

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Garret Keizer is the author of Privacy and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want. A contributing editor at Harper's magazine and a former Guggenheim Fellow, he has written for Lapham's Quarterly, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications. He lives in Vermont.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805096434
• ISBN 13: 9780805096439
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320