ADVENTURES IN THE TEACHING TRADE
“Stupid Edufads appear with the regularity and consistency of monkey bowel movements.”
Memorable teaching memoirs exist—Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man and Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide come to mind. Adventures in the Teaching Trade represents a worthy addition to the list. Jones revisits High Plains schools at a time when most public schools reflected the values and aspirations of the communities they served. Interrelated essays follow a 1960s graduate school refugee blessed with an authority-resistant personality learning his trade in small rural schools in Kansas and Nebraska. Keen observations of jargon-babbling educrats, hilarious sketches of doofy administrators, eccentric teachers, and recalcitrant custodians, coupled with sympathetic student portraits, demonstrate a veteran storyteller’s ability to entertain and inform.
During three decades in the classroom, Jones and his students witnessed the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Great Russian Grain Robbery, the impeachment of two presidents, the Federal Reserve’s near extinction of the rural economy, the Columbine massacre, and the opening skirmishes in the current war on meritocracy, parents and their children. How students and their teacher coped with major events sometimes far removed from rural High Plains communities illustrates the stubborn resilience of the human spirit.