What about the movies?

It's probably true that most of the people who are reading about education are people who are paid (however little) to be interested in education-- teachers, administrators, policy types, and politicians. Parents are the obvious exception here. This may be a reason why reading about it seems so much like work. Where is the writing that does justice to the full human experience of a year in a high school classroom from a teachers perspective?

The movies seem to be a primary location where American culture processes how it feels about the work that teachers do. The dozens of examples are too obvious to list, but without exception a teacher in the movies never has more than one class of students. A practical necessity when it comes to telling efficient stories, but an obviously absurd lens for looking at the work teachers do when you consider that the typical high school teacher has not one class of hard-edged-but-lovable underacheivers, but five. Five. Five classes everyday for 180 days in a row.

So it seems like writing might be better at this than the movies, but I am willing to expand my search to include any work of art. Also, if somebody can tell me a movie where a teacher has more than one class, I'd like to know. The only possible exception I can think of is Matthew Broderick's character in Election (and what a depressing example that is...).

Good writing is more important than research or your experiences

My preliminary web surfing has turned up a couple more categories of school writing that I left out of my previous post-- molasses thick education policy blogs and teachers personal blogs. Now that I think of it, I encountered the book versions of these things in graduate school and they made my head hurt then too.

Also, it seems that everybody who writes about schools ends up sounding like a jerk, including myself.

Looking for good writing about public high schools

I have not found much good writing about public schools, especially high schools. Newspapers and magazines seem to be talking about schools from miles away, as if they visit once a year, and are far too quick to hype miracle schools. Academic texts, though often right on about how students actually learn, don't provide much insight into the practical realities (or even just the experience) of handling 100 students or more for 180 days. And professional development for teachers is just one random matrix after another.

So I'd like to use this site as a log of my search for interesting writing about schools, to solicit suggestions from any readers, and to react to the not-quite-right analysis we see most everyday.

Speaking of not-quite-right analysis, here's one from today's Slate by University of Virginia law professor Jim Ryan. I can't question the man's erudition and his book sounds like it might be good (if one can judge by the title), but the prescriptions or the overall tone here feels musty. He's right about the more absurd elements of No Child Left Behind and he's right that teacher prestige is very important, but his suggestions for things that would directly affect the atmosphere at a public high school (hypothetical pay raise, a federal teaching program somehow based on Teach for America) seem a little meager.

Let me know what you think.