Dan Brown’s memoir of his first year as a New York City teacher, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, is out in paperback. I will freely admit my bias: Dan’s book resonated with me because his experience as a New York City Teaching Fellow assigned to a school in the Bronx mirrored my own experience so closely. Still, Dan is a fine writer and Great Expectations is a great read.
Top 5 Teacher Books, anyone? Off the top of my head, here’s my list:
1. Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder
I’d pay to read Tracy Kidder’s grocery list.
2. Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, Rafe Esquith
Esquith’s essential optimism re-energized me on many occasions. Try to find even a sentence of “woe-is-me-this-is-too-hard” in his book. The man’s a saint.
3. The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child, by Ron Clark
The original New Paternalism. Go ahead and mock Clark’s highly prescriptive measures, but this book made me a better teacher. What higher praise can there be?
4. There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, by Alex Kotlowitz
Not a teacher book per se, but a first-rate account of childhood in urban poverty. Kotlowitz avoids the tendency to sentimentalize the lives of the urban poor, and his book is all the more powerful for it.
5. Ms. Moffett’s First Year, Abby Goodnough
My favorite book about the alternative certification experience before Dan’s came along.
While not a teacher memoir, or even an education book, the one I’d make required reading for any new urban teacher would be Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I wish before I’d become a teacher, someone had merely handed the book to me and said, “Just read this. Everything you need to know is in here.”
