"Anger these days has gotten a bad rap, but it has its purposes. Sometimes it is the only thing that frees you to speak the truth."
Similar to: Miles Corwin's "And Still We Rise"; "Educating Esme"
Book Jacket Summary: Elizabeth Gold's memoir of four months spent at School of the New Millennium, where the idealism of a progressive education and the reality of a city classroom collided. Charged with taking over 3 classes of 9th grade English in the middle of the year, Gold arrived with some lofty dreams of sharing her love of literature with her students. Instead, she ended up teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Provocative and hilariously sobering, Gold's story is a vibrant portrait of a multiethnic urban high school and the people who inhabit it, and a poetic meditation on adolescence and the difficulty, sometimes, of being an adult.
Highlights:
--beautifully written prose; almost poetic in nature
--surprisingly (sometimes even shockingly) candid and honest
--points out the Truth: that all these efforts to reform schools are futile if we don't first reform the American Culture at large
--Not cliched, as memoirs in this category invariably seem to be. A fresh, original take on the idea of writing about a year of teaching in a less-than-ideal school
--if, as some claim, the highest goal any writer can aspire to is to create a work of art such that it evokes a raw emotional response from the reader...Gold certainly has set the bar high
It is hard to convince kids to stay in school when their stomach is rumbling. I think that education reform would take care of itself if we did a better job fighting poverty. Sounds like a really good book thought.
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